The Footprint as Object in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly (1895)

Abstract

The paper looks at the significance of the footprint in Hardy’s The Woodlanders and Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly. Both texts feature a footprint (or set of footprints) made by a daughter who is forced to carry the hopes and social/imperial ambitions of her father. In both cases the empty footprint is a signifier of the presence and absence of the person who made it. Where Melbury seeks to preserve Grace’s footprint by placing a slate or flat stone over it, Almayer carefully and methodically seeks to erase the prints left by the departing Nina, not by brushing them but by burying each of them in its own small tomb of sand. We could also read Melbury’s attempts to preserve Grace’s footprint as a form of entombment, in which case the footprint can be read as signifying the death of the daughter as autonomous subject and her preservation as signifier and carrier of fatherly ambition. Linking these texts to the most famous footprint of all, that left by Man Friday on Robinson Crusoe’s “desert” island, the paper reads both texts in the light of theories of Empire and Imperialism. Both Melbury and Almayer seek to cultivate, and trade their daughters on the marriage market, in order to secure social (and trade) advantages for themselves. In The Woodlanders this may be set against the colonisation and cultivation of Hintock Wood and the labour of the woodlanders themselves. In Almayer’s Folly, the attempted trading of the mixed-race Nina takes place against the background of her father’s failed trading enterprises in the Borneo Jungle.