Once the preserve of the powerful, red shoes captured hearts and minds for centuries. But Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale distilled this obsession into something far more potent. Because red shoes got personal…
There’s a line in the film Chocolat where Juliette Binoche’s frustrated daughter admonishes her:
“Why can’t you wear black shoes like the other mothers?!”
Because, of course, this witchy woman who’s come to town to shake up the strict moral codes with her seductive and ever-so-slightly-magical chocolate shop does it wearing red shoes.
Luck & Power
Red shoes are powerful. In China, for example, red shoes were often considered to be “full of lucky” as Eddie Izzard might say. Which is why in some traditions a bride’s red shoes were tossed from the roof to ensure marital fortune.
But, in the west red shoes have traditionally been the preserve of popes and royalty. As the “online cabinet of curiosities” that is Messy Nessy Chic says:
“The [red] shoes’ origins go back to Byzantine days, when they were donned by Norman kings as symbols of bloody martyrdom. Their successors, the Roman Emperors, stuck with it – in fact, they became a standard high-fashion accessory for aristocrats. If your shoes were red, you were a somebody.”
So, when an ordinary woman - a woman of no public standing - wore red shoes there was trouble.
Overstepping the Mark
In 1845 Hans Christian Andersen came along with his foreboding footwear-focused fairytale The Red Shoes, a story about a girl, plucked from poverty by a rich old lady, who dares to wear red shoes to her confirmation:
“Everyone looked at her feet, and ... it seemed to her that even the old pictures of the funerals, those portraits of vicars and their wives with stiff collars and long black robes, fixed their eyes on her red shoes, and these were all she thought of when the vicar placed his hand on her head and spoke of holy baptism, of the covenant with God and that she was now going to be a grown-up Christian person... but all Karen could think of was her red shoes.”
Of course, it doesn’t turn out well. Karen has overstepped the mark in her beloved red shoes. And, so she is punished. Cursed to dance to her death - always good to know where you stand, eh?!.
Unsurprisingly, this story has inspired many a feminist conversation. Why is Karen’s choice of footwear so troublesome? Pride? Vanity? Excessive aspirations? Sexual explicitness? Well, what many forget is that The Red Shoes actually features not one, but three pairs of red shoes - and not all of them are cursed.
Three Red Shoes
First, there are the handmade red shoes made from scraps of fabric given to the poor, bare-footed Karen by Mother Shoemaker, a village elder. So when Karen’s mother dies what does she wear? Well, the red shoes, naturally. The only pair she owns.
In contrast, the second pair of red shoes belong to a princess, no less. Now living with the wealthy old lady, Karen has been forced to cast aside her crudely-made red shoes - shoes she believed to be magic due to her stroke of good fortune. Now she’s learning what it means to be good and proper. And yet:
“Nothing in the world, though, could compare with red shoes!”
So, when she spies the third and final pair in the shoemakers, she’s a gonna. A dead ringer for the princess’s pumps, these red shoes were meant for a Count’s daughter. So Karen’s ultimate sin, it seems, is her desire to step above starchy middle class respectability and into the lap of aristocratic luxury - she is literally walking in someone else’s shoes.
What Do You Stand For?
In real life, just as in the story, Andersen’s red shoes have taken on a life of their own. Probably most famously there is the 1948 Powell & Pressburger film about a ballerina (Moira Shearer) torn between love and art.
Then there is Kate Bush’s 1993 album, The Red Shoes, which expands on the film and puts a very Kate Bush spin on things. As Hilary Davidson writes in her paper, Sex & Sin: The Magic of Red Shoes, Bush:
“ [U]ses the red shoe motif to trace a journey through feminine emotional experience, losing and regaining love, passion and a sense of self.”
So, as women have become increasingly emancipated it appears the story of The Red Shoes has evolved with them. No longer simply footwear, the red shoes seem to have become symbolic of our own agency, or lack thereof. As Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes in Women Who Run With The Wolves:
“[W]e may travel life’s path in one of two ways: in hand-made shoes — crafted with love and care according to the unique needs of the individual soul; or in red shoes — initially promising instant fulfillment, but ultimately leading to a hollow, painful, split existence.”
Your Red Shoes
So if, as the Jungian analyst tells us, shoes are symbolic of what you stand for, what do your red shoes represent? Are they red shoes of your own design? Or are you squeezing your feet into someone else’s shoes, and being led a merry dance?