Sex and Sin: The Magic of Red Shoes
https://www.academia.edu/884995/Sex_and_Sin_The_Magic_of_Red_Shoes
The enduring potency of red shoes, both as real items of footwear and as symbol and cultural force, has fascinated people of different cultures in very diverse ways. The “power” of red shoes is not recent. The prestige of red heels in seven-teenth- and eighteenth-century European courts is well known. Subsequently, redshoes have taken on other charges. This chapter will focus on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, The Red Shoes (1845).
2 This literary work created symbolic associations which have become part of everyday cultural “usage” today. The power of Andersen’s fairy tale lies in its capacity to “dematerialize” red shoes by replacing their physicality with a symbolic meaning (Figure 13.1). This infusion of meaning into an object is a significant example of how dress and shoes are far from trivial and trivializing affairs. It established a template for the way in which red shoes were appreciated and comprehended in the twentieth century, especially by women.
The understanding of red shoes proposed by Andersen was not just the result of a literary imagination. The writer was informed by precise ideas and concepts related to red footwear that had been developed in the period before he wrote his story. The peculiar psychological intensity of red shoes must also be further examined by considering Andersen’s life and personality. TheDanish author’s neurotic self-obsession remained a constant feature of his literary production.Many of the features included in
The Red Shoes have a psychological endurance in contemporary culture. Andersen’s concepts of sexuality, 3 mobility, magic, and gender are here traced through time by considering red shoes from the mid-nineteenth century, the time he wrote his famous tale, to the present day. Are “red shoes” simply red-colored footwear? Is the symbolic potential necessarily “readable” from the physicality of red shoes, or is it in the context of wearing that interpretive meanings are generated? Rarely worn by men today, why do red shoes continue tocarry so much charge, especially for contemporary women, from novelists to consumers?
(Tony Podesta and friends wearing red shoes to his birthday party.) https://imgur.com/gHKSN2D He is well known for wearing red leather boots. https://imgur.com/GqdbgMX