Culture Watch
Footnotes On Shoes
Edited by Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss; Rutgers University Press, 325 pp, paperback: $24
Shoes have appeared as symbols in literature since the Cinderella legend, if not before. The Charles Perrault story of 1697 (in which the slipper was made of white fur) has inspired dreams of young girls with a rescued-by- a-prince plot line.
In High Angles on Shoes: Cinema, Gender and Footwear, an essay in the collection of fourteen edited by Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss, Maureen Turim posits that the fairy tale holds out the promise that each shoe might be the one to attract the prince. And, as we might recall, Cinderella possessed the daintiest foot, perhaps hinting at her true state of nobility.
Examples of shoe fetishism in cinema abound: Forty-second Street ( Come and see/those dancing feet...), the shoes of Rogers and Astair, Barbara Stanwyck in white pumps greeting the character played by Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity and Cora Smith (Lana Turner) in The Postman Always Rings Twice wearing open-toe heels, an emblem of her desire for wealth and comfort. Who could forget the magical ruby slippers of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, vehicles to transport Dorothy back to the safety of home and hearth.
One reference to the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Red Shoes, uses ballet shoes as "a celebration of the perversity of art, as the film's rhythms accelerate toward a strange, sacrificial binding to endless, obsessive performance." There are two essays in the Footnotes On Shoes collection dealing with the Andersen fairy tale and the story itself is retold in its entirety in the book.
In the essay, In Rebecca's Shoes, by Jaime Hovey, we are drawn into a thorough going Freudian interpretation of the novel Rebecca, most especially the scene centering on Mrs. Danvers forcing Rebecca's shoes onto the hands of Maxim's new wife.
Another essay, Self-Fashioning, by Lorraine Gamman delves into feminist Susan Brownmiller's construct that, "A shoe imposes a new problem of grace and self consciousness on what otherwise would be a simple act of locomotion, and in this artful handicap lies its subjugation and supposed charm."
The social history of the type of footwear known as a brogan reflects hardships, prejudice and poverty as described in Anthony Barthelemy's essay, Brogans. Ellen Carol Jones powerful essay, Empty Shoes, begins by quoting a poem by Moses Schulstein , "I Saw a Mountain, about the derelict shoes of the victims of the Shoah:
We are the shoes, we are
the last witnesses.
We are the shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers.
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam,
And because we are only made of fabric and leather
And not of blood and flesh, each one of us avoided the hellfire.
After some fairly serious approaches to the subject, the essay Big Feets: or How Cinderella's Glass Slippers Got Smashed Under the Hell of a Number Ten Doc Maarten is a bit of a relief. Necessarily, a number of the essays quotes, sources and theories overlap in the book due to the subject matter, but you will never look at footwear the same way again.
It should be noted that a portion of the profits of the book will be donated to Dress for Success to purchase shoes for its clients.
Some Internet sites the authors provided that will prove interesting:
Some others we've added:
Julia Sneden's: If The Shoe Fits....you can bet it's not fashionable
Design Afoot: Athletic Shoes 1995-2000
Manolo Blahnik at Neiman Marcus
—Tam Gray
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