Bondage of the Red Shoes and Its Feminist Reinterpretation: Anne Sexton, Kathryn Davis, Yideum Kim

For Hans Christian Andersen the red shoes syndrome indicates the supposedly feminine vanity and pride; contemporary feminist writers unveil the womanly innate desire for artistic behavior represented by the syndrome. But since this feminine desire had been a taboo, they had to interiorize it, but were not able to completely dampen it, hence often-times their desperate attempt to satisfy it, coupled with death instinct. This essay explores the red shoes syndrome in the works of Anne Sexton, Kathryn Davis, and Yideum Kim (a contemporary Korean poetess), as well as Alice Walker and a couple of others, with the special intention to demonstrate the shared desire among women a generation after another. As was already shown in “The Red Shoes” by Andersen, the shoe cannot be detached from human body and won’t stop dancing even after being separated. In the final analysis, this paper argues that the undying shoe is a zombie, which has only one-dimensional principle of behavior just like an object or a machine thus programmed. A zombie is, in this regard, an object the way that the red shoes are. In turn, the unremovable red shoes from the feet can be equivalent to a certain non-organic part of female body. Human body already has lots of non-organic ingredients in it, which are, of course, objects. The object of the red shoe, the non-organic bodily part, generates the affect of artistic satisfaction in our (especially, women’s) body.