Wear 'Red Shoes' with care.....

I can't move on from fairy tales without mentioning 'The Red Shoes.' also by Hans Christian Anderson.


My friend, who could be known as 'Fabulous Handbag Lady', bequeathed a large red handbag to me.  It hangs there saying, "When am I going to be taken out?"   Probably never, as I don't feel the need to move on from basic black or occasionally a slight seasonal change. Inevitably, when I make the shift, something I desperately need is contained within the bag which has been left behind. Nor have I ever been drawn towards red shoes but I know of women who have an addiction to them and the fairy tale warns me not to go there ......  Clara

'The Red Shoes’ tells the story of a girl whose vanity and obsession with her red shoes lead to grotesque punishment and then death.



A peasant girl named Karen is adopted by a rich old lady after her mother's death. She grows up vain. She tricks her adoptive mother into buying her a pair of red shoes and repeatedly wears them to church, without paying attention to the service. Her adoptive mother becomes ill, but Karen deserts her, preferring to attend a party in her red shoes. Once she begins dancing, she can't stop. The shoes take over. She cannot control them and they are stuck to her feet. The shoes continue to dance, through fields and meadows, rain or shine, night and day.‘

The haunting 1948 film of the same name, offers a more complex story, with the red shoes representing the lure of the artistic life. The heroine of the embedded ballet dances herself to death, beguiled into wearing the shoes by the sorcerer‐like ‘shoemaker’. The ballerina‐heroine of the frame narrative must choose between art (represented by a forceful and hypnotic director) and love (her temperamental composer husband). Irrevocably torn between art and life, wearing the red shoes of her signature ballet, she dances wildly to a parapet and leaps in front of a passing train.


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