‘Red Shoes, The’ (‘De Røde Sko’, 1845). Known to modern audiences largely through the haunting 1948 film of the same name, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Red Shoes’ tells the story of a girl whose vanity and obsession with her red shoes lead to grotesque punishment and then death.
‘Little Karen’ is given a pair of makeshift red cloth shoes, which she wears to her mother's funeral. She is pitied and adopted by a wealthy woman who has the red shoes burnt. Taking advantage of her guardian's poor eyesight to buy another pair for her confirmation, Karen goes through the ceremony thinking only of the shoes. Forbidden to wear them to church, she disobeys. At the church door the following Sunday, a red‐bearded soldier taps the soles of her shoes, both as she enters and as she leaves, saying: ‘My! what lovely dancing shoes! Stay on tight when you dance!’ While kneeling at the altar, Karen thinks only of the red shoes, forgetting to sing the hymns and to pray. But as she leaves the church, Karen begins to dance. Once started, she cannot stop until the shoes are forcibly removed and hidden in a cupboard.
Rather than tend her sick guardian, Karen accepts an invitation to a ball, again donning the red shoes. But once she starts dancing, the shoes take on a power of their own, clinging to her feet despite her efforts to tear them off and dancing her into the forest and churchyard. In the church, an angel appears, his face ‘stern and solemn’. ‘Dance you shall, ’ he proclaims, ‘dance in your red shoes until you are cold and pale, until your skin shrivels up like a skeleton's!’ Dancing ceaselessly, Karen feels abandoned by humans and cursed by God. Desperate, she implores the executioner to cut off her feet, and, as he does so, the shoes and feet dance off alone, across the fields and into the forest. Now with wooden feet and crutches, she is afraid to enter the church, which is barred by the red shoes still dancing before her eyes. Modest and pious, she becomes the parson's servant. As she prays, the angel reappears, transforming her simple room into the glorious church she had so feared to enter. ‘Full of sunshine and peace and joy’, her heart at last breaks, her soul flying ‘to heaven, where there was no one to ask about the red shoes’.
Andersen ascribed this harsh and puritanical story to his own childhood guilt over caring more about a pair of new boots than the confirmation to which he wore them. However, the red shoes seem to symbolize not merely vanity but also normal sensuality, which the narrative seeks unremittingly to expose and punish.
While employing Andersen's symbolic language, the film 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. A 1993 Broadway musical, choreographed by Lar Lubovich, was based on the film. A new ballet, choreographed by Flemming Flindt for the Royal Danish Ballet, premièred in January 1998.
Bibliography
- Andersen, Hans Christian, The Fairy Tale of My Life (1868).
- Bredsdorff, Elias, Hans Christian Andersen: The Story of his Life and Work 1805–75 (1975).
— Joan G. Haahr
