You'll Always Have a Friend Wearing Cursed Red Shoes

One thing you’ll notice in the works of Hans Christian Andersen is an obsession with shoes. The impression given is that a lot of people in Denmark in Andersen’s time couldn’t afford shoes and had to go barefoot in the cold. Shoes are generally presented as a luxury item, and luxuries tend to be frowned upon by Christianity. Well, some branches of Christianity, anyway. Maybe not the ones where people wear their finest clothes and drive to church in expensive cars. At least that’s the impression I get from “The Red Shoes,” a disturbing story in which a girl who insists on wearing red shoes to church is cursed by an angel to dance without stopping. It sounds like a rather petty thing to care about, but I suppose the shoes are a symbol of her vanity and wilfulness. In order to stop the dancing, she has her feet chopped off, and they continue dancing in the shoes after being cast off. It seems rather like the same sort of poetic justice you would come across in the Saw movies, in which people are always having to pay for their sins through self-mutilation. Of course, in these movies, it isn’t an angel of God dishing out the punishments, but rather a cancer patient with too much time on his hands. Still, I think there’s some thematic similarity there.

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