Abstract
In this chapter, addressed to my daughter, I read Hans Christian Anderson’s ‘The Red Shoes’ against-the-grain of patriarchal interpretation. I read the totemic red shoes from a feminist perspective to reveal that Karen’s red ruby glistening slippers represent a burgeoning sexual desire and creative urge brought on by her first menstruation. I expose an explicit link between desire, poetic catharsis and menstruation in Anderson’s ‘The Red Shoes,’ and which is also evident in the Grimm fairy tale ‘The Almond Tree’ and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer filmic adaptation of The Wizard of Oz (1939), directed by Victor Fleming. I argue that red shoes bring about a girl’s entrance into becoming a woman beyond societal expectations imposed on them in patriarchal cultures, which affirmatively invokes the wild zone.
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