Virtuous Footwear: Pamela’s Shoe Heel and Cinderilla’s “Little Glass Slipper”

Abstract

The scene in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) wherein Pamela tries to escape Mr B’s Lincolnshire estate provides a crucial metaphor for her virtue in her lost shoe heel. In this essay, I consider the ways in which Pamela’s lost heel comes to represent her virtue and assumed upper-class identity, and I place the scene alongside the English translation of Charles Perrault’s “Cinderilla, or The Little Glass Slipper” (1697), which Robert Samber translated into English in 1729. The lost glass slipper in “Cinderilla” carries ideas about fit, imitation, luxury, and virtue that are similar to those Pamela’s lost heel embodies; a reading of Pamela and “Cinderilla” with attention to the cultural significance of shoes, heels, and glass uncovers the ways in which these influential and highly material fictions use footwear to fetishize virtue and reform upper-class femininity.