The Red Shoes & The Little Mermaid

Atwood’s appropriation of Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” and “The Little Mermaid”

reveals a female artist’s dilemma between her artistic career and her desire for men’s love.

The either / or choice encountered by women, particularly female artists, adds complexity to Atwood’s Gothic novel. Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” is a moralistic tale. The protagonist, Karen, is punished for her vanity and ingratitude. She forgets her Christian obligation to be humble. Ceaselessly dancing in red shoes becomes her punishment rather than a gift.

Dancing is so painful for her that Karen eventually asks an executioner to cut off her legs.

The tale shows the conflict between the girl’s love for dance and the submissive piety demanded by a paramount patriarchal institution, the church. Karen’s dancing, viewed as self-expression, defies the traditional notion of female decency and obedience. In folklore, dancing is often associated with enchantment, taboos, deception, captivity, and (especially for women) punishment (Wilson 121). The color red is associated with blood. Therefore, dancing in red shoes becomes a curse. Karen finally reconciles herself to sufficient piety and restricted mobility so that she can resist this curse. Her story indicates that the price of women’s self-expression is “[b]lood, the elemental fluid, the juice of life, by-product of birth, prelude to death. The red badge of courage” (Atwood, Dancing Girls 191-2).

In Lady Oracle, Joan has doubts about the choice to fulfill woman’s traditional roles or to realize her own dream after watching Moira Shearer’s 1948 film “The Red Shoes.” In the film, Moira Shearer plays a ballet dancer torn between her career and her husband.

According to Sharon Rose Wilson, dancing as a ballerina is not only individualistic and self-expressive but also selfish and unfeminine because such dancing takes on implications beyond compliance to role-conditioning (129). In spite of her rebellious pursuit of art, the ballerina ultimately commits suicide by throwing herself in front of a train. Joan explains the reason why she adores the unfortunate ballerina: “not only did she have red hair and an entrancing pair of red satin slippers to match, she also had beautiful costumes, and she suffered more than anyone” (LO 93, italics mine). Joan not only has the same kind of red hair but, more importantly, easily identifies with the female character’s life story full of

suffering and indecision. Moreover, the ballerina’s story sheds light on Joan’s pursuit of her artistic career. The ballerina at first represents a wish-fulfillment dream for Joan who

“wanted to dance and be married to a handsome orchestra conductor, both at once” (LO 93-4).

However, after she decides to “dance for no one but [herself],” she cuts her feet on broken glass in her balcony (LO 405). Her bloody feet look like “[t]he real red shoes,” punished for dancing (LO 406). Then, Joan realizes the double bind of Moira Shearer’s role in the film:

she can dance (be artists, be free) or marry (be conventional) but she cannot do both.

In Lady Oracle, Atwood highlights “dancing” and “women’s self-sacrifice” when she creates a female artist, Joan Foster, who often compares herself to the woman in red shoes and the Little Mermaid. For Atwood, the mermaid is an “archetypal victim / artist” who sacrifices her tongue in order to search for her true love (Rigney 9). She renounces her talent for singing in exchange for the prince’s attention. However, the mermaid with human legs is incapable of walking or dancing well. As Atwood points out, “[i]f you want to be female, you’ll have to have your tongue removed, like the Little Mermaid” (Second Words 225). In a sense, femininity is in conflict with creativity. The fact that Joan conceals her writing talent from her husband is not only due to her feeling of being torn between

femininity and artistic creativity, but also because “secrecy” is a woman’s way of coping with the fear of success. Her successful writing career becomes “a challenge to the male ego”

(LO 326). As Joan’s lover criticizes, she is “a threat” (LO 327). The concealment of her writing talent makes Joan gradually feel “something was missing” (LO 261-2). Although she succeeds in possessing an ideal female body, Joan perhaps loses her soul. She “just drifted around, singing vaguely, like the Little Mermaid in the Andersen fairy tale. […]

She’d become a dancer, though, with no tongue” (LO 262). When facing the dilemma between her artistic career and romantic love, Joan chooses love and marriage. She may not be aware that she is following her mother’s expectations: first you get a pretty body, then you catch a man. Joan also confesses that she “had this unnatural fear that if you danced they’d

cut your feet off so you wouldn’t be able to dance” (LO 405). She worries that even if she finally overcomes her fear and dances, “they cut your feet off” and “[t]he good man went away too, because you wanted to dance” (LO 405). To keep her marriage, Joan chooses a duplicitous life because she realizes that neither the Little Mermaid nor Moira Shearer “had been able to please the handsome prince; both of them had died. […] Their mistake had been to go public” (LO 262). In order to survive, she decides to “do her dancing behind closed doors” (LO 262). Yet, Joan is not quite sure about her decision because she says,

“[i]t was safer, but….” (LO 262, ellipses in source).

Her uncertainty looms in her writing processes and finally evokes her vision of a dancing Fat Lady:

My old daydreams about the Fat Lady returned, only this time she’d be walking across her tightrope, in her pink tutu, and she’d fall, in slow motion, turning over and over on the way down…. Or she’d be dancing on a stage in her harem costume and her red slippers. But it wouldn’t be a dance at all, it would be a striptease, she’d start taking off her clothes, while I watched, powerless to stop her. She’d wobble her hips, removing her veil, one after another, but no one would whistle, no one would yell Take it off baby. I tried to turn off these out-of-control fantasies, but couldn’t, I had to watch them through to the end. (304-5, ellipses and italics in source)

Joan’s obsession with the Fat Lady together with her anxiety about her body and her writing career not merely creates an uncanny and supernatural effect but also expresses Joan’s

conflicting desires for both men’s attention and a career as a writer. Here the Fat Lady, who is dressed like Joan in her ballet recital in the past, transcends the time-space boundary and disturbs Joan’s sense of self at present. Being a successful writer, Joan fears that she may become unattractive to men, just like a fat woman whose striptease is ridiculous rather than sexy. Moreover, since dancing is a metaphor for writing, Joan also worries about repeating

the failure in her ballet performance, particularly when she relies on writing to support herself economically and psychically. Atwood is concerned most specifically with the role of women as artists and with the price of art. As Joan describes it: “At every step I took, small pains shot through my feet. The Little Mermaid rides again... hobbling through the gauntlet of old women, who would make horns with their hands, tell the children to throw stones, wish me bad luck. What did they see? […] A female monster, larger than life, larger than most life around here anyway” (LO 407). Unlike the original image of the sweet Little Mermaid in Andersen’s tale, Atwood’s female artist needs to break through the prescriptions of female roles and express her repressed desires, which are regarded as monstrous.

Regardless of the price, however, Atwood condemns her female artists to the choice of art.

As she states,

[y]ou would come to a fork in the road where you’d be forced to make a decision:

“woman” or “writer.” I chose being a writer, because I was very determined, even though it was very painful for me then (the late ’50s and early ’60s), but I’m very glad that I made that decision because the other alternative would have been ultimately much more painful: it’s more painful to renounce your gifts or your direction in life than it is to renounce an individual. (Ingersoll 117)

Atwood shows, from “The Little Mermaid” and “The Red Shoes” (the film), that a woman is punished for wanting both to be an artist and to be loved. At the same time, she reminds us that to sacrifice art for love is, ironically, to sacrifice art, love, and the self as well.

Rewriting the famous fairy tales in Lady Oracle, Atwood successfully calls our attention to the differences within similarities. While no longer agreeing to amputation or, like Andersen’s Karen, depending upon a male angel to open the maze enclosing and excluding her, Joan opens the closed door by herself. Like Fitcher’s third bride in “Fitcher’s Bird,”

Joan discovers that she is not a passive victim and that men, not necessarily Bluebeards, are also human and vulnerable. The Little Mermaid who renounces her voice for the prince’s

love finally loses her life. Joan instead survives. More importantly, she retrieves her voice so that like the Grimms’ Robber Bride in “The Robber Bridegroom,” she can tell her and her sisters’(mother’s) story. Atwood utilizes many familiar elements from fairy tales, thereby aiding reader’s recognition of the intertextuality of fairy tales. At the same time she wittingly defamiliarizes, transgresses, and often parodies these elements. This also makes Atwoodian Gothic “uncanny.”

III. Conclusion

Although Lady Oracle is a comic Gothic novel, its intent is serious. By incorporating Gothic conventions, its parodic humor exposes the myths and conventions of social

construction of gender and shows how these are perpetuated in literature. In her poem

“Hesitations outside the Door,” Atwood writes, “[i]f we make stories for each other / about what is in the room / we will never have to go in” (Selected Poems 171). Unless we examine the truth / myth behind the door, women’s lives still seem inescapably shaped by patriarchal forces lurking in Gothic texts.

Chapter Two