빨간 구두의 굴레와 여성주의적 재해석

Bondage of the Red Shoes and Its Feminist Reinterpretation: Andersen and Atwood

It is already known that Hans Christian Andersen attempts to curb the womanly vanity for the red shoes by Protestant belief and Victorian social convention. The girl in his Red Shoes who covets the shoes is forced to dance forever and, in order to stop it, has to mutilate her feet. In the Victorian patriarchal society, the womanly duty to work for family strongly suppressed female desire for play, artistic expression, occupation. The so-called Red Shoes syndrome refers to the female psychology and behavior which represents that women take as their own the supposedly feminine vanity and vice, and thus internalize the guilty feeling and the resultant fear. When contemporary feminist writers addressed this syndrome, however, they had to radically revise it. This essay explores the prototype of the Red Shoes syndrome by Andersen and the reinterpretation of it by Margaret Atwood in her Lady Oracle. Aspects of the syndrome in Andersen and strategies to survive it in Atwood deserve a careful analysis. The feminist writers try to demonstrate that the female artistic spirit and desire for social ascent, related to the syndrome, turn out to have been a latent but hardly suppressible characteristic of womanhood over generations.