The Red Shoes

What a terribly truthful and wonderfully insightful story. So much symbolism. There are 2 pairs of Red shoes and they represent 2 very different psychological aspects of human nature... The first pair of shoes represents the girl's creativity and ingenuity. She has made them from scraps and wears them with joy and pride. Her creation lifts her spirit and she is full of a sense of who she is and happy in her own skin. She is poor but happy in her life ... she is strong in her own creative energy. Although she is an orphan and she is penniless, she has found the key to her happiness within her self...which is her creativity...and she has manifested the shoes. They, literally and figuratively, keep her gounded in herself and upon the earth. They are her core and they take her from place to place in the world with the knowledge that she is whole within herself. Her wild and authentic nature is intact, despite her outter worldly conditions. After she is taken in by the wealthy old woman, and provided materialistic comforts...she becomes trapped. Her shoes are looked down upon by the old woman, and eventually by the community that she is now living in. Steadfast, she continues to wear them, even though her benefactor insists that she not wear them anymore. She is unconcerned by the reactions of those around her. The old woamn and the community become increasingly outraged by her non-conformism and, eventually, the old woman takes the shoes away from her and burns them. The Girl becomes depressed. She sadly goes through her days and nights missing a piece of herself. Her creative core has been burned away by the old woman's (and the community's) insistance on her conforming to their ideas of "normalcy". Her true nature has been burned in the fire along with the shoes. Her soul is no longer alive...and she has a deep seated hole in herself that she cannot seem to escape. Over time the hole becomes larger and larger until she is starved for the missing piece. The second pair. As the girl wanders through the vendor carts of the village she seeks for something to replace what she has lost. And then she sees them...a shiny and perfect pair of red shoes. They are not of her own creation, but they are so much prettier than the ones she made. She tries them on and they fit perfectly. The vendor gives her the shoes as a present with a glint of sinister knowledge in his eyes. She skips down the road so happy in her new shoes. As she skips along she begins to dance. She dances all the way to her house and into the front door. She begins to tire now and sits to remove the shoes, yet her feet keep moving and dancing even while she sits...and the shoes won't come off of her feet. So she goes out into the night dancing away...at once thrilled and terrified. She dances throughout the night, unable to stop...out of control of herself...she stops eating and does nothing but dance, because she cannot stop. The shoes will not allow her to rest or to eat. They have taken over her life and they will kill her, in time. she knows she must remove the shoes and returns to the vendor who tells her they can never be removed. The terrible ending is that she has to have her feet cut off in order to be able to live. The second pair of red shoes represent the thing that we choose that is outside of ourselves to fill the void inside. Having lost her core creative nature...she seeks outside of herself, rather than returning to her core...and the thing outside cannot replace what was lost internally. The second pair traps her into madness which will kill her, in time. This story brings up many personal events and times when I have felt the creative core and then lost it and then turned to outside replacement only to find that the outside replacement is not only dissatisfying but also dangerous....more to come on this.