High Heel

Summer Brennan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501326004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Best Fifteen Books of March 2019, Refinery29
Best Nonfiction Books of 2019, Paste Magazine Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Fetishized, demonized, celebrated, and outlawed, the high heel is central to the iconography of modern womanhood. But are high heels good? Are they feminist? What does it mean for a woman (or, for that matter, a man) to choose to wear them? Meditating on the labyrinthine nature of sexual identity and the performance of gender, High Heel moves from film to fairytale, from foot binding to feminism, and from the golden ratio to glam rock. Summer Brennan considers this most provocative of fashion accessories as a nexus of desire and struggle, sex and society, violence and self expression, setting out to understand what it means to be a woman by walking a few hundred years in her shoes. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

1 The Garden Of Forking Paths

“Then it seemed like falling into a labyrinth:

we thought we were at the finish

but our way bent round and

we found ourselves as it were

back at the beginning . . .”

—Socrates, Plato’s Euthydemus

1

A woman runs through a forest, chased by a god.

Another attends a ball.

A third stands over a subway grate in white chiffon.

A fourth chains herself to the gates of a palace.

A fifth is carried away.

A sixth is going home now, click click click.

(Another, not counted here, disappears in the darkness.)

A seventh approaches the guillotine.

An eighth dances backward, into cliché.

A ninth wants to stop and can’t.

A tenth is furred and feathered and becomes the jungle.

An eleventh emerges from the sea.

A twelfth erases the border between countries, rides a stallion, and does the laundry, like a goddess, in a cocktail dress and black high heels.

These, my dancing princesses, of a different sort altogether.

2

I started writing this in Paris, birthplace of the stiletto, in summer. The daytime streets were crowded with women in flats, sandals, casual sneakers, and fashionable running shoes; few wore high heels. With the locals having fled to the countryside or vacations in the south, the city’s annual flush of tourists was given right-of-way.

To be sure to see a woman in high heels out in the open, one had to catch her in the morning on her way to work, or else wait until the evening hours when she emerged again, doe-like, crepuscular, red lipstick refreshed. Old, young, tall, short, black, white, and everything in between, the chic Parisiennes filled Metro cars and twilit sidewalks; they traversed the smoky cobblestones or the chalky ground of manicured parks en route to dinners or parties, their arches lifted as if on tiptoe, moving to the street-muffled sounds of clack clack clack clack and tap tap tap tap.

3

Enter the labyrinth. Take a turn, and another turn, and another. You won’t have too much time. The stopwatch is ticking, and evening is closing in. Just keep walking.

Yes, like that.

4

Our shoes pin us to the world, like Peter Pan to his shadow. More than simply facilitating our movement out-of-doors, they mediate between the wearer and the ground. Perhaps it is less the world they pin us to, but our place in it—that shadow of society that follows wherever we go.

5

In 1962, the writer and poet Sylvia Plath drew a picture of a pair of black patent leather high-heel shoes. That these were her own personal shoes is not confirmed, but I believe they were. In the drawing, done in ink, the left shoe points east while the right shoe points north by northwest, as if turned overly inward into a position that no real feet could find tenable. Above these, in pencil, Plath wrote “The Bell Jar.”

6

A pair of worn shoes is a portrait of its wearer. Not just the scuffed toes and heels ground down by months or years of pavement, or the narratives told by damage and repair, but the form and function of them, their type. They are a part of our costume in both the quotidian and theatrical sense. And because the stories that shoes tell are invariably about public life, they must also be about status, and power, or the lack of it.

7

A friend of mine, a former colleague, is one of the most consistently feminine-presenting women that I know—always tastefully perfumed, always in heels. She emigrated from the Soviet Union with her family when she was just a child. Sometime during that first year in America, her father took her to a supermarket in Queens, and snapped a photo of her in front of the overstocked juice aisle. It is a picture that radiates astonishment. One might expect a look of joy to accompany that much abundance, but instead there is something closer to shock and fear in her big brown eyes. Entitlement is a learned skill.

8

Western women are often told that we’re now living in a time of unprecedented choice and the ability to form our own destiny. That the world is our overstocked supermarket. You go girl! the advertising copy says—or seems to say. The popular narrative is that we can choose to be whatever we want to be, to work or be a “housewife,” a stay-at-home mom, to have a child or to not. We’re told that we can choose how we want to look, to wear makeup or not wear makeup, to grow our hair long or to buzz it off, and that we can choose whatever we want to wear on our feet. Modern shoe consumerism, especially, is often presented within the politically feminized language of choice. A woman’s right to choose becomes “a woman’s right to shoes.” By this logic, it matters not so much what we choose, but that it is chosen. The very presence of different paths, visible but untaken, seems to indicate that choice was possible; that the path we end up on was selected as a result of our desires or, at the very least, by our personal limitations, and that this is empowerment, or even feminism. That empowerment—the taking on of power—is a matter of personal intent and actualization, rather than one of structural change. That the course we chart through the labyrinth is individual, and intentional.

Some buy it, some don’t.

9

The high heels that Plath drew under the words “The Bell Jar” were meant to be an illustration for her novel of the same name. Understood to be an autobiographical roman à clef, it concerns a troubled young woman named Esther Greenwood at the dawn of her adult life. She is struggling to find her place in the world, beginning with an internship in New York City, and these same heels appear throughout the book as a sort of leitmotif. She is frequently aware of them, and what they are supposed to mean; the role they assign to her. The heels follow her like a shadowy familiar. We hear their origin story, bought one lunch hour at Bloomingdales “with a black patent leather belt and black patent leather pocket-book to match.” At one key point in the book when she is ready to abandon her life, to unpin herself from the world, she first abandons the shoes—only to return, the stitching between self and society momentarily restored. She knows they should be a source of envy, that thousands of other college girls probably wished they could be standing in them: inside the high heels themselves, but also inside the life she has found herself in—selected for a prestigious scholarship, receiving fancy clothes, getting dressed up to attend formal luncheons and parties and to be photographed.

They are a pair of shoes she is supposed to be happy in but isn’t.

10

There was a time in my own life in New York City when I wore high heels almost every day. I myself did not have much power, but I worked at the United Nations, in a place where powerful people congregate. It is a place of suits and ties, skirts and silk blouses; of long speeches and aggressive air conditioning; of Your Excellency, and Madam Chairperson, and freshly shined wingtips and yes, high heels.

I sat in rooms with presidents and royalty, although to these people I was always, precisely, nobody. There was an image in my mind of a certain kind of woman—professional, feminine, poised—that I wanted to embody. I saw these women daily, year after year, backstage to the halls of power, on benches by the ladies’ room, changing in and out of comfortable and uncomfortable shoes.

11

In an early chapter of The Bell Jar, Esther comes across a description of a marvelous fig tree in a book, and it sends her spiraling into the daunting labyrinth of her own prospects: I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story, she writes. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

12

The shoes I saw women changing in and out of at work were a more advanced form of high heel than Plath’s modest pumps, or the low kitten heels preferred by some, or the simple shoes that I could afford. These were power heels, and they were worn by women from all over the world. They were leopard print, or green and scaly. They were amaranthine and violaceous and subtly velvet. They were black and shiny as Japanese lacquer, with a shock of red on the sole. Some were plain, but uncomfortable anyway. Perhaps I have embellished them somewhat in my imagination, my memory tempered by glamour. What is not in dispute is that all of these statement shoes invariably came with a steel-spined appendage like an exclamation point: stiletto, the heel named for a dagger. For the women whose feet put up a fight, these shoes were changed out of and put away, smuggled in and out of the building in handbags, like weapons.

13

One warm night, outside Grand Central Station after a long day of work, I witnessed a curious metamorphosis. There was a woman standing in the shadows of 42nd Street. She was petite and nondescript, dressed in a black skirt, a black shirt, and brown moccasins, her hair pulled up in a bun. She had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to search for something in her oversized shoulder bag. After a moment she pulled out a pair of tall, platform, silver high heels, and set them on the ground in front of her. She stepped out of one moccasin, and then the other, and into the waiting, sparkling shoes. Calf muscles flexed, legs elongated, shoulders pushed back, she pulled a pin from her hair and a dark waterfall tumbled down. Had her ankles been that narrow a moment ago? Had the slit in the back of her skirt been quite that high the whole time? The moccasins went into the bag and the woman walked away down the street and into the night, glittering, transformed.

14

When I worked in a formal office setting, high heels were never of any special interest to me beyond the fact that I liked them, and wore them, and liked wearing them. I didn’t fixate. I never owned too many. If I’m honest, there were times when I liked the idea of wearing them more than the actual wearing of the actual shoes.

15

Walking in high heels is easy, until it isn’t. YouTube is full of videos of models falling down in high heels on the catwalk, even though walking confidently in high heels is a big part of their job. The long, thin bodies wobble, then crumple like collapsing paper dolls, rising and falling several more times as they gangle their way off the stage, the spell of poise irredeemably broken. Once they fall, it seems, they are likely to keep falling. Up and down they go. They fall because they are very young, or because they are hungry, or because balance, once lost for even a moment, can be difficult to regain—or because the shoes are impractical even for a model on a catwalk. Some of the worst “high heel fail” video clips come from high heel races, wherein runners try to sprint while wearing tall stilettos, to earn money for charity, raise awareness for a cause, or, in the case of one Parisian event, to win free shoes for a decade from a particular company. In some instances, the runners secure the heeled shoes to their feet with packing tape. Some fall anyway. Walking in heels is one thing, but running in heels is a skill akin to unicycling: a thing that one can master, but that can go very wrong very quickly, even for a professional.

16

I knew a woman some years ago, a scientist, who considered herself very reasonable. She did not wea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 The Garden Of Forking Paths
• 2 Daphne in Flight, Daphne in Flower
• 3 Ashes, Sea-Foam, Glass, Gold
• 4 The Minotaur
• 5 A Goddess at the End of the World
• Acknowledgements
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright