Eventually, the Victorians covered the female breast and pretty much everything else. It is tempting to try to link the covering up to a need to stay warm in homes without central heating during Western Europe’s “Little Ice Age,” a term coined by climatologist François E. Matthes (1874–1948) in a paper published by American Geophysical Union in 1939. Unfortunately, the dates of the cold period were roughly, and with much disagreement among the scientists, set at between 1350 and 1850. After that, clearly, the Victorians were chilled by their prudery, not their climate, just as Sorel and her followers had been warmed by their nature, not their clothes.
Meanwhile, with the breast in full view, what was hidden—like the wrapped Chinese foot—was titillating. In the words of that 1930s expert on social mores par excellence, Cole Porter: “In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking.” His point is made in art such as Hogarth’s The Rake at Rose Tavern (1733). That woman at the front of the painting is identifiable as a prostitute not because her breast is bare, but because she is showing her leg, her foot, her shoes, and her black silk stockings.
It is one thing to be aroused by the sight or touch or scent of a living foot attached to a living body. It is another to be attracted to the shoes that cover the foot, a fetish known as rétifism.
For rétifists, the shoe itself is the object of desire, to be collected, caressed, kissed, or even ejaculated into, practices that researchers in a 1998 study from Ohio State University thought may have been a form of safe sex from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, a time when cases of syphilis were on the rise in Europe. This unusual love affair is named for the eighteenth century French novelist Nicolas-Edme Rétif, a.k.a. Restif or Rétif de la Bretonne (1734–1806), a contemporary of the Marquis de Sade and the man who invented the word pornography, from the Greek words porno meaning prostitute and graphein meaning to write. Rétif is the author of L’Anti-Justine (1798), a novel he insisted was sensual rather than purely lustful like de Sade’s Justine. Readers might find that a distinction without a difference. Amazon.com describes L’Anti-Justine as a “monumental odyssey of sexual depravity.” As for rétifism, that arose from Rétif’s real-life sighting of a young milliner in the Rue St. Denis whom he immortalized in Le Pied de Fanchette [Fanchette’s Foot (1769)]. “Her foot,” he wrote, “her small foot, that turns so many heads was shod with a pink pump so beautifully made and as worthy of enclosing such a beautiful foot that my eyes once fixed on that charming foot could not turn themselves away.” Rétif was not the only author to delight in shoes. According to Cameron Kippen, fellow shoe fanciers have included the Roman poet Ovid, the Persian poet Omar Khayyam, and Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoyevsky.
British psychoanalyst John Carl Flügel had a theory about that. In 1930, three years after Freud looked into the psyche to link foot fetishes to the fear of castration, Flügel looked into the mirror or, more precisely, at people looking at themselves in the mirror while dressing, to plumb the deeper meaning of clothing. What we wear, Flügel said, serves three common needs: the need for privacy (“I’m modest”), the need for protection (“I’m cold”), and the need for publicity (“Look at me!”). As for shoes, in The Psychology of Clothes, published in London in 1930, Flügel agreed with Freud, and all the men who wrote the Bible. Feet, he said, served as metaphors for the male genitalia; shoes, for the vagina.
In Biblical times, the most common shoe was a flat-soled sandal. Shoes built on a thick, raised “platform” sole were worn in Asia and later in Western Europe. Butchers would wear high platform shoes while wading through offal and blood on the slaughterhouse floor, and ordinary people living in non-sewered cities such as London relied on platforms to step safely clean along the waste-strewn streets—not without consequences. The chopine, an overshoe whose sole might rise as high as 30 inches, was banned in Venice when several women miscarried after falling off their shoes while pregnant, probably as they attempted to stay dry during the annual floods in the Piazza San Marco.
The first carved out, slim, and shapely high heel may have been the one Leonardo made in 1553 as a wedding gift for Catherine of Medici (1519–1689), who, according to Dance Magazine, needed the extra two inches to compete with her future husband’s taller mistress. After that, as the art of the period shows, both men and women wore high heels, although with some restrictions such as Louis XIV’s rule that no one could wear shoes with heels higher than his and that only the nobility could wear them in red. The height limit is understandable: Every king wants to be the tallest person in the room. The ban on red shoes for the hoi-polloi is more complex. Red is the color of blood, power, fire, and the Devil. In Britain, women accused of wearing red high heels to attract a husband could be prosecuted for sorcery. By allowing his courtiers to wear red, Louis seems to have been saying that none of them was a witch. The association between witchery—or as former first lady Barbara Bush said in 1980 of Geraldine Ferraro then running as Walter Mondale’s nominee for Vice President of the United States, “… the word that rhymes with witch”—and red shoes is still with us. On September 16, 2012, The New York Times Book Review illustrated its front page reviews of The End of Men by Hanna Rosin and Vagina by Naomi Wolf with a very large, very red pump whose stiletto heel was set deliberately into the back of a very small man’s shoe.
Just as Cinderella turns the universal mother/daughter conflict into a universal fairy tale search for the rescuing prince, Hans Christian Andersen’s story, The Red Shoes (1845), ties together the links between footwear, color, and magic. Andersen’s young heroine, an orphan, naturally, covets a pair of red leather shoes. Once she has them, she decides, against all propriety, to wear them to church. As she is about to enter the door, an old crippled soldier on a crutch leans forward to touch the shoes and commands them: “Sit fast, when you dance.” The command is a not a blessing; it is a curse that fastens the shoes permanently to the girl’s feet and sets them (the shoes) dancing without pause, even when they are finally cut off her legs, with her feet still in them. Given a pair of wooden feet, the girl returns to church only to see her own human feet, still in their red shoes, dancing before her. Repenting the sin of having given herself airs for the shiny shoes, she prays for forgiveness, and her soul flies up to heaven. In 1948, Andersen’s story was reinvented as the British feature film The Red Shoes starring Moira Shearer as a dancer who must choose between her lover and her starring role in a ballet based on the Andersen story. Once again, the shoes assume control of the girl, this time carrying her forward, over a balcony, and into the path of an oncoming train.
There is, of course, another important pair of movie red shoes, the ruby slippers owned by the Wicked Witch of the East and appropriated by Judy Garland’s Dorothy in the The Wizard of Oz. In Frank Baum’s original book, the shoes were silver; for the movie, the color was changed to take advantage of the newly invented Technicolor. There were originally seven pairs; several have disappeared, and one was stolen, but in May 2012, the pair actually worn by Garland when she clicked her heels and went home to Kansas was sold at auction for $2 million. For two shoes neither silver nor ruby nor red (the camera required pink), that is witchy good indeed.
Eventually, high heels, red and otherwise, were worn not only by prostitutes in Paris, but also by prim Victorian ladies who liked the way they created an arch similar to the ballerina’s “banana foot,” echoing a woman’s curves. Today, high heels convey power, erotic and otherwise. Long-legged women in black net stockings and very high heels are, along with those nurses playing their game of grown-up Doctor, standard erotic fare. In The Story of O, the sadomasochistic novel by the pseudonymous “Pauline Reage” (Anna Desclos, 1907–1998) published in Paris in 1954 and in the United States nine years later, the title character—Odile—loses not only most of her name, but also her clothes, and more importantly, her shoes. On page one, she is “dressed as she always is, high heels, a suit with a pleated skirt, a silk blouse….” On the last page, she is bereft of
even the wooden clogs she wears to her last assignation with her masters, her dignity gone along with her last symbol of feminine power, the high-heeled shoes.
It says something about the state of pornographic literature, not to mention the state of sex in the twenty-first century, that the men in the The Story of O deliver their demands to Odile in approximately 790 spoken words (nine of which are either whip, whipping, or flogging), while Christian Grey, the eponymous title character in the more recent Fifty Shades of Grey (2012), submits an eleven-page contract between Dominant (him) and Submissive (her) with many clauses and subclauses, more talk about safe sex than whips and chains, and three appendixes that require the Submissive to watch her diet, work out regularly, and rate from 1 to 5 her opinion of various forms of sexual activity with the first number corresponding roughly to, “sure, why not?” and the last, “not a chance.” O’s agreement is a handshake among consenting adults; the contract between Dominant and Submissive resembles nothing so much as a long-winded prenup with two lawyers and a notary lurking in the background. Even if the Submissive does get to wear stiletto heels. Grey, of course.
No wonder that powerful women like Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, often collect high-heel shoes, in Marcos’ case, an estimated 3,000 pairs, 800 of which she donated to Marikina’s Footwear Museum in Manila. No wonder either, that after a decade of very flat, very expensive, very comfortable walking shoes as a fashion statement, in 1998 the girls of Sex and the City brought back very high, very expensive, very uncomfortable heels as standard equipment for the urban seductress.4 And finally, absolutely no wonder that in the opening credits for Necessary Roughness (2011), the television show in which a female psychologist signs on to counsel male athletes, the camera does not focus on her diploma, instead closing in tight on her feet in their black, strappy, very high heels.
Marie Antoinette (1755–1793) would have understood. On June 12, 1793, proud to the end, she rode to the guillotine in an open cart, wearing, some say, two-inch heels. A few contemporary paintings and engravings do show the heeled shoes; others, have a skirt long enough to hide her feet. What is known for certain is that she was forbidden to wear a widow’s black lest that draw pity from the crowd. According to an account given many years later by Rosalie Lamorlière, the shoemaker’s daughter who served as maid to the imprisoned queen, Marie wore a white dress, white cap, white scarf, black stockings, and shoes made of prunella, a heavy fabric often used for clerical and academic robes. High-heeled or not, the shoes were either thrown away or thrown into the coffin with the queen and buried in an unmarked grave in a small Paris churchyard where she lay until 1815 when the coffin was dug up and the body reburied at the St. Denis Cathedral with the rest of the royals, executed and otherwise.
In March 2012, at auction in Toulan, France, a collector of Revolutionary artifacts purchased a different pair of the Marie Antoinette’s shoes, size 3.5, more in line with Cinderella’s than a modern American woman’s. The royal shoes fetched a bid of $56,944 (43,225 Euros), $1, 943,056 less than the price of the pair of Judy Garland’s red shoes at auction two months later, thus proving, if proof be needed, that in life as in love what we most treasure is our fantasy—magical movie slippers, Cinderella’s prettily erotic foot, and in the end as at the start, Leonardo’s impossibly perfect Vitruvian Man.
Notes
(1)Roughly in order of appearance, the major monotheistic religions are Atenism, a short-lived belief system linked to the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) in the fourteenth century BCE; Judaism; Christianity; Zoroastrianism (sixth century BCE); Islam (seventh century CE); Sikhism (mid-fifteenth century); and Bahai (mid-nineteenth century).
Mormonism, founded in 1820 by the fourteen-year-old upstate New Yorker Joseph Smith and formally organized ten years later into the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, considers the Trinity to be three separate beings, a situation some see as outside the Christian tradition. But Mormons, who worship only “God, the Father,” consider themselves Christian and monotheistic.
Hinduism is polytheistic. Buddhism, Confucianism, Jain, Shinto, and Tao (the last two are the Japanese and Chinese words meaning “the way”) are non-theistic “ways of living” based on principles of human behavior rather than veneration of one or many gods.
(2)Count Dracula was not the first literary vampire. That honor appears to go to a spirit character in “Thalaba the Destroyer,,” an epic poem by British romantic poet Robert Southey (1797). The first vampire to appear in prose seems to have been Lord Ruthven, the title character in English writer/physician John William Polidori’s The Vampyre, a novella/short story written while Polidori was on holiday in Switzerland with Mary Shelley and Byron during the summer of 1816 that also produced the much better known Frankenstein. Polidori’s story was published in London in the April 1819 edition of The New Monthly Magazine, which erroneously attributed authorship to Byron.
(3)The literal meaning of homunculus is little man; historically, the word was used to describe the completely formed, very small human body once believed to be contained in the spermatozoa.
(4)Testifying to the popularity—but not the comfort—of one brand of stilettos featured prominently on the television show, in August 2012 the designer’s store on Madison Avenue in New York was robbed of thirty-four handbags, each priced at more than $2,000, but only one pair of shoes. Clearly the thieves were seeking chic without pain, the promise of “Dr. Scholl’s® For Her High Heel Insoles,” introduced in 2011 with a “unique design [that] helps prevent foot aches and pains caused by high heels two inches and higher.”
*Except where noted, the biblical phrases used here are from The Holy Scriptures, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1712–1952 or The Holy Bible, King James Version, American Bible Society, New York, 2009.
APPENDIX
PAIS, PED, POD
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871)
QUESTION: When is a ped not a foot?
ANSWER: When its etymology tracks back not to pes, the Latin word for foot, but to pais, the Greek word for child.
For example, the verb pedal, from the Latin pes, means to move something with your foot, and the noun pedal is the thing you move with your foot to move something else, say, a bicycle. But a pedagogue, from the Greek pais plus the add-on -agogos (which means to lead), is a person who teaches.
These rules apply, of course, regardless of where the p letters sit in any given word. Although they are most commonly up front, they may also be imbedded in the middle as in encyclopedia, expedite, and impediment.
The first, encyclopedia, is a pais word from the Greek compound enkyklios, whose literal meaning is in [en] a circle [kyklos], but the word may also mean general. Adding paideia/pedia, which means education or child-rearing, gives you “general education,” which is pretty much what an encyclopedia is. Our use of the word encyclopedia as the name for a reference book dates to the eighteenth century and Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts, et des Métiers, published in a series of volumes over twenty or twenty-five years after 1751. Its (temporary) suppression by the French church and state, was one of the matches that lit the fires of the Revolution. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de l’Aulne, an economist who had served as controller general under Louise XVI, attempted to convince the King to put in place financial reforms to even the field for French society. Turgot was sensible but completely unsuccessful; he died eight years before the deluge he predicted arrived to wash away the Ancien Regime:. The Scots, being a people whose heads (and climate) were cooler than the French, produced the second major encyclopedia, The Encyclopaedia Britannica, in Edinburgh in 1768 during the period known as the Scottish Enlightenment. Its publication went off without anyone’s spilling a single drop of blood.
Expedite,
the second word with –ped in the middle, comes from the Latin verb expedire, which means to free the feet from fetters, in other words, to speed someone or more likely something, on its way. The third, impediment, is the exact opposite, from the Latin verb impedire, which means to shackle the feet.
As for the concluding peds and pedes in words such as biped, quadruped, centipede and millipede, they simply and directly join the Latin prefixes for two, four, one hundred, and one thousand with feet to describe creatures with a certain number of legs. I do not know why one set ends with -ped and the other with –pede. Maybe they simply sound better that way, but they may sound better that way because that’s how we’re used to hearing them sound. What a pity there is no -ped word for mystery, which is what the word stampede presents. A stampede is an impulsive, rushed run of frightened animals or people. Because they all run on their feet, you’d think the word has a –ped connection. My dictionaries say no, and so does the Online Etymology Dictionary, which credits it to the “Mex.Sp. estampida, from Sp., ‘an uproar,’ from estamper ‘to stamp, press, pound,’ from the same Germanic root that yielded English stamp (v.).”
Pod can also be a puzzle. Obviously, podiatrist comes from the Greek pous meaning foot plus iatros meaning physician. Podagra, from the Latin pod or the Greek pous plus the Greek agra meaning to catch, translates loosely to foot trap, so it is the perfectly sensible medical name for gout. As for the adjective podgy, etymology links that to pudgy which may be related to pudsy, an eighteenth century term meaning plump derived from pud, meaning hand or forepaw. Bingo.
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