Can a Shoe Ever Be Just a Shoe? Can I Ever Write a Review that is Just a Review?
a long-awaited (entirely by me) essay on High Heel, a book by Summer Brennan
High Heel is a peculiar book published by Bloomsbury Academic as part of its Object Lessons series of books, “A book series about the hidden lives of ordinary things”, with other titles like Shipping Container, Burger, and Traffic. The book itself is a gorgeous little object and makes me wish that Books as Aesthetic were part of the series. It’s also been on my to-write-about list for over two years. So, as Summer Brennan herself always opens her essay camp, let’s begin.
High heels are equal parts shoe and symbol, and as Brennan writes, “the high heel is now womankind’s most public footwear.” Its symbolic role within society is so potent that it extends backwards beyond the literal invention of the shoe, into classical myth.
Part one of the book, or the first chapter, I’m not sure what to call it because this book is not a series of essays connected with grammatical transitions. Indeed, it is much more similar to Brennan’s Five Things Essay method of writing, of which I am a devotee. Anyway, part one addresses the importance of heels to the public performance of femininity, establishing them as more of a metaphor than practical foot protection. She includes some personal stories about her own relationship with high heels, as a heel-wearing woman among other heel-wearing women and how they changed out of and in to comfortable shoes when the powerful men in flat shoes weren’t looking. The symbolism of which is fertile enough for its own book.
Part two is the section Brennan wrote exclusively for me, comparing the modern invention of the stiletto heel to Ancient Greek myths of women transformed into objects. “From the creations of Viver, to Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo, Christian Louboutin, and Alexander McQueen, so many modern high heel designs embody ideas of metamorphosis. The fashion gods transform women into something other than human.”
Smart, sharp writing about feminism, fashion, and ancient myth? Inject it into my veins, please.
My fan-girling aside, this chapter can be summed up with this line, “A woman in motion, outside of male control, has long been viewed as a problem.” Men want to capture women for consumption, and if that’s not possible, they at least want to hobble them to nullify their flight response. Daphne was not interested in men, preferring to spend time outside, exploring and hunting and minding her own business. Of course, a man, Apollo, felt entitled to possess her. She runs away and eventually cries out to her river god father for help, so he turns her into the laurel tree. These days we don’t need our river god fathers to turn our feet into roots to immobilise us, we just need a pair of high heels.1
Part three of this book is the section Brennan wrote exclusively for seven-year-old me. I was an ardent devotee of The Little Mermaid. I wanted her voice, her hair, her breasts, and to be a mermaid. Really, I thought she was a bit mad to pick a stupid boy over being a mermaid. What lessons was a little girl supposed to learn from the Disney version of this fairytale? That drag queens are fantastic, crashing waves never mess up your hair, and “fish” in French is “les poissons”. Brennan takes a rather more serious tone when addressing the social and moral lessons intended in the original Grimm and Andersen fairytales, as befits the topic.
It was in this section that I learned that Cinderella’s story was first told in Imperial China, where Yexian’s tiny, tiny feet were the main reason the king fell madly in love with her at first sight. Around the time this story was published, foot binding started trending among the ladies of the court. I already knew that in the Grimm version of Cinderella, the step-sisters cut off their own toes to try to fit in Cindy’s tiny shoe. For whatever reason (misogyny) pain seems to be a key component to the wearing of heels, especially if those shoes are what help you transcend into the upper classes of society. And a key component of the pain is that it be understood by all, while seen by none. In the Andersen version of The Little Mermaid, each step she takes on her new legs feels like walking on knives, but her prince has no idea.
And Brennan couldn’t help but wonder: “What if we, as a patriarchal society, have decided to find beautiful in women that which causes suffering? What if the suffering is actually the point?”
Part four, as is inevitable for a book about high heels: “A woman is always seen to be saying something with her clothes, in ways that a man is not.” This is the most depressing chapter in the book because it is depressing that women have to just live with and accept violence from men as if it were as natural as rain. It’s depressing that painful high heels are required attire for professional, well-educated women. It’s depressing that those same heels on that same woman are a good enough reason for a man to sexually assault her.
At the end of this chapter, Brennan tells the story of a PhD student who accused her former graduate school adviser. When she was getting dressed for the hearing, she had to be “just plausibly sexy enough to look like you could have been harassed but 100 percent wasn’t asking for it.” She knew that the hearings wouldn’t be about what happened to her, but would be about whether she was the kind of woman whose lifestyle and clothing choices practically ask men to assault her. Depressing. So depressing that I don’t even care about how she deftly connects this violence to the myth of the Minotaur.
The fifth and final chapter doesn’t have much hope to offer the reader, but at least Brennan can move on to wrapping up this thoughtful little book. This isn’t to denigrate her writing of part four; it was necessary to the story of high heels. Given the centuries of weight behind what they symbolise, “Can we really pare away those parts of us bruised by culture, and still be whole? … What are women even like outside of patriarchy? As Virginia Woolf said, we don’t actually know.”
In this section Brennan is looking for an answer to whether or not a woman’s shoe can ever just be a shoe. Whether a woman can truly choose to wear high heels because they empower her. It’s the logical way to conclude a book about high heels, but it strikes me that the answer is “no” and the reason is what she wrote about in the rest of the book. We are in the Minotaur’s maze and there is no exit.
Well, I didn’t intend for this to be such a long book review that it ended up being more like a book report. Now that I’m writing my own conclusion, I can see that I enjoyed thinking about high heels as they relate to myths and fairy tales, both out of love for those stories and out of hate for the ouroboros of modern feminist discourse. I enjoyed reading this book, and I enjoyed writing about it, but I would like us to move on from women needing to write about this bullshit, “asking for it” no matter what the fuck we’re wearing.
Thank you for reading this edition of hot mushrooms! I’ll try for something a little more light-hearted next week.
This chapter also goes into the actual, scientific, biological differences between men and women and how there is not really that much difference. Brennan quotes Dr Daphne J. Fairbairn: “Often our basic biological differences are reinforced and exaggerated by our culture so that even minor, average differences are treated as though they are fixed, dichotomous traits. This does not reflect biological reality.” I didn’t include this in the main post because it was already too long and honestly, this exact biological fact makes me really fucking depressed. Forgive me for favouring Ancient Greek myths.