The Shoes and The Dance: The Tragedy of the Anxiety of Authorship within Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle

“The real red shoes, the punishment for dancing. You could dance, or you could have the love of a good man. But you were afraid to dance, because you had this unnatural fear that if you danced they’d cut off your feet so you wouldn’t be able to dance. Finally, you overcame your fear and danced, and they cut your feet off. The good man went away too, because you wanted to dance.”

– Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle

In Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the Evil Queen, after being thwarted yet again,  is forced to dance in a pair of red-hot iron shoes until she dies (Grimm 7). In Lady Oracle, by Margaret Atwood, this scene is reimagined into an extended metaphor that consists of two parts: the dance and the shoes. These two extensions of the metaphors work together and against each other to demonstrate what Gilbert and Gubar call the anxiety of authorship. The passage from Lady Oracle, used by Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic and hereby referenced to as Footnote 20, is the apotheosis of the extended metaphor of the dance and the shoes, to demonstrate this feeling of being “literally or figuratively crippled by the debilitating alternatives her culture offers her” (Gilbert and Gubar 57).

In Lady Oracle, the narrative introduces the metaphors of the dance and the shoes through Joan’s childhood memories. These memories are tied to important female figures in Joan’s life. The primary experience with the dance is tied to Joan’s actual mother; the red shoes are tied to the character of Aunt Lou. 

Unlike the main character’s mother, who follows traditional femininity rules, Aunt Lou breaks those feminine stereotypes by living alone, openly having a married lover, and being fulfilled by her career. Aunt Lou often took the main character of Lady Oracle, Joan, to the movies throughout her childhood, which Joan considered some of her happiest childhood memories. One of these movies was, “The Red Shoes with Moira Shearer as a ballet dancer torn between her career and her husband” (Atwood 75), which sets up and parallels Footnote 20.  

The red shoes also appear in two places during the trips to the Canadian National Exhibition that Joan attends with Aunt Lou. There are two tents that Joan is not allowed to go into: the one with harem girls painted on the front and the one that held the freak show, including the Fat Lady. Joan always imagined the Fat Lady, “in gauze pants and a maroon satin brassiere, like the dancing girls, and red slippers” (Atwood 89). The Fat Lady and the harem girls, linked by their otherness and their red slippers, are blurred together further by Joan’s reminiscence of the Exhibition, “What I couldn’t remember was this: were there two tents or was there only one? The man with the megaphone sounded the same for freaks and dancing girls alike ” (Atwood 86). Like Aunt Lou, who is portrayed as the opposite of Joan’s mother, the red shoes represent the spectrum of otherness for the wearer. This is in direct contrast to the dance and Joan’s mother. 

During a dance recital Joan – who weighed a lot when she was younger – participated in as a child, her mother and dance instructor decided that her costume for the butterfly-themed number was inappropriate for a child of her size. Instead of wearing the butterfly costume, which she had been excited about, Joan was forced to wear a teddy bear costume and be a “mothball”. This incident resulted in Joan quitting ballet, though ballet is a recurring motif throughout the novel.

When Joan finally decides to dance for herself, as an adult,“[She] remembered the music, [she] remembered every step and gesture […] Wings grew from [her] shoulders, a hand slid around [her] waist,” (Atwood 365). It is the butterfly dance. However, Joan flutters into shattered glass and ‘feels that she has discovered “The real red shoes, the punishment for dancing”’ (Gilbert and Gubar 57). Before this instance, the butterfly dance and the red shoes are never put together. Footnote 20 is the apotheosis of these motifs, which have danced around each other narratively, throughout the book. It is the marriage of them as one metaphor, the climax. 

The dance and the shoes are dual and dichotomous. They simultaneously are representative of the different choices a woman could make, and yet, “they cut off your feet because you wanted to dance. The good man went away too, because you wanted to dance” (Atwood 365). As Gilbert and Gubar suggest in The Madwoman in the Attic, they end up intertwined in the same place. Either way, they are trapped. Joan laments, after Footnote 20, “But I chose the love, I chose the good man; why wasn’t that the right choice?” (Atwood 365). As put forth by The Madwoman in the Attic, no matter what choice a woman makes within the patriarchal society, she is trapped – either frivolous, mad, or both. By using this particular scene in their work, Gilbert and Gubar are demonstrating the moment where these metaphors come together in their defining commonality, the lack of space for women to express themselves freely within a patriarchal society, which leads to a lack of artistic and literary tradition. It is this lack of room for this tradition – the lack of room to dance – that defines the anxiety of authorship, and Gilbert and Gubar interact with this scene specifically because it represents the culmination of factors that create the anxiety of authorship.

The dance and the red shoes symbolize the duality of female choices, which come together in one scene within Lady Oracle, to reflect the tragedy of women trapped by the anxiety of authorship. The scene of Joan dancing in “the real red shoes” (Atwood 365) is the apotheosis of the contrasting and overlapping metaphors for the tragedy of the feminine experience, despite choosing the red shoes or the dance, within the patriarchal system that birthed the anxiety of authorship and dooms the dancer to be The Madwoman in the Attic.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Lady Oracle. 1976. First Anchor Books, Penguin Random House, 1998.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and

the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979, pp. 45–92.

Grimm, Jacob, et al. 812 GRIMM’S FAIRY TALES SNOW-WHITE and the SEVEN DWARFS. 1812,

pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/story158.pdf.