Kate Bush's Subversive Shoes

If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution.

Emma Goldman, 1869–1940

If you know the lurid details of hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Red Shoes," then Kate Bush's song of the same name presents a fascinating twist. A dance tune with pulsating rhythms and haunting effects, it encourages and celebrates dance. The song begins with a girl who wants to dance. She gets to dance and along the way takes her listeners for an experience that borders on ecstatic frenzy. Sending a very different message, the 1848 didactic tale positions dance as both sin and punishment. In the story a pretty but very poor orphan girl named Karen falls in love with a pair of red shoes made of shiny patent leather. After tricking her blind but pious benefactor into buying them, she makes the near-fatal mistake of wearing them to her Confirmation and Communion. As punishment for her vanity and excess she must endlessly dance; even when she is lifted off the ground her little feet keep on dancing through the air, totally escaping her control. She wants to go left, they go right; she wants to go home, they dance out into the street, where all can see her terrible state. An angel makes her fate painfully clear: "You shall dance in your red shoes until you become pale and thin. Dance till the skin on your face turns yellow and clings to your bones as if you were a skeleton. Dance you shall from door to door and when you pass a house where proud and vain children live, there you shall knock on the door so that they will see you and fear your face. Dance, you shall Dance."¹ Redemption ultimately arrives after Karen confesses her sins and the executioner chops off her feet, which then spend eternity dancing without a body. The girl, sans feet, lives out her life in domestic servitude to a local pastor. In this tale dance is both a symbol of and a punishment for female excess. Karen's forced dance represents a struggle to constrain female sexuality and raw passion by violently punishing the female body.

In Bush's sung version the projection of multiple subjects and the creation of a soundscape that celebrates and inspires dance transform the story into precisely what it is meant to denigrate—the dance of female excess. Karen was forced to dance because she wore the sinful red shoes, and her dancing isolated her from the villagers, who look on in dismay at her unhappy fate. Bush's character puts on red shoes because she wants to dance. To be sure, the celebration is not unproblematic, because dance still pushes participants out of control. But the crucial difference between the fairy tale and the song is that, in the modern sung version, the loss of control is ecstatic and desired, representing the threat of excessive pleasure. Moreover, in the fairy tale the protagonist dances alone, and in the song we all, listeners and other interlocutors, dance with her.

We do this at least in part because in her version of "The Red Shoes" Kate Bush takes on multiple roles, including both Karen and the original owner of the shoes. The most dramatic difference between Bush's song and the original fairy tale is the music. In an effort to focus on the power of sound to change meanings, this paper deals exclusively with the song, purposefully avoiding discussions of the film that Bush directed in conjunction with the album. The film presents an even more complicated story in which visual images sometimes work against the sound.² In some ways the lyrics of Kate Bush's song might seem to paraphrase and accentuate the old fairy tale, as both versions share a plot and suggest that the shoes, with their material presence and magical disposition, sit on the...