Canadian Children’s Shoe Stories and Their Antecedents: Fortune’s Footwear

Few literary symbols offer the richness of the shoe as an emblem of mobility, the ability to be moved and to move. Shoes are the first grown-up part of work attire that ordinary young readers own. They need shoes for many tasks in the parts of the world to which much Canadian literature relates. Elegant and dainty shoes, like fine clothes, offer hints of nobility and belong to a privileged class. As L. M. Montgomery’s Anne Shirley comments, “You couldn’t imagine a fairy wearing boots, could you? Especially with copper toes?” (268). Coarse shoes or clogs indicate that the wearer is a worker or a contributor to the family’s upkeep but also that, although the family may be poor, it at least can afford shoes. It seems likely, then, that most Canadian children open a shoe story or listen to a shoe tale with at least a practical sense of the importance of shoes.

Canadian children’s literature focuses on life in a “geographic landscape and a child’s experience in it,” according to Patricia Vickery in her response to the survey conducted by Perry Nodelman on “What’s Canadian about Canadian Children’s Literature?” (28). Young readers learn of parts of Canada they have never visited through stories about children who live there and, on another level, identify more closely with the children who share their own experiences. For this reason, a story that employs a common symbol such as shoes may elicit additional sympathy and understanding between readers and literary characters while providing information about a region and its activities. Yet, at the same time, the shoe is associated with the imaginative elements of fairy stories and nursery rhymes, so that even a prosaic fictional story about shoes resonates with possible associations with earlier literary and oral traditions.

This article surveys some notable Canadian shoe stories that are traced from their antecedents. By placing these titles within a historical context, I hope to demonstrate the pattern that emerges of largely traditional tales, usually taken from borrowed European sources, often retold through new regional and cultural voices that add a Canadian emphasis.

The earliest shoe stories are not specific to children’s literature. One version of Cinderella comes from Ancient Egypt as the tale of the courtesan Rhodope. An eagle steals Rhodope’s tiny gilded sandal and drops it before the Pharaoh, who is so intrigued that he cannot rest until he has followed the shoe to its owner. Numbers of young women try to wear the sandal, but only Rhodope’s foot is small and dainty enough, and she becomes Pharaoh’s wife.¹

The earliest dated version of Cinderella comes from the ninth century and is described by literary historians Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Pritchard as part of the oral tradition of storytelling in the south of China (119). According to a retelling by Ai-Ling Louie entitled Yeh-Shen, a chieftain named Wu-the-Cave has a beautiful daughter, Yeh-Shen, whose pet carp is killed by her cruel stepmother. The fish is enchanted, and its bones grant Yeh-Shen her every wish, including a pair of golden slippers. After Yeh-Shen loses one slipper at a festival, it comes to the hands of a mighty king, who is “entranced by the tiny thing, which was shaped of the most precious of metals, yet which made no sound when touched to stone.” The King finds Yeh-Shen and has her try on the slipper, then whisks her away to his kingdom as a bride.²

Following print versions in Italy and France and a related sixteenth-century play by Thomas Dekker entitled The Shoemaker’s Holiday, a children’s version of Cinderella appeared in English, with the famous glass slipper, in a translation of Charles Perrault’s tales published in 1729. The folklorists Peter and Iona Opie speculate about a possible alteration made by Perrault from vair (fur) to verre (glass), which suggests that he considered the daintiness and fragility of glass more appealing than plain slippers; glass suggests a brittleness that only the most...