Literature & Fashion

By Clara McWeeny

“Yet each morning their shoes // were danced to pieces.” 

Anne Sexton, “Twelve Dancing Princesses.” 

It is Bernini’s careful attention to the delicate roots that adorn Daphne’s feet in the sculpture Daphne and Apollo that work to differentiate and contrast the seemingly immaterial portion of the sculpture from the rest of its broad, intentionally trunk-like form. Bernini seems to call attention to the very impossibility of his own work — the roots that drip from the toes of Daphne seem to defy the properties of marble, resting in a place vaguely between the form of a solid and that of a liquid, at once appearing conceivably grounded without negating the possibility — or even probability — that they could fracture at any moment. Bernini imbues these roots with a certain delicacy that could be easily understood as sartorial — they serve as appendages to her feet, extensions of her being, much like a traditional high heel could be understood as doing. In their sartorial capacities, the work of both Bernini’s Daphne and Apollo and Nortitaka Tatehana’s “Lady Bloom” centers footwear or feet as a vessel for intense transformation. My work hopes to place Bernini’s sculpture — and in particular, the sartorial roots that drape Daphne’s feet — in conversation with Tatehana’s work, exploring notions of the shoe as an aesthetic object as well as potentially an object of the fetish. 

The art of both Bernini and Tatehana work in tandem to gesture towards both the grounding and soaring qualities paradoxically contained within the shoe. In both works there seems to be this guiding notion that the very act of footwear — of drawing attention to the form of the foot, of adorning the foot with an object — is in itself destabilizing. When wearing Tatehana’s red shoes, for example, the wearer would seem to exist in a place of perennial instability, a precarious liminal space that rests somewhere between erect and supine, literally leaving the wearer off-balanced. Contained in the footwear is the possibility of flight at any time, humming with the potentiality of lift-off. Tatehana reasserts the gravity-defying act of crafting a heel less shoes in his angular structuring of the shoe’s sole — the form serves to mirror the act of standing on one’s tip toes, a motion inherently entrenched with a desire to stretch beyond or maybe even out of a human form, into the sky. The shoes quite literally launch their wearer forward, and the potential of flight remains potent. 

Bernini’s Daphne and Apollo similarly prompts questions of the aesthetics of motion, as does its general preoccupation with the art of escape. Angled in a similar fashion to Tatehana’s shoes, Daphne’s foot stands flexed and strained, prime for take-off — it is almost as though she is being caught by the tree instead of growing into it. Just as a heel may function, the roots attached to Daphne’s feet serve — improbably — to lift her up, launching her forward much like the red shoes do to their wearer. 

Simultaneously, though, both artists seem insistent on the fact that feet and footwear contain the potential for vigorous grounding just as much as they contain the potential for flight. The roots that ground Daphne are integral to both the narrative Bernini attempts to capture and the very structure of the sculpture: they are anchoring, insofar as they allow her to escape the otherwise rooting force of Apollo, but they also quite literally hold her up. The roots work with the trunk of the tree to serve as the “strut” of Bernini’s work, providing the structure with the necessary support it needs to stand. Both in myth and reality do these roots serve to hold Daphne to the ground. Interestingly, though, Bernini is careful to disguise the functional as the aesthetic, integrating the necessary structural component of the sculpture into the art. He seems unwilling to admit to the very usefulness of the roots, disguising them instead as purely narrative and aesthetic. 

Tatehana, like Bernini, similarly must work to negate any semblance of usefulness the shoe may have. Despite its impracticality, his shoe is ultimately both lifting the wearer into the sky and also providing them with the means to walk on the ground. Inherent to the latter half of this paradox is the (albeit it less radical) sentiment that in taking on the the label of “shoe,” Tatehana’s art is undeniably utilitarian at its core, emphasizing the laborial and practical properties of even a seemingly ornamental shoe — still, he is insistent on subverting these presumed purely practical characteristics of a shoe, crafting a piece of footwear that verges on uselessness given its structure and dimension. In adorning his red shoes with fading gold paint, he similarly asserts this uselessness, imbuing them with a gildedness that philosophizes a certain worthlessness beyond any aesthetic value. 

In foregrounding the aesthetic value of their art work and undermining any practical function, both Tatehana and Bernini pose their pieces as fetish objects. In Joan Copjec’s The Sartorial Superego, she explores the photographs of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault and his statement that a characteristic of fetish objects is that they have “rigorously no use” (Copjec 108). Like the photographs of Clérambault, “Lady Bloom” and Daphne and Apollo are both “marked with the seal of uselessness” ( 108). 

If Tatehana and Bernini share the common vision of a sort of useless aesthetic plenitude contained within shoes, Anne Sexton punctures this dream in her poem “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” The poem, in a perverse modern retelling of the German fairy-tale that shares its name, narrates twelve young girls who are locked in a single dormitory at night by their tyrannical father. Each morning, though, their shoes show signs of use, hinting at the girls’ nightly escapades, sneaking down beneath the earth to dance, drink, and seemingly engage in sexually illicit behavior. Sexton’s attitude towards the shoes, though, carries with it a certain irreverence not matched in the works of Tatehana or Bernini. It is an irreverence worth exploring — if Tatehana and Bernini’s fascination with feet and shoes partially assert — or at least entertain — Clérembault claims that fetishes are of “rigorously no use,” Sexton negates it completely (108). She ignores any ornamental traits of the shoes, except for the scuffs caused by the labor and work they undergo. The shoes of the twelve princesses are vigorously of use, possibly even intended to be used and not seen, a vessel for illicit actions as opposed to having any particular aesthetic value. At the very least, Sexton does not seem particularly concerned with devoting attention to describing the ornate image of the shoes. No color or design is ever mentioned — instead, Sexton writes, “Yet each morning their shoes // were danced to pieces.” (Sexton). The only attributes assigned to the shoes call upon their previous practical use: they are worn and scuffed, not red and ornate, or dripping and sartorial. *

*I can’t figure out how to footnote on WordPress so doing it here: Throughout Sexton’s poem, there is the emerging sense that the shoes of the princesses could be feasibly conceived of as what Copjec labels the female fetish, or the asexual fetish: “the woman enjoys the cloth — for itself, not for any imagined connection it might have with the opposite sex” ( 108 ). In many ways, in their female-serving utility, the shoes act as asexual fetish objects for the princesses. 

The works of Tatehana, Bernini, and Sexton each act to center the shoe and the foot. Tatehana and Bernini do so through their insistence of the shoe as almost exclusively an aesthetic object, only briefly entertaining the potential for usefulness. It is in these sartorial assertions that the works can be  conceivably understood as exploring notions of the fetish, essentially refusing to function as objects of practicality or usefulness despite the traditional capacities of a shoe. Sexton, on the other hand, allows her shoes to be entirely useful, as well as entirely focused on female-pleasure, taking aim at Freud’s traditional conception of the fetish. 

This is not to say that the works of Bernini and Tatehana stand in complete contrast to Sexton’s poem. Just as the two works complicate notions of flight and grounding, of a sort of fleeting rootedness, Sexton similarly wonders how shoes can act at once as a means of liberation and subjugation, both in their narrative role and their actual form. In the poem, the shoes allow the princesses to access a sort of freedom and escape, but they ultimately serve to ground and subjugate them when they are used as evidence for their transgressions. The form of the shoes also are reminiscent of some of the paradoxes that both Tatehana and Bernini pose in their respective work — in “The Twelve Princesses,” the shoes fall away to shreds after each night and then are made anew each morning, as if to suggest they are stable and self-supporting and also ephemeral. 

My altered work dreams of exploring the sartorial feats of “Lady Bloom” and Daphne and Apollo in conversation with the seemingly utilitarian feat of Anne Sexton’s “Twelve Dancing Princesses” — it is my aim to illuminate the oftentimes contradictory complexities that lie at the heart of each one of these pieces, to rely on Clérembault’s theory of the fetish to assert the practical and sartorial value of the shoe, and to conceptualize how heel-less or heeled, scuffed or gilded, rooted or soaring, shoes can be understood as entirely destabilizing objects.

Works Cited

Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire. The MIT Press, 1995. 

Giovanni Bernini. “Daphne and Apollo.” Villa Borghese, 1625. 

Image from Met Costume Institute. Artist: Noritaka Tatehana.

Sexton, Anne. “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” Transformations. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1979.

I pledge my honor that this paper represents my own work in accordance with University regulations. 

/s/Clara McWeeny