The Red Shoes

To make their home more pleasing, the speaker and their significant other paint the walls. However, as the speaker discovers, the alteration is to no avail, and the relationship fractures much like the floor splinters. The colors used for painting symbolically show the shift from a warmer relationship to a more fragile one. At first, the rooms are in hues like “cinnamon” and “Aegean blue” (Line 26) but are soon repainted to “eggshell” and “gris-perle” (Line 26), which are colors very close to white, a shade of absence. The speaker certainly feels they are walking on eggshells in the violent world of their surroundings and during their partner’s erratic behavior. That the paint colors show the relationship’s change is confirmed by the sentence after the notation of repainting, as the couple “[fights] and [the partner] tore all [the] letters and diaries” (Line 27).

In the movie The Red Shoes, as well as Andersen’s fairytale, the “red shoes” are evilly enchanted and the heroine cannot stop dancing. Symbolically, the shoes are both treasure and curse, which is much like the speaker in the poem’s relationship. The red slippers metaphorically show that what was once pleasurable is now fallen to disarray. The shoes have been “buried” (Line 1) under the “splintered” (Line 2) “floorboards” (Line 1), meaning that what was once a good relationship is now hidden away by a damaged exterior the couple has tried to mend several times.