"Ladies. Has it ever occurred to you that fairy tales aren't easy on the feet?"(Link) is perhaps a great way of starting off a fairy tale with a lesson, instead of having to dig around for it like you have to do in some of Link's other stories, it's safe to say that the moral of this story has everything to do with the obsession of feet. Now perhaps it's not exactly feet themselves Link is trying to point out to the reader, but instead what they are capable- especially what they are capable of when they are the feet of a woman. The protagonist is named Gerda (at least that's what I presume from the interaction the second-person narrator has with their stolen lover Kay) and she's been traveling a long way for reasons she at first thought had to do with a man she supposedly loved, but as the story progresses it's more than obvious that this objective isn't the case.
At the beginning, Gerda and Kay have some sort of fight where glass breaks and "Don't move," you said. You weren't wearing shoes."(Link) is the first mention of feet in correlation with Kay and Gerda's relationship. After Kay doesn't come back, Gerda decides to go searching for him., "You were going to travel for love, without shoes, or cloak, or common sense. This is one of the things a woman can do when her lover leaves her. It's hard on the feet perhaps, but staying at home is hard on the heart, and you weren't quite ready to give him up yet."(Link). So, what's up with Gerda's feet? I think Link makes a connection between (maybe not so weirdly) a girls heart and her feet, after all in most fairy tails it's the young heroine who has to travel far and wide for a prince or run desperately through the woods from a wolf. Maybe Link is right, maybe it isn't all love and roses to be the main character of a fairy tale, let alone a woman in a fairy tale. "No, really, think about it. Think about the little mermaid, who traded in her tail for love, got two legs and two feet, and every step was like walking on knives.....The woodsman had to chop her feet off with an axe.....There are Cinderella's two stepsisters, who cut off their own toes, and Snow White's stepmother, who danced to death in red-hot iron slippers." (Link)
Travels with the Snow Queen (Source Unknown)
Is it possible that Travels with the Snow Queen is just a wholehearted satire on the romanticism of girls in fairy tales? Link really does a good job of throwing in her unique sense of humor and using classic plotlines, The Princess & The Frog, Sleeping Beauty, and The Princess & The Pea to name a few, to show just how unrealistic and probably quite painful and disgusting some of these stories really are. After all the requiring mention of bleeding feet, of hardship travels, and the fact that hey have you ever though the prince charming wasn't so charming anymore, kind of makes me feel as a reader that that is exactly what Link is doing here - mocking the classic fairy tale.
But what she does so well and what really makes such a close reading of this short story so fun is the mention of feet. In sake of interest, I googled the words 'feet' and 'femininity' and the first result to come up was female foot language? Like, apparently women can flirt through their feet now? And not to mention that we all know those horrifying tales of foot-binding in ancient China. It's safe to say that a woman's feet can really (for the record I never knew this but..) say a lot about her and the universal symbol of travel and hardships are the worn out soles of the workers shoes. "You tell the geese that your feet are maps and your feet are mirrors. But you tell them that you have to keep in mind that they are also useful for walking around on. They are perfectly good feet." (Link) So are feet used in this story for Links point about how tough a heroine in a fairy tale really is? That there is way more to her then just lithe beauty and mindless frolicking, that some of the things women go through for love is nothing to joke and romanticize about. Greda's bleeding feet, which only stop bleeding after a robber girl kindly gives her her old boots, symbolize the painful endeavors that women face everyday in relation to men and the perfection that they seek (in this case Greda and Kay's interest in the ever beautiful Snow Queen).
Plus, it's interesting to add as a side note that Kay finds Greda's shoes ugly, but the Snow Queen finds them pretty. The fact that the shoes are given to Greda by a female (a robber nonetheless) are all things to remember because maybe Link is saying that sometimes a heroines most supporting characters aren't prince charming or whatever, but the women who help her along the way?
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