The red shoes were perceived by others as excessive and inappropriate for a young girl in mourning for the death of her mother, but to Karen, "nothing else in the world was so desirable." Her story reveals the tension between appearance and sensation,between the visual and the tactile, between image and sensation. Shoes, of course, offer bodily pleasure and so, according to Elizabeth Wilson, "gratify women's highly developed sense of touch and pleasure in their own bodies.
The effect of high heels on the body has been...