FASHIONABLE UGLINESS
How universal is the desire to have, or appear to have, small feet is shown by the fact that everybody blackens his shoes or boots; for, owing to a peculiar optical delusion, black objects always appear smaller than white ones; which is also the reason why too slim and delicate ladies never appear to such advantage in winter as they do in summer, when they exchange their dark for light dresses.
To a certain point the admiration of small feet is in accordance with the canons of good Taste, as will be presently shown. But Taste has a disease which is called Fashion. It is a sort of microbe which has the effect of distorting and exaggerating everything it takes hold of. Fashion is not satisfied with small feet; it wants them very small, unnaturally small, at the cost of beauty, health, grace, comfort, and happiness. Hence for many generations shoemakers have been compelled to manufacture instruments of torture so ruinous to the constitution of man and woman, that an Austrian military surgeon has seriously counselled the enactment of legal fines to be imposed on the makers of noxiously-shaped shoes, similar to those imposed on food-adulterators.
Most ugly and vulgar fashions come from France; but as regards crippled feet the first prize has to be yielded to the Chinese, even by the Parisians. The normal size of the human foot varies, for men, from 9½ to 13; for women, from 5½ to 9 inches, man’s feet being longer proportionately to the greater length of his lower limbs. In China the men value the normal healthy condition of their own feet enough to have introduced certain features of elasticity in their shoes which we might copy with advantage; but the women are treated very differently. “The fashionable length for a Chinese foot,” says Dr. Jamieson, “is between 3½ and 4 inches, but comparatively few parents succeed in arresting growth so completely.” When girls are five years old their feet are tightly wrapped up in bandages, which on successive occasions are tightened more and more, till the surface ulcerates, and some of the flesh, skin, and sometimes even a toe or two come off. “During the first year,” says Professor Flower, “the pain is so intense that the sufferer can do nothing but lie and cry and moan. For about two years the foot aches continually, and is subject to a constant pain, like the pricking of sharp needles.” Finally the foot becomes reduced to a shapeless mass, void of sensibility, which “has now the appearance of the hoof of some animal rather than a human foot, and affords a very insufficient organ of support, as the peculiar tottering gait of those possessing it clearly shows.”
The difference between the Chinese belle and the Parisian is one of degree merely. The former has her torturing done once for all while a child, whereas the latter allows her tight, high-heeled shoes to torture her throughout life. The English are the only nation that have recognised the injuriousness and vulgarity of the French shoe, and substituted one made on hygienic principles; and as England has in almost everything else displaced France as the leader in modern fashion, it is reasonable to hope that ere long other nations will follow her in this reform. American girls are, as a rule, much less sensible in this matter than their English sisters; one need only ask a clerk in a shoe store to find out how most of them endeavour to squeeze their small feet into shoes too small by a number.
Fashions are always followed blindly, without deliberation. But would it not be worth while for French, American, and German women—and many men too—to ask themselves what they gain and what they lose by trying to make their feet appear smaller than they are? The disadvantages outweigh the advantages to an almost ludicrous extent.
On the one side there is absolutely nothing but the gratification of vanity derived from the fact that a few acquaintances admire one’s “pretty feet”; and even this advantage is problematical, because a person who wears too tight shoes can hardly conceal them from an observer, and is therefore apt to get pity for her vain weakness in place of admiration.
On the other hand are the following disadvantages:—
(1) The constant torture of pressure (not to mention the resulting corns and bunions), which alone must surely outweigh a hundred times the pleasure of gratified vanity at having a Chinese foot.
(2) The unconscious distortion of the features and furrowing of the forehead in the effort to endure and repress the pain,—and wrinkles, be it remembered, when once formed are ineradicable.
(3) The discouragement of walking and other exercise, involving a general lowering of vitality, sickly pallor and premature loss of the bloom of youth.
(4) The wasting of the calf of the leg to dimensions characteristic of savagedom, disease, and old age, not to speak of the numerous maladies resulting to women from the use of hard high heels of fashionable shoes, every contact of which with the ground sends a shock through the spinal column to the brain and produces obscure disorders in various parts of the organism.
(5) The mutilation of one of the most beautiful and characteristically human parts of the body. As the author of Harper’s Ugly Girl Papers remarks: “One’s foot is as proper an object of pride and complacency as a shapely hand. But where in a thousand would a sculptor find one that was a pleasure to contemplate like that of the Princess Pauline Bonaparte, whose lovely foot was modelled in marble for the delight of all the world who have seen it?”
(6) Finally, and most important of all, the loss of a graceful gait, of the poetry of motion, which is a thousand times more calculated to inspire admiration—æsthetic or erotic—than a small foot.
Man is said to be a reasoning animal; and man embraces woman. But surely in matters of fashion woman is not a reasoning being. Very large feet being properly regarded as ugly, she draws the inference that the smaller they can be made the more will they be beautiful; forgetting that Beauty is a matter of proportion, not of absolute size. A foot may, like a waist, as easily appear ugly from being too small as from being too large. A large woman with very small feet cannot but make a disagreeable impression, like a bust on an insecure pedestal or a leaning tower.