In "Every Step a Lotus, " Dorothy Ko embarks on a fascinating
exploration of the practice of footbinding in China, explaining its
origins, purpose, and spread before the nineteenth century. She
uses women's own voices to reconstruct the inner chambers of a
Chinese house where women with bound feet lived and worked.
Focusing on the material aspects of footbinding and shoemaking--the
tools needed, the procedures, the wealth of symbolism in the shoes,
and the amazing regional variations in style--she contends that
footbinding was a reasonable course of action for a woman who lived
in a Confucian culture that placed the highest moral value on
domesticity, motherhood, and handwork. Her absorbing, superbly
detailed, and beautifully written book demonstrates that in the
women's eyes, footbinding had less to do with the exotic or the
sublime than with the mundane business of having to live in a
woman's body in a man's world.
Footbinding was likely to have started in the tenth century among
palace dancers. Ironically, it was meant not to cripple but to
enhance their grace. Its meaning shifted dramatically as it became
domesticated in the subsequent centuries, though the original hint
of sensuality did not entirely disappear. This contradictory image
of footbinding as at once degenerate and virtuous, grotesque and
refined, is embodied in the key symbol for the practice--the lotus
blossom, being both a Buddhist sign of piety and a poetic allusion
to sensory pleasures.
"Every Step a Lotus "includes almost one hundred illustrations of
shoes from different regions of China, material paraphernalia
associated with the customs and rituals of footbinding, and
historical images that contextualize the narrative. Most of the
shoes, from the collection of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, have
not been exhibited before. Readers will come away from the book
with a richer understanding of why footbinding carries such force
as a symbol and why, long after its demise, it continues to
exercise a powerful grip on our imaginations.
A Copublication with the Bata Shoe Museum
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