Silver Shoes
The Silver Shoes are a pair of enchanted footwear that first appear as a gift from Frex to his younger daughter Nessarose, later enhanced by Glinda's sorcery to grant Nessarose the ability to stand and walk independently despite her congenital armlessness. After Nessarose's death in a tornado, Glinda gives the shoes to Dorothy, setting off a conflict with Elphaba that culminates in the Witch's death. The shoes function as a nexus of paternal love, magical empowerment, political symbolism, and contested inheritance throughout the novel.
Origin and Craftsmanship
Frex, a unionist minister, had the shoes made for Nessarose before she left for university. He bought them from a toothless tinker woman outside Ovvels and then decorated them himself with silver glass beads, using skills in glass and metal that he had learned from the Quadling glassblower Turtle Heart. When the shoes first arrive at Crage Hall, their effect is dazzling: the surface seems to pulse with hundreds of reflections and refractions, looking in the firelight like boiling corpuscles of blood under a magnifying glass. Madame Morrible herself gasps at their splendor. The box contains nothing else for Elphaba, underscoring Frex's unequal affection for his two daughters. Nessarose exclaims over their beauty and has Elphaba fix them on her feet, while Elphaba, kneeling before her sister, says thickly that they are made for her and fit like a dream.
Enchantment and Empowerment
Years later, Glinda visits Colwen Grounds and puts the shoes through an enchantment. The spell allows Nessarose to sit, stand, and walk without support for the first time in her life. Nessarose is never without them and claims they give her moral virtue as well. The shoes become so integral to her identity that when she becomes the Eminent Thropp and the political head of the secessionist Free State of Munchkinland, she is called the Wicked Witch of the East. Elphaba observes that the shoes give her sister an unnatural balance, making her look like a serpent standing on its tail. When Elphaba asks if Glinda amplified them with a magic spell, Nessarose replies that Elphaba can have the shoes over her dead body.
Political Symbolism and Conflict
After the tornado drops a house on Nessarose, killing her, Glinda arrives on the scene and gives the shoes to Dorothy, the girl who survived the fall. Glinda tells Elphaba at the memorial service that she gave Dorothy the shoes as a sort of protection, and that she had them resoled and laced them through with a special binding spell of her own. Elphaba is furious, insisting the shoes are hers by right and that Glinda had no authority to give them away. Glinda argues that the shoes were coming apart until she repaired and enchanted them, and that she stood by Nessarose when Elphaba abandoned her. The shoes become a grotesque icon of their differences, planted between them. Elphaba warns that if the shoes fall into the hands of the Wizard, he will use them in a maneuver to reannex Munchkinland, as they have too much significance to Munchkinlanders. Glinda counters that the shoes won't make Elphaba's father love her any better.
The Shoes and Dorothy
Dorothy tells Elphaba that the shoes won't come off, that Glinda put a spell on them, and that she tried to give them to the Wizard when he demanded them but they wouldn't come off. Elphaba, obsessed with reclaiming them, pursues Dorothy across Oz. When Dorothy finally arrives at Kiamo Ko, the Witch demands the shoes, but Dorothy insists they are stuck. The confrontation on the parapet ends when Dorothy, trying to save the Witch from a fire, throws a bucket of water at her, causing Elphaba to melt. After the Witch's death, Dorothy returns to the Emerald City with the shoes still on her feet. The Wizard, unable to remove them, eventually absconds from the Palace in a hot-air balloon. Whatever may have happened to the original shoes, everyone remembers them as beautiful and stunning. Well-fashioned name-brand imitations are always available and never go out of style for very long, and the shoes or their replicas crop up at so many public ceremonies that, like the relics of saints, they begin to multiply to fill the need.
