Change Your Shoes, Change Your Life: On Object Play and Transformation in a Woman's Story.

This article asks why adults play dress-up and investigates the role of object play in the making of magical thinking and the reforming of adult identity. The author looks at a wide spectrum of narratives and their genres-the fairy tale "Cinderella," the film comedy Some Like it Hot, the epistolary novel Pamela, the film melodrama Now, Voyager, the psychoanalytical case study of "Miss K.," and the memoir My Judy Garland Life. She asserts that these narratives help define what constitutes "a woman's story" as a story of transformation by setting its representation in relation to objects or aesthetic worlds, into which the woman changes or immerses herself with the same intensity and single-mindedness as a child at play. The author draws on the works of psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas to explain the transformational object seeking and aesthetic moment of these narrative representations and argues they model a woman's longing for transformation and make it imaginable to the adult mind. Key words: adult identity; a woman's story; Christopher Bollas; comedy; dress-up play; fairy tale; melodrama; memoir, object play; psychoanalysis; transformationIntroduction-Fairy Tales: Playing with NounsConsider the adage: You can't really know somebody till you walk a mile in her shoes. We know this expression does not mean that to know somebody you really have to walk a mile in her shoes. Even though the maxim says that is what we really must do, that is not what it means. Saying one thing, the words mean another when understood as a figure of speech. And as a figure of speech, the expression reveals that its meaning resides within or below the surface of the literal claim, as in the analogy: to perceive life as another perceives it feels to our imaginations as wearing her shoes and walking in them for a mile would feel to our feet. Somewhere in that slipping on of her difference (from the feet up, or from the feet in), she would grow more understandable to us. The axiom does a remarkable thing. It uses a figure-walking in somebody else's shoes-to embody an abstract idea: how to solve the problem of other minds by attempting to imagine living as another, of being another. The figure gives us an embodied account of a highly abstract, difficult idea as a means of opening up cognitive space for us to see ways into that idea. The analogy concretizes what resists expression. And in its very materiality, it builds a mental bridge to help mark offa space for the idea's coming to thought. The figure of speech metamorphoses from itself to an abstraction.We need objects and their signifying presence in language-nouns-to help us get closer to thinking and feeling what is difficult to imagine precisely because it has no image, no form, no material presence for us to grasp. This is the work of metaphor. As James Geary (2011) writes, "Metaphorical thinking creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which one concept is understood in the context of another. The abstract is understood in the context of the concrete, the metaphysical in the context of the physical, the emotional in the context of the biological. Through metaphor, body and mind are inextricably linked" (93). Geary describes embodied cognition, how the mind imagines an idea using the physical experience of the body.But what would it mean to take the shoe adage literally, not figuratively? However much we can allow for and enjoy the word play of metaphor, such magical thinking-to imagine that by performing the concrete prompt, to put on her shoes and walk, you really would know her in the sense of become her-seems to belong to the realm of fantasy. Freud offers us an early theoretical model for considering why we associate such magical thinking with childhood or fantasy. He writes about how we outgrow the pleasures of nonsensical sound play but find a way to still enjoy something like those early childhood pleasures of freedom from sense in the kind of adult word play of joking. …