Stephanie Roberts Your Shoes

The novel ”Your shoes” by Michele Roberts is a story about a mother who is “writing” a letter to her daughter. The story is somewhat about how parents and children communicate, or fail to do so. Roberts is acknowledging that a lot of parents believe that material gifts can take the place of emotional support, and that displays itself in the form of the mother.
The narrator of the story is the mother. The mother is in the daughter’s room and she is having an inner dialogue. Roberts has chosen to give the story a first-person narrator so that the reader experiences the emotions that the mother has. The first person view also makes the mother more trustworthy, which affects our view of the story. The narrator is limited to her own point of view. But she does comment on the daughter’s behavior and what she has said.
The mother is probably about 40 years old so she wouldn’t understand how the daughter feels and why she has done the things that she has done. Even though the mother tries to be like a friend to the daughter by buying her shoes and giving her all the things her own mother didn’t give her. But then again the mother ignores the emotional needs of the daughter. She gives the daughter whatever she believes that she wants and whatever the mother would have

wanted herself when she was her age.
She thinks she knows her daughter's tastes, even to the point of buying her shoes in her absence and yet the girl has left the shoes behind. In a similar way, she removes the curtains from her daughter's room, throwing them away to ensure that she cannot put them back. The mother says the new curtains are "really modern" and "exactly what I'd have wanted as a girl"
The mother talks a lot about what she feels, and why she thinks the daughter will come back. She believes that the shoes that got left behind are a symbol of the daughter’s return. “she’ll be back soon, I’m sure of it, why, she hasn’t even taken her new shoes”. The mother is full of self-pity, insisting that the daughter should blame her.

The mother talks about what the daughter could have done differently and why she feels like the daughter is the one to blame. She continues to tell the daughter that her friends were the ones to who influenced her. “It was that mob you got in with at school. That Vanessa for instance.” This tells us that the mother is quite unreliable as a narrator given that she concludes a lot of things, even though she doesn’t understand the daughter’s perspective. The daughter surely has an opinion on the whole story, but the first person narrator doesn’t focus on the daughter’s opinion, but on her own version of the truth.
The mother talks about her own childhood and how her own mother was.

The narrator talks as if she is angry with her own mother. She says that she preferred her fathers company. The narrator calls her mother a “A plump woman with a loud jolly laugh” she then continues describe her as “Fat, let’s be honest. Terribly vulgar, always saying the wrong thing then laughing.” Apparently, the narrator has a kind of hate to her mother and that hate becomes an insecurity when the narrator realizes that her mother loves the granddaughter more than she loves her own daughter. The narrator obviously disapproves of her own mother. She neglects her mother with a pride in learning and in a close relationship with her

father.

The relationship between the narrator and the daughter, and the relationship between the narrator and her mother shows us that Michele Roberts has taken the theme of communication between parents and children into consideration. The narrator talks about how she tries to converse with her daughter but she doesn’t know that all her efforts were in vain. The narrator talks about why the daughter doesn’t know how they feel. She even says “We don’t speak of it much. But of course we know how each other feels” This especially shows us that they really don’t talk about how they feel. The only thing they communicate about is the materialistic stuff. The shoes and the food is the main things they converse about.
The narrator’s relationship with her own mother resembles the relationship between the narrator and the daughter in a lot of ways.

The most obvious symbol in the text is in the title. Roberts uses the shoes as a symbol for several things. The first thing that the perhaps stand for could be the mothers wish to keep her daughter as a child. The mother talks about how she locked the shoes in the wardrobe. She talks about the shoes as if they were alive. “They wanted to get out, to get away, just like you did”. The mother clearly cannot let go of the daughter. She is trying to keep her as a child for as long as possible.
So what we can conclude in the end, is that the mother probably never will let go of her child. She could not see her daughter having a free life. In fact, the mother undoubtedly relates everything she says about the daughter to herself and her own worries. The story definitely has a lot of traits that confirm the theme of how parents and children communicate, or fail to do so.