A Peculiar Passion

CHINESE FOOTBINDING by Howard S. Levy. 352 pages. Rawls. $10.

A forest maiden of Indian legend had tiny faun feet that left footprints in the form of lotus blossoms. A 10th century emperor of China, delighted by the tale, commanded one of his concubines to bind her feet in a faunlike configuration and dance among the petals of a giant golden lotus. The emperor's concubine, if Chinese tradition is correct, was the Judas deer who led millions of Chinese women down a thousand-year trail of torture. The cruel custom of footbinding spread rapidly from court to commons, and continued unabated until Sun Yat-sen's revolution of 1911. After that, it disappeared so rapidly that no Western sociologist investigated a practice that exemplified a sadomasochistic cast of character and civilization and illustrated more drastically than the Ubangi lip what monstrous things a woman will do to make herself attractive.

The Advantages. All available facts about footbinding are presented by Howard Levy, an eminent U.S. sinologue, in the first history of the subject printed in the West. The bound foot, says Levy, was both a means of hobbling women and an emblem of conspicuous leisure. Only a man of means, the Chinese thought, could afford a wife so badly crippled that she could hardly walk. Yet the principal appeal of the practice may come as a shock to Westerners. Levy states flatly that footbinding survived, despite its anatomical and emotional horrors, because the Chinese for more than a thousand years were a nation of foot fetishists who adored the pedicule with a peculiar passion.

Binding usually began when a girl was five years old. Her feet, softened in a broth of monkey bones, were compressed in a bandage two inches wide and ten feet long. The four lesser toes were folded back under the sole, and the front of the foot was drawn back toward the heel until the instep collapsed upward into a grotesque ball of bone. The process sometimes required four years to complete, and during all that time the foot suppurated and the girl lived in punishing pain. Sometimes a child died of gangrene or blood poisoning. At last, the foot was reduced to what foot fanciers called a "golden lotus"--a pale grub of flesh about four inches long, less than an inch wide, and arched "like a lady's eyebrow."

The lotus' size made balance precarious, and its tenderness made walking painful. The withering of the foot caused a withering of the calf and sometimes dangerously distorted the curve of the spine and the position of vital organs. The Chinese believed, however, that by shifting muscular strain from the lower leg to the hip region, the process considerably increased the size of a woman's thighs and buttocks and permanently strengthened the pelvic muscles, alterations much appreciated by Chinese men.

And the Shoe. The object of supreme adoration was the bound foot itself. It was caressed with an intensity and ingenuity that often make this volume read like a Chinese Kinsey report. The cult of the lotus inspired a corollary cult of the shoe. Many a young man slept with a slipper that belonged to his beloved--indeed, an elderly Chinese ambassador to Moscow made no secret of the fact that he carried a trunk of tiny shoes and, as Levy puts it, "privately amused himself with them."

To separate the Chinese from such dubious delights, Sun Yat-sen and his followers included abolition of footbinding in a portmanteau program of feminine emancipation. Even then, millions of women obdurately refused to unbind--and not only because letting the feet out was almost as painful as binding them up. They simply feared that if they lost the lotus they would lose their man. As it turned out, most men were secretly pleased to have a wife who could also stand up and do housework.

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