Introduction
The fable of Little Red Riding Hood has resonated for centuries. Predating even the first written version by Perrault in the 17th century, the themes of rescue from savage beasts, innocence, morality and cunning that outwits brute strength can be traced back to Biblical accounts, to Russian and Norse mythology, and to pragmatic fears by French and German peasants about ravening wolves in surrounding forests. As literature inevitably does, the tale evolved to reflect changing role models and sexual mores. And far from fascinating solely impressionable young children, it is striking how the fable proved appealing even when rendered in modern poetry, art and movies for adult audiences.
Origins of the Fable
In many versions of Little Red Riding Hood, both the young girl and her grandmother are swallowed whole by the wolf. This is a throwback to the Jewish and Catholic traditions about Jonah being swallowed by the whale (King James version, Book of Jonah) and Saint Margaret of Antioch similarly devoured whole by a dragon. Both are, in fact, morality tales of redemption through piety.
The story of Jonah is set around the 8th century B.C. though it was written three centuries later. God sends Jonah on a mission to “prophesy against” Nineveh, a phrase usually meaning to “foretell the inevitable doom” of a sinful people as had happened in Sodom and Gomorrah. But Jonah is a passive man and he attempts to flee his divine mission by taking a sea trip to another destination. A wrathful God sends a storm to imperil the ship. To save themselves, the sailors pray and then cast Jonah overboard, into the maws of a whale that swallows him. For three days, Jonah is in the belly of the whale till he repents and cries to God for mercy. God then sends the whale to a beach to safely disgorge Jonah. In the end, Nineveh is also spared by a merciful Divinity. It is powerful testimony to the wonder this and the tale of Little Red provoke that children are fascinated, whether hearing them at bedtime or in Sunday school.
St. Margaret (the Virgin) lived late in the 2nd century A.D. and was persecuted by both family and the community for her Christian faith. On refusing marriage to the Roman prefect of the province, she was fed to Satan who came in the form of a dragon. But the gilded cross she carried apparently so irritated the belly of the beast that she was miraculously disgorged. This is the same saint to whom the parish church in Westminster, the Houses of Parliament in London is dedicated.
The immortal dialogue between girl and wolf that has existed in writing since the very first version by Charles Perrault – “”Grandmother, what big arms you have! All the better to hug you with, my dear. Grandmother, what big legs you have! All the better to run with, my child. Grandmother, what big ears you have! All the better to hear with, my child. Grandmother, what big eyes you have! All the better to see with, my child. Grandmother, what big teeth you have got! All the better to eat you up with” (Lang, 1889, pp. 52-53; Perrault, 1697). – is said to echo what happened in Norse mythology when the giant King Þrymr stole Thor’s hammer and demanded Freyja as ransom and bride. The gods dressed Thor in bridal finery and send him in Freyja’s stead. It took all of Loki’s cunning to keep the deception going when the other giants remarked on the bride gazing at them too boldly, eating and drinking like a man. In the end, naturally, Thor wreaked havoc on all the jotnars present at the feast (Opie & Opie, 1974).
More than a century after Perrault, Ludwig and Jacob Grimm (the Brothers Grimm) began publishing their collection of folk tales, transcribed from peasants, aristocrats who related tales their servants had recited, and French Huguenots, who had fled persecution in Catholic France and therefore became a source of French folk tales. In the Grimm version of 1812, Perrault’s “chaperon rouge” (red hooded cape) became Little Red Cap. This is introduced at the beginning of the tale as a gift from the grandmother. The girl liked it so much she wore it all the time and therefore earned the moniker “Little Red Cap”. The Grimms modified the story in a few ways. In their first version, the grandmother lives in the village, just beyond the mill itself beside a stream. At the wolf’s urging, the girl took her sweet time picking flowers in the forest. Some progress was already evident in the fact that the bobbin that had to be pulled to open the door in the French version was now a modern latch. On arriving at her grandmother’s house, the girl was surprised to see the door open and the curtains drawn. Despite her apprehension, she proceeded to her grandmother’s bedside and suffered the usual fate, after which the wolf fell into deep sleep with much snoring. A passing huntsman, also surprised to hear someone he presumed to be the grandmother snoring so loudly through the open door, went in to investigate and released the two ladies by cutting open the wolf with scissors. As he had really been hunting the wolf, he takes the pelt home as a souvenir.
Another version in the anthology depicted the little girl as having learned her lesson and refusing to obey the importuning of another wolf to dally in the forest. She runs quickly to her grandmother’s house. By the time the wolf arrives, he cannot of course convince the grandmother to let him in. He waits it out on the roof, hoping to waylay Little Red Cap on her way home. Instead, the grandmother proves more wily. She and the girl fill a trough with the broth in which sausages had been cooked. The irresistible scent wafts to the roof and sends the wolf sliding to his doom to drown in the trough.
In the same anthology, there is the related tale of The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids. A mother goat goes shopping after warning her offspring not to let anyone in, least of all wolves. Here, the Grimms repeat the device of the wily wolf gaining entry by softening his voice with chalk and whitening his paws with flour. Engorged after swallowing six of the kids, he also falls asleep. The mother goat arrives, is briefed by her youngest who had hidden and they release the other kids. They then fill the wolf’s belly with stones and he drowns on waking and trying to slake his thirst in the well.
Mirrors of Their Times
As Zipes (2000) tells it, Perrault had merely recorded an oral tradition dating back at least three centuries, to 14th century France. These were grim times for the French. The Great Famine of 1313 was followed by the Black Death that eventually cut down one-third of the European population. The Hundred Years War with England commenced in 1337 and soon enough saw Joan of Arc coming to the rescue of the French dauphin. The Great Schism weakened the papacy that had been temporarily based in Avignon and thereby undercut another pillar of French society. In such a murky period of turmoil, hopelessness, institutional failings, and helplessness, residing at the edge of forests may have been enabled ordinary folk to survive and escape civic turmoil but also exposed peasants to predatory wolves.
Other variants of the story are more gruesome and explicitly sexual, reflecting the despair of a continent just emerging in the 14th century from the Dark Ages. Thus, there are versions with werewolves and therefore that much more terrifying. Zipes (1983) claims that more of the extant versions at the time were ghastly and certainly not meant for reading to children since they involved the wolf slaughtering the grandmother and feeding a broth of blood and flesh to Little Red Riding Hood. After that unwitting cannibalism, the wolf would then have the girl undress, toss all her clothes into the fire and get into bed with the lecherous wolf. Only after he was sexually sated would he gorge himself on the girl.
By the time Perrault penned Chaperon Rouge, the Early Modern period had dawned in France and the rest of Europe. Modern science and philosophy was emerging. Europe saw the flowering of the Baroque cultural movement. In France itself, the “Sun King” Louis XIV quelled feudalism, brought the nation to Continental leadership by winning three major wars and participating in the colonization of North America. In this more enlightened era, it stands to reason that Perrault wrote as epilogue to the Little Red folk tale an admonition for young ladies to protect their virtue from wolves of the human variety:
Moral: Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf. I say “wolf,” but there are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all (Perrault, 1697).
Examining thirty-one versions of the fairy tale published between 1697 and 1979, Zipes (1983) reminds us how fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood help shape and reinforce social norms relevant to each era in history. Since society in the Dark Ages and the Renaissance was male-dominated, the evolution of the tale subverted the original oral folk tradition centered on female self-reliance, independence and resourcefulness to dependent women but disobedient and possessed of a threatening sexuality all her own. This illustrates the idea that, at the end of the day, literature merely reflects the mores and aspirations of each era that gave birth to it.
Not every offshoot of the folk tale has necessarily been about the battle of the sexes, of course. In the Russia of 1936, a totalitarian government barely 19 years in power wished the new generation to be inculcated with the virtues of the Young Pioneers, the youth group expected to volunteer for infrastructure and agricultural collectives when school was out. When the Central Children’s Theater in Moscow commissioned Sergei Prokofiev to compose a new musical symphony ostensibly to develop musical tastes in children in the primary grades, the result was Peter and the Wolf. Young Peter raises farm animals with his grandfather in a forest glade. Despite warnings to keep the gates securely closed against wolves, the duck is still in the pond when a wolf does come out of the forest and swallows the fowl whole. Proving his claim to the grandfather that “Young Pioneers are not afraid,” Peter uses guile and the distraction of a circling bird to trap the wolf. So, the battle of wits between beast and man is played out again. The operetta ends with the requisite victory parade reminiscent of May Day in front of the Kremlin.
As the centuries went by, Slatter (2008) reprises in an amusing way Zipes’ contention about the transition of Little Red from a long-ago tribal tale of a girl outsmarting a wolf all on her own to become less intelligent and more compliant to men with every new re-telling from the Middle Ages. This persisted until the advent of equal rights for women in the last century.
The Feminist Perspective
In contemporary times, the most dispassionate treatment of perpetuation of sexist role models in Little Red may well be a qualitative critical analysis of Traditional, Modern, and Postmodern treatments that Chalou (2002) embarked on. Alterations in Postmodern retellings, she affirms, are more accepting of the political implications of Little Red portrayed on the cusp of womanhood.
As an offshoot of the feminist lobby against pornography being not only demeaning but also liable to “compel” men to act out their fantasies, Dworkin (1976) represents a more vigorous protest against the gender stereotypes that fairy tales imprint at an early age:
The lessons are simple and we learn them well. Men and Women are different, absolute opposites … Where he is active, she is passive … There are two definitions of woman. She is the victim. There is the bad woman. She must be destroyed. The good woman must be possessed. The bad woman must be killed or punished or nullified (pp. 79-80).
In fact, Dworkin’s seems an unnecessarily abrasive and extreme polemic of sexual politics, using among others Little Red Riding Hood to prove her thesis that all oppressive acts in history – the exploitation of the industrial age labor force, imperialism, political dominance, exhausting the earth’s resources – spring from women acceding to “phallic dominance”. Dworkin is an example of using the modern interpretation of the fable to advance feminist ideology. A tiny morsel of truth drowned in such gigantic rant that the author managed to turn off even the progressive-minded leaders of the feminist movement in the 1970s like Gloria Steinem.
Turning to Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”, Stumpf (2008) shows how the former had already made a significant advance in highlighting women’s awareness of their own sexuality and how the tale more “properly” ends with the girl consenting to mutual passion with the man-wolf before going her own way. Carter therefore effectively undermined gender stereotypes with depictions of women who could express sexual desire separately from love and marriage; be just as sexual as men, even when it came to expressing desire in carnal and violent terms; and extract both pleasure and profit from employing their sexuality (Katsavos, 1997). Such an assertive retelling as Carter’s could at least help women acknowledge the full force and reality of their own sexuality
Other critics fault Carter for using fairy tales at all. Consequently, Duncker and Bacchilega (as cited in Stumpf, 2008) propose more radical feminist and postmodern re-writing of the four versions of Little Red Riding Hood Carter included to eliminate the patriarchal bias and theme of female submission. Still, it must be conceded that, in giving new voice to other characters in the fable, the Carter rewriting had weakened the patriarchal paradigm somewhat and opened up new possibilities for gender and erotic identity.
Employing the feminist framework, Turner-Bowker (1996) reviewed multiple works spanning 1984 to 1994 to test the hypothesis of gender stereotyping in children’s literature. While male characters merited more depictions as potent, active, and masculine, the descriptors for female characters were “more positively evaluated than those used for males” (p. 485). In effect, the author is among the feminists contending that the re-telling of the fable has not gone far enough.
Permeating the Written Form and Visual Media as Well
A good example of fable turned to poetry is Carol Ann Duffy’s Little Red-Cap (in Brinton, 2009). Here we are struck by the portrait of empowered, vengeful women who break gender stereotypes by parodying the traditionally masculine qualities of assertiveness, violence and aggression. In Duffy’s version, the tale ends with the heroine eviscerating the wolf-man with whom she has lain only to find her grandmother’s bones inside. Thus, the poetess demonstrates just how far the reversal of gender stereotypes can be taken.
As to visual media, one only has to examine three examples to engage with the persistent debate about entertainment versus ideology. The long string of commercial successes built by Disney Films make them perhaps the most compelling channel for communicating fairy tales to modern generations all over the world. Fox (1999) wishes the production company had done more to diminish the patriarchal approach and a bias towards women as principally nurturing, hypersexualized and silent heroines. Mulan is a good example, however, of new myths in later Disney productions that portray heroines as independent and strong.
Between 1960 and 2010, no fewer than 22 live-action films were produced based on the fairy tale. In the Freeway adaptation of 1996, Kiefer Sutherland and Reese Witherspoon essay roles as, respectively, a psychotic serial killer and a sexually abused teenage girl. Witherspoon is frequently seen wearing a red leather jacket to modernize the red cape of old. However, this twisted tale of pedophilia can hardly advance the feminist cause (Slatter, 2008).
Finally we come to a 1998 TV ad for Chanel No.5 that portrays Estella Warren in red gown and red satin cape leaving behind a submissive wolf for a night on the town in Paris (Bonner, n.d.). Four centuries after Perrault, the French themselves can be relied on to depict Little Red Riding Hood in the full bloom of sexual awareness and self-interest.
Conclusion
Where Beauty and the Beast focused singularly on redemption by an act of love between man and woman, Little Red Riding Hood evolved through the ages. The original folk tradition emphasized the peril of humans in forested Europe and the ability of a young girl to defeat superior strength with cunning. But the male-dominated culture of the Dark Ages, the Renaissance and the Early Modern era preferred to portray women as passive and dependent.
As counterpoint to Perrault’s original evocation about the perils innocent young women risked at the hands of human wolves, some later retellings recognized that females could be willful, disobedient and perfectly capable of deploying their sexuality to get what they wanted. As well, the red garment that first appeared in Perrault’s version came to be invested with meanings such as the lurid clothes of streetwalkers, the sleaze of “red light districts”, and the awful mystery of girl entering womanhood with her first menarche.
In contemporary times, the continuing appeal of Little Red has followed two streams. One is the feminist re-working. The second manifests in a continuing stream of art, poetry, and movie adaptations that confirm just how strongly the themes of vulnerable heroine, family ties, community-held morals, maturing, going adventuring into a hostile world, and the eternal clash between the sexes has been imprinted in generation after generation.
References
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