The French folklorist Paul Delarue published a version of “Little Red Riding Hood” that was recorded in Brittany in 1885 and part of a long-standing oral storytelling tradition that may have reached back many decades and even several centuries. “The Story of Grandmother” (see here), as he called the tale, recounts a girl’s trip to her grandmother’s house and her encounter with a wolf. But the resemblance to the Little Red Riding Hood story we know today ends there. This Gallic heroine escapes falling victim to the wolf and instead joins the ranks of trickster figures. After arriving at grandmother’s house and unwittingly eating “meat” and drinking “wine” that is in fact the flesh and blood of granny, the girl removes her articles of clothing, one by one, performing a striptease before the wolf. She climbs into bed with the beast, but it soon dawns on her that she is in danger. No dimwit, she escapes by pleading with the wolf for the chance to go outdoors and relieve herself, and once released, she races back home.
Although “The Story of Grandmother” did not make it into print until nearly two centuries after Perrault wrote down his version of the story, it is presumably more faithful to oral traditions than Perrault’s “Little Red Cap.” After all, the folklorist who recorded it was not invested in producing a book that would end up in the nurseries of aristocratic families. Instead he worked hard to set down the words of his informant, who may have gotten some parts of the story wrong (as each teller does) but who managed to capture the spirit of narratives that were part of an adult storytelling tradition.
The heroine in “The Story of Grandmother” is, as Jack Zipes points out, “forthright, brave, and shrewd.”4 She is an expert at summoning courage and using her wits to escape danger. Perrault changed all that when he put her story between the covers of a book and eliminated vulgarities, coarse turns of phrase, and unmotivated plot elements. Gone are the references to bodily functions, the racy double entendres, and the gaps in narrative logic. As Delarue points out, Perrault removed elements that would have shocked and startled potential buyers of a volume that pictured a woman who appears to be a domestic servant, holding a spindle and seated before a fireside, with three well-dressed, attentive children surrounding her. Scenes of barbaric behavior (the girl eats granny’s flesh and drinks her blood) and deep impropriety (the girl asks granny about her hairy body and big nostrils) no doubt discouraged parents from reading these “tales from times past” to their children, even when they included “morals.”
Perrault worked hard to craft a tale that excised the ribald grotesqueries of the oral narrative and rescripted the events to accommodate a rational moral economy. His Little Red Riding Hood has no idea that it is “dangerous to stop and listen to wolves” (see here). She also has a frivolous streak, stopping in the woods to have a “good time” as she gathers nuts, chases butterflies, and picks flowers. And, of course, she is not as savvy as James Thurber’s “little girl,” who knows that “a wolf doesn’t look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge,” and shoots the wolf dead with an “automatic.”5 To drive home the point that the tale is on a mission to modify behavior, the story ends with the following lesson:
From this story one learns that children,
Especially young girls,
Pretty, well-bred, and genteel,
Are wrong to listen to just anyone.
And it’s not at all strange,
If a wolf ends up eating them.
Little Red Riding Hood’s failure to fight back or to resist in any way led the psychoanalytically oriented Bruno Bettelheim to declare that the girl must be “stupid or wants to be seduced.” In his view, Perrault transformed a “naïve attractive young girl, who is induced to neglect mother’s warnings and enjoy herself in what she consciously believes to be innocent ways, into nothing but a fallen woman.”6 “Fallen woman” seems something of a stretch, but Little Red Riding Hood is no longer a trickster who survives through her powers of improvisation. Instead of succumbing to a rapacious beast in the woods, Little Red Riding Hood falls victim to one of those “tame wolves” who are “the most dangerous of all.” It may be true that peasant cultures figured the wolf as a beast of prey, but folk raconteurs had probably already gleefully exploited the full range and play of the sexual innuendos in the story.
The Grimms’ “Little Red Cap” (see here) erased all traces of the raw energy found in “The Story of Grandmother” and placed the action in the service of teaching lessons to the child inside and outside the story. Like many fairy tales, the Grimms’ narrative begins by framing a prohibition, but this tale has difficulty moving out of the regulatory mode. Little Red Cap’s mother hands her daughter cakes and wine for grandmother and proceeds to instruct her in the art of good behavior with a barrage of imperatives: “[W]hen you’re out in the woods, walk properly and don’t stray from the path. Otherwise you’ll fall and break the glass, and then there’ll be nothing for Grandmother. And when you enter her room, don’t forget to say good morning, and don’t go peeping in all the corners of the room” (see here). The Grimms’ efforts to encode the story with lessons could hardly be called successful. The lecture on manners embedded in the narrative is not only alien to the spirit of fairy tales—which are so plot driven that they rarely traffic in the kind of disciplinary precision on display here—but also misfires in its lack of logic. The bottle never breaks even though Red Cap strays from the path, and the straying takes place only after the wolf has already spotted his prey.
What we discover in new versions of the tale is a form of repetition compulsion on steroids. The Brothers Grimm show us a Little Red Riding Hood who has internalized the lesson she has been taught, and at the end of her story she declares: “Never again will you stray from the path and go into the woods, when mother has forbidden it” (see here). Pick up any one of the dozens of versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” available in child-friendly picture books today, and you will find that the girl invariably states that lesson, not only for her own benefit but also for the sake of the child outside the book. Even the versions that use humor and whimsy end up giving us the same old story, as if staying on the path would somehow have saved the girl from the predator in the woods. Never mind that the lesson itself is one that we probably don’t want to transmit to children today. As Neil Gaiman writes in The Ocean at the End of the Lane: “Children … use back ways and hidden paths, adults take roads and official paths.”7 Straying from the path is actually a good thing today, yet we persist in condemning it in a story that nearly everyone hears—in one version or another—as a child.
The multiforms of “Little Red Riding Hood” are not all cautionary. But the ones we tell to children all point to a moral, resisting the notion that the tale might engage with a range of cultural binaries: the predator–prey relationship, the nature–culture divide, or the fraught tension between innocence and seduction. And the cautionary version of “Little Red Riding Hood” inevitably gives us a tableau of violence intended to drive home a lesson about the consequences of disobedience and transgression. Worse yet, the girl is faulted for her love of beauty. Bettelheim famously condemned the Grimms’ Little Red Cap as beset by the “pleasure-seeking id,” a girl seduced by the beauty of the flowers that line the path she takes to granny’s home.8
The folly of trying to derive a clear moral message from “Little Red Riding Hood” in any of its versions becomes evident from Eric Berne’s rendition of a Martian’s reaction to the tale:
What kind of a mother sends a little girl into the forest where there are wolves? Why didn’t her mother do it herself, or go along with LRRH? If grandmother was so helpless, why did mother leave her all by herself in a hut far away? But if LRRH had to go, how come her mother had never warned her not to stop and talk to wolves? The story makes it clear that LRRH had never been told that this was dangerous. No mother could really be that stupid, so it sounds as if her mother didn’t care much what happened to LRRH, or maybe even wanted to get rid of her. No little girl is tha
t stupid either. How could LRRH look at the wolf’s eyes, ears, hands, and teeth and still think it was grandmother? Why didn’t she get out of there as fast as she could?9
By analyzing the rhetoric of the story and showing how it subverts the very terms it establishes, Berne performs a kind of protodeconstructive analysis that challenges the notion of a straightforward moral message in “Little Red Riding Hood.” For Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, the story itself never stood in the way of a message. Both their tales make the heroine responsible for the violence inflicted on her. By speaking to strangers (as Perrault has it) and by disobeying her mother and straying from the path (as the Grimms tell it), the girl in red courts her own downfall.
For every act of violence that befalls heroes and heroines of fairy tales it is easy enough to establish a cause by pointing to behavioral flaws. The aggression of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” for example, has been read as a consequence of the children’s gluttony and greed. A chain of events that might once have created burlesque, surreal effects can easily be restructured to produce a morally edifying tale. The shift from violence in the service of slapstick to violence in the service of a disciplinary regime may have added a moral backbone to fairy tales, but it rarely curbed their uninhibited displays of violence. Nineteenth-century rescriptings of “Little Red Riding Hood” are, in fact, among the most frightening, in large part because they tap into discursive practices that rely on a pedagogy of fear to regulate behavior. A verse melodrama that appeared in 1862, for example, made Little Red Riding Hood responsible for her own death and for her grandmother’s demise:
If Little Red Riding Hood had only thought
Of these little matters as much as she ought,
In the trap of the Wolf she would ne’er have been caught,
Nor her Grandmother killed in so cruel a sort.10
Or, as Red Riding Hood’s father put it in another nineteenth-century version of the tale:
A little maid,
Must be afraid,
To do other than her mother told her.11
The story of Little Red Riding Hood seems to have lost more than it gained as it made the transition from adult oral entertainment to literary fare for children. Once a folktale full of earthy humor and high melodrama, it was transformed into a heavy-handed narrative with an adult agenda. In the process, the surreal violence of the original was converted into a frightening punishment for a relatively minor infraction. A few writers balked at the new twist given to the story and resisted blaming the girl, and, in some cases, even refused to demonize the wolf. James Thurber turned Little Red Riding Hood into a clever, resourceful heroine (“It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be”) in his “The Little Girl and the Wolf.”12 Angela Carter ends her story “The Company of Wolves” by turning the bedroom scene into a site of reconciliation: “Sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.”13
Just as writers have felt free to tamper and tinker with “Little Red Riding Hood” (often radically revising its terms, as does Roald Dahl [p. 23]), critics have played fast and loose with the tale, displaying boundless confidence in their pronouncements about what it means. To be sure, the tale itself, by depicting a conflict between a weak, vulnerable protagonist and a large, powerful antagonist, lends itself to a certain interpretive elasticity. The girl can stand in for any innocent victim while the wolf can be any kind of predatory villain. Nazi ideologues read the story as a parable about rapacious Jews preying on innocent German purebloods; feminists read the tale as an allegory about rape; and psychoanalysts saw in it a fable about female maturation, pitting women against men who try to “play the role of a pregnant woman, having living things in [their] belly.”14
Recent efforts to map the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” and trace its transmission reveal the importance of taking into account a story that folklorists have made the mistake of putting in a separate category. This is the tale type known as “The Wolf and the Seven Kids” (ATU 123), and it is a story about an ogre, monster, or beast that tries to break into a home, often inhabited by multiple siblings. Because its cast of characters is all animal, folklorists segregated it in the category of tales featuring animal protagonists. In “The Glutton” (ATU 333), the umbrella term for “Little Red Riding Hood” stories, a single child enters a house taken over by a rapacious demon. Both “The Wolf and the Seven Kids” and “The Glutton” pit a predatory creature against vulnerable children separated temporarily from maternal protection. Can the children display courage and use their wits to survive? Or will they fall victim to the monster? Some are masterful strategists, luring villains into a tree or up onto a rooftop, then tempting them to dive back down to satisfy gluttonous ways. Others feel helpless, cower in corners, and perish.
Anthropologist Jamshid J. Tehrani has traced the evolution of the two tale types, showing how they mix and mingle, bifurcate and branch out.15 But his phylogenetic tracking of the tale—which proposes that Asian versions blend ATU 123 with ATU 333 and that African tales are distinctly in the mode of ATU 123—fails to recognize that a sample of fifty-eight tales is insufficient to draw generalizations about global cultural differences. And his analysis captures only versions that were written down, not the multitude of tales that never made it into print. Stories about home invasion are primal and perennial. They are told in every time and place, and there is hardly anything unique about the dramatis personae and plot moves.
In a sense “The Wolf and the Seven Kids” and “The Glutton” give us foundational narratives, plots that provide an instruction manual for survival at a time when life turned on the hunter and the hunted. What is astonishing, however, is the fact that these stories, in all their global variation, feature a child as trickster or as victim, modeling tools for survival for the very young or revealing the consequences of cowardice and fear. The story lives on as a primer about predators and prey, animals and humans, life and death, survival and suffering. But its roots in the childhood of culture and its move into the culture of childhood are symptomatic of how Little Red Riding Hood is in one sense the story of stories, the rock-solid foundation on which folkloric traditions were built as cultures evolved. We could easily speak here too of how ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, with each child moving through the various phases through which humans passed as culture emerged from nature.
This unit features two versions of “The Wolf and the Seven Kids,” one from Asia and one from Africa. Some decades ago German folklorist and sinologist Wolfram Eberhard carried out fieldwork in the Kuting section of the city of Taipei in Taiwan. He had no trouble coming up, while there, with 241 versions of a story he called “Grandaunt Tiger,” a colossal number that reminds us that we rarely have more than the tip of a very large iceberg when it comes to a folktale. Grandaunt Tiger is a hybrid creature, half-human, half-beast, and she preys first on a mother, then on her two “nieces,” devouring one but unable to outwit the other, who is as nimble and sharp-witted as the Gallic heroine in the “Story of Grandmother.” The version included here is a free translation of “The Tale of the Tiger Woman,” published in 1803 in an anthology of tales. It was recorded by Huang Chengzeng at the end of the seventeenth or beginning of the eighteenth century.
“Tsélané and the Marimo” is a South African tale recorded in 1842 by two French missionaries, who, as they stated in the preface to the account of their travels, hoped to “seek out unknown tribes, to open up communication with their chiefs, to mark out plans suitable for missionary stations, to extend the influence of Christianity and civilization.”16 They also wished to give their readers some instances of the “old wives’ stories with which mothers put their little ones to sleep, and inculcate betimes the first principles of Bechuana morality—that is submission to parental authority, and dread of the Marimos.” The story was translated into English by anthropologist James G. Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, who published it in the British Folk-Lore Journal in 1888.
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p; Everyone experiences the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Wolf and the Seven Kids” in different ways. To illustrate how the tales have unpredictable effects—they have, after all, been told in countless different ways—we can turn to any number of testimonials. Two, in particular, illustrate wide-ranging differences in reception, with memories that touch radically different points on an emotional spectrum, from comic to tragic. The writer Angela Carter recalled reading Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” as a child: “My maternal grandmother used to say, ‘Lift up the latch and walk in,’ when she told it [to] me when I was a child; and at the conclusion when the wolf jumps on Little Red Riding Hood and gobbles her up, my grandmother used to pretend to eat me, which made me squeak and gibber with excited pleasure.”17 Carter’s grandmother, by impersonating the grandmother-devouring wolf who was also impersonating grandmothers, turns the tables by turning on her granddaughter, the girl who feasts on grandmother’s flesh and blood in folk versions of the tale. Carter’s account of her experience with “Little Red Riding Hood” stages the tale as one about intergenerational rivalry and love, yet it also reveals the degree to which the meaning of a tale is generated through performance. The scene of reading or acting out a story can affect its reception far more powerfully than the morals and timeless truths inserted into versions of the tale recorded by Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and others.
Consider Luciano Pavarotti’s childhood experience with “Little Red Riding Hood” and how markedly it differs from Carter’s. The renowned baritone heard the stories from his grandfather, who told “violent, mysterious tales” that “enchanted” his listeners. “My favorite one,” Pavarotti declared, “was Little Red Riding Hood. I identified with Little Red Riding Hood. I had the same fears as she. I didn’t want her to die. I dreaded her death—or what we think death is. I waited anxiously for the hunter to come.”18 Little Red Riding Hood’s encounter with the wolf and her brush with death is no longer burlesque, playful, or erotically charged. Instead, it has become the site of violence, anxiety, melodrama, and mystery. The feeling of dread, coupled with a sense of enchantment, captures the fascination with matters from which children are usually shielded. Pavarotti, like Dickens, is enamored of Little Red Riding Hood, but his infatuation is driven by her ability to survive death, to emerge whole from the belly of the wolf. For centuries now, we have fallen for the girl in red, even if and perhaps precisely because she is constantly shape-shifting, reflecting our own cultural and personal anxieties and reminding us of who we are and how we came to be that way.
The Classic Fairy Tales (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions) Page 4