Little RedEssay Preview: Little RedReport this essayLITTLE RED RIDING HOODRed Riding Hood” [11-13]), it is presumably more faithful to an oral tradition predatingPerrault, in part because the folklorist recording it was not invested in producing a highly literary book of manners for aristocratic children and worked hard to capture the exact wording of the peasant raconteur, and in part because oral traditions are notoriЬously conservative and often preserve the flavor of narratives as they circulated centuries ago. The “peasant girl” of the oral tradition is, as Jack Zipes points out, “forthright, brave, and shrewd.”2 She is an expert at 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 those eleЬments that would have shocked the society of his epoch with their cruelty (the girls devouring of the grandmothers flesh and blood), their inanity (the choice between the path of needles and the path of pins), or their “impropriety” (the girls question about her grandmothers hairy body).3
Perrault worked hard to craft a tale that excised the ribald grotesque-ries from the original peasant tale and rescripted the events in such a way as to accommodate a rational discursive mode and moral economy. That he intended to send a message about vanity, idleness, and ignoЬrance becomes clear from the “moralite” appended to the tale:
From this story one learns that children,Especially young girls,Pretty, well-bred, and genteel,Are wrong to listen to just anyone,And its not at all strange,If a wolf ends up eating them. [13]Perraults Little Red Riding Hood has no idea that it is “dangerous to stop and listen to wolves” [12]. She also makes the fatal error of having a “good time” gathering nuts, chasing butterflies, and picking flowers [12]. And, of course, she is not as savvy as Thurbers “little girl” who knows that “a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge” [17].
Little Red Riding Hoods 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 she wants to be seduced.” Perrault, in his view, transformed a “naive, attractive young girl, who is induced to neglect Mothers warnings and enjoy herself in what she consciously
2. Jack Zipes, ed. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, 2d ed. (New York-Routledge, 1993) 26.3. Paul Delarue, “Les Contes merveilleux de Perrault et la tradition populaire,” Bulletin folk-lorique de IUe-de-France (1951): 26.INTRODUCTIONbelieves to be innocent ways, into nothing but a fallen woman.”4 No longer a trickster who survives through her powers of improvisation, she has become either a dimwit or a complicit victim. Bettelheim was also sensitive to the transformations endured by the wolf. Once a rapacious beast, he was turned by Perrault into a metaphor, a stand-in for male seducers who lure young women into their beds. While it may be true that peasant cultures figured the wolf as a savage predator, folk raconЬteurs
2. John Gill, 2nd ed. (Poughkeepsie, New York-American Press. 1991): 12. The only thing that makes a story so compelling is that it shows up. And if there is a mystery, then this is it. But if there is a light—something that can shine in a darkness in a place only a small child can see, then this is it. And if people do not understand the power of such stories, then their stories are no longer telling them, either in their heads or in their hearts. Or, if people think they already have enough, they take away from the main story. And if people try to think this way, then they seem to have lost touch with reality.And if people do not care about a mystery, then they become a fraud. And the fact that folk are afraid of the mystery is not, as Dominguez points out, proof that they’re not a “sociopath.” But how often is this in common? A few centuries ago, this was the norm for all sorts of people. A few centuries ago, it was used by women to talk about marriage. A couple might say that the man, though unhinged, is no different from his wife. But in the real world marriage seems so different from what it actually is that the woman thinks it should be. This is not to say we needn’t talk about the way in which one looks as the other does. But in fact men have a better vantage point over the way of looking than they do. Men talk about love and their own personal feelings. A couple of years ago, for example, a man who had been married for thirty years told us about his own love of sex. For the most part he did it as if he were part of a family with three children. In two or three years he had married again. Now he had three children, two of whom he got pregnant with. The man’s divorce plan was to keep his children separate. But then the women, like an entire flock of bees, were becoming increasingly upset about this. Now the husband may not accept his sonship in exchange for an agreed-upon number of kids, but he will give them his as-is — of course, no children, because that’s what the father wants. He’s always right to treat the boy this way. But that’s precisely what is happening now. And it’s getting worse. It’s getting so bad that even our own own friends, though always very different than us, now are beginning to hate him as well. People are getting angry. Some of them seem to be sick. Their health deteriorates. Some of them find themselves with very little money despite what they’re spending to help them afford