Little Red Riding Hood

For one of my upcoming MA seminars we are looking at the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, and also Wolf by Gillian Cross. I’ve been doing some background reading and found the Perrault’s version of RRH, which is in The Virago Book of Fairy Tales edited by Angela Carter. I wasn’t totally surprised to find that in this version LRRH cops it in the end. I was a bit more surprised that she is asked to take her clothes off and lie down next to grandma – didn’t remember that bit. Guess it makes it a bit more obvious what the wolf might represent.

I looked round the house and found two other versions in books of fairy tales for children. In both LRRH and grandma are eaten by the wolf but rescued by the woodcutter. Stranger danger is heavily pushed as the moral. “‘I hope this teaches you never to talk to strangers again,’ said Granny to Little Red Riding Hood. Little Red Riding Hood promised that she wouldn’t, and she never did, however charming and helpful they seemed to be.” Rather a boring (and not very polite) future for her then.

I asked my children to tell me the story to see what they remembered. Rory (7) said he knew two versions. In his first version grandma gets locked in a cupboard by the wolf and just jumps out unharmed at the end. His other version was the one where granny and RRH escape from the wolf’s stomach in one piece when the woodcutter cuts the wolf’s head off.

I told Rory that RRH just gets eaten in the original version and he was interested, but not at all bothered. I then read him the Roald Dahl revolting rhyme version (“suddenly one eyelid flickers, she whips a pistol from her knickers”). He liked this and took the Roald Dahl omnibus away and read himself some other extracts from The Witches, so a tick to RD for getting boys reading.

I then asked Frances (5). She has a language disorder so needed a bit more help and prompting but she definitely knew the story. The basket of goodies featured heavily in her version. She told me that when the wolf went to Grandma’s he ate her up “in one gulp!” (said with great glee). When LRRH went to the house she was also eaten up in one gulp. “Was that the end?” I asked “Yes, that’s the end” (said very definitely).

So from my very small sample I don’t think all re-written fairy tales to protect children’s sensitive feelings are really necessary. Of course it’s possible I am raising a couple of little sociopaths but I like to think not.

For Frannie, but not Rory, the other main point of the story was the conversation with the wolf (“Granny, what big eyes you have” “All the better to see you with my dear”, etc). We had to act this out several times (“now you be the wolf, Now I’ll be the wolf”). I know she was playing this with my mother when we were last staying during the summer holidays. It seems to me this must be partly the reason for the aural version of the story continuing to be handed down, in particular from grandmother to grandchild, just because it is fun.

Angela Carter mentions a similar experience with her own grandmother in her notes to the Perrault version in The Virago Book of Fairy Tales. It seems a natural climax to the tale.