A
Brief History of Little Red Riding Hood
John
Thompson
Little Red Riding
Hood is but one of many examples of a story living into perpetuity. What
began in the oral tradition of fireside tales has now, in the twenty-first
century, become video game fodder. What was once a tale told for adult
entertainment is now a children’s tale used to empower young girls and warn
against stranger danger. A story’s staying power is dependent in no small part
to its adaptability, and the examples found in the following sections support
the adaptability of Little Red Riding
Hood.
The adaptations of Little
Red Riding Hood are wide and varied to say the least, wider and more varied
than can be adequately covered here. This paper will examine the roots of the
tale in the oral tradition, examine some of its better-known early adaptations,
and finally introduce some of the more recent, off-beat adaptations.
Little Red Riding Hood in the Oral Tradition
A minimalist cover for Little Red Riding Hood
Scholars tend to
agree that most of the versions of Little
Red Riding Hood that exist today are derived from Charles Perrault’s
seventeenth century tale. In Perrault’s version, Little Red Riding Hood is
outsmarted and eaten by a wolf disguised as her grandmother. However, scholars
also agree that Perrault adapted an oral version known simply as “The Story of
Grandmother,” various versions of which can be traced back to France, Austria,
and northern Italy (Tehrani).
Jamshid J. Tehrani writes in the article “The Phylogeny
of Little Red Riding Hood” that Little Red Riding Hood, classified in
the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folktales as ATU 333, is similar to
other tales that can be found in non-western cultures such as Japan, China,
Korea, and areas of East Asia known as “The Tiger Grandmother” aside from the
regions mentioned above (Tehrani). What
complicates matters is that, as Tehrani writes, it is not clear whether these
Asian tales should fall into the ATU 333 classification or the ATU 123
classification. ATU 123 refers to a tale titled “The Wolf and the Kids” and was
also a popular tale type in Europe and the Middle East.
In “The Wolf and the Kids,” a nanny goat warns her kids
not to go outside while she is in the field; her warning is overheard by a wolf
that tricks the kids into letting him inside where he eats them. It is
interesting to note that, while ATU 123 and ATU 333 are similar story types,
the story types differ in two distinct ways.
“First,
ATU 333 features a single victim who is a human girl, whereas ATU 123 features
multiple victims (a group of siblings) who are animals. Second, in ATU 333 the
citim is attacked in her grandmother’s house, while in ATU 123 the victims are
attacked in their own home” (Tehrani).
While Jamishid Tehrani’s work goes a great distance in
determining the oral origination of Little
Red Riding Hood, the article also demonstrates how difficult it is to pin
down exactly where a tale began. It is safe to assume, based on the portion of
Tehrani’s article cited here, that multiple cultures have similar versions of Little Red Riding Hood and that those
tales offer similar warnings to the listener/reader, namely the obedience of
children.
Perrault,
Grimm, and Carter
L to R: Charles Perrault, the
Brothers Grimm, and Angela Carter
Charles Perrault
published his version of Little Red
Riding Hood in 1697 followed by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in 1812, both of
which to end as warnings to the audience: Don’t
talk to strangers and children should
obey their parents. Bill Delaney writes that Perrault’s version of the
character, clearly a peasant girl, lives in a fantasy world brought about by
her little red riding hood, and her fantasy can be regarded as the reason why
the girl did not heed her mother’s warning about staying on the path and going
straight to her grandmother’s house (Delaney).
Another interesting aspect of both Perrault’s and the
Grimms’s versions of the story is the authors’ attempts at creating an innocent
aura around the character of Little Red Riding Hood and the story as a whole. Consider
Charles Perrault’s description of Little Red Riding Hood’s trip through the
woods after meeting the wolf: “She had a good time gather nuts, chasing
butterflies, and picking bunches of flowers that she found” (Perrault). Compare
that with the Grimms’ version in “Little Red Cap”: “Little Red Cap opened her
eyes wide and saw how the sunbeams were dancing this way and that through the
trees and how there were beautiful flowers all about. She thought to herself:
‘If you bring a fresh bouquet to Grandmother, she will be overjoyed. It’s still
so early in the morning that I am sure there will be plenty of time’” (Grimm).
Both versions of the story describe the innocence of
Little Red Riding Hood, or Little Red Cap, and both stories show how that innocence
led to trouble later in the texts. A more recent adaptation of the story
demonstrates how, even without the innocence that Perrault and the Grimms’
versions, trouble can still lurk.
Angela Carter’s “The Werewolf” leaves behind the
innocence of earlier versions and takes readers into a cold, dark, and brooding
world. Carter’s version contains many of the same elements as earlier versions
of Little Red Riding Hood but also
incorporate various plot twists that set the story apart as its own tale.
Carter’s character meets a werewolf in the woods, and the girl ultimately cuts
the werewolf’s paw off which turns into a human hand. The reader discovers that
the werewolf was actually the girl’s grandmother, and the grandmother dies
after she is attached by neighbors. The story ends with the line: “Now the
child lived in her grandmother’s house; she prospered” (Carter).
While the versions of Perrault’s and the Grimms’ tales
can be interpreted as cautionary, Carter’s tale is written in a more feminist
vein. With no central male figure in the story, such as the hunter, Carter
forces her character to fend for herself in the woods against the werewolf,
and, by giving the girl her father’s hunting knife, and assuming that she knows
how to use it, Carter empowers the young girl to take care of herself even if
she is aided by villagers at the end of the story. It is as if Carter is
saying, “The tools may belong to men, but they wielded by the girl.”
Zombie
BBQ and a Scooter
Left: Cover art for Peter Stein’s
children’s book Little Red’s Riding Hood.
Right: Cover art for Little Red Riding
Hood’s Zombie BBQ.
Little Red Riding Hood has found her way into several
movie and television adaptations in recent years including the 2011 film, Little Red Riding Hood, staring Amanda
Seyfried and Gary Oldman and other feature films and made-for-T.V. movies going
back to the 1960s and television series including the pilot episode of Grimm, which aired on NBC from October
2011 to March 2017, but, despite the mainstream attention that the story has
garnered, more off-beat adaptations do exist.
The first of these adaptations is a children’s book
written by Peter Stein and illustrated by Chris Gall titled, Little Red’s Riding Hood. In a review of
the book, written for Publisher’s Weekly,
the book is said to contain a “boyish red scooter” named Red as the main
character. A monster truck named Tank serves as the wolf, and granny (named
Granny Putt Putt) is played by a pink golf cart (Publisher’s Weekly).
Based on the review, the story does not divert from the
course of the original tale in very many ways other than the absence of
violence found in the original versions, but the story is told through
automotive turns of phrase, wordplay, and spoofs. The only frightening element
of the story is Tank the wolf/monster truck, and even he is tame when compared
to the wolf of earlier versions.
Another, albeit bizarre, adaptation is EnjoyUp and
Destineer Studios’ Little Red Riding
Hood’s Zombie BBQ. The game was released on Halloween, 2008 for the
Nintendo DS platform and pits Little Red Riding Hood against, oddly enough,
zombies. Cari Keebaugh finds the game as an interesting study in fairy tale
recovery because, as she writes, the game serves a dual purpose: first, it
criticizes fairy-tale characters for what they have become, and, second, the
game gives a rare view of the violent and explicit content found in earlier
versions (Keebaugh).
Conclusion
Even though some adaptations vary widely from the
original versions of the stories, Little
Red Riding Hood has proven to be one of those tales and characters that can
stand the test of time. Despite the lessening violence, changes in gender,
changes of character type, and changes in format, Little Red Riding Hood has maintained its relevance over the
centuries, and relevance is key to longevity.
Works Cited
Carter, Angela. “The
Werewolf.” The Bloody Chamber. New
York: Penguin Books,
1979.
Print.
Delany, Bill. “Perrault’s
Little Red Riding Hood.” Explicator 64.2 (2006): 70-72. Print.
Grimm, Jacob, Grimm,
Wilhelm. “Little Red Cap.” The Classic
Fairy Tales, Norton second
Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2017. Print.
Keebaugh, Cari. “The
Better to Eat You{r Brains} with, My Dear”: Sex, Violence, and Little
Red Riding Hood’s Zombie BBQ
as Fairy Tale Recovery Project. Journal
of Popular
Culture
46.3 (2006): 589-603. Print.
“Little Red’s Riding
‘Hood.” Publishers Weekly. 261.50
(2014): 53-53.Print
Perrault, Charles.
“Little Red Ridding Hood.” The Classic
Fairy Tales, Norton second
Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2017. Print.
Tehrani, Jamshid J. “The
Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood.”
PLoS ONE. 8.11 (2013): 1-11
Print.
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