Little Red

4 LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

Red Riding Hood" [11-13]), it is presumably more faithful to an oral tradition predating'Perrault, 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 notoriÐ'¬ously 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 eleÐ'¬ments that would have shocked the society of his epoch with their cruelty (the girl's devouring of the grandmother's flesh and blood), their inanity (the choice between the path of needles and the path of pins), or their "impropriety" (the girl's question about her grandmother's 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 ignoÐ'¬rance 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 it's not at all strange,

If a wolf ends up eating them. [13]

Perrault's 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 Thurber's "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 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 she wants to be seduced." Perrault, in his view, transformed a "naive, attractive young girl, who is induced to neglect Mother's 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 I'Ue-de-France (1951): 26.

5

INTRODUCTION

believes 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 raconÐ'¬teurs

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