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The cannibalistic, scatological stripper is not exactly Disney material, but she's believed to be the original incarnation of Little Red Riding Hood before she would undergo hundreds of revisions to become the G-rated heroine of our collective memory. Catherine Orenstein's revelatory new book, "Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked," traces the tale's makeovers and what they reveal about each culture that produced them.
Like a director's juicy cut of a film, "Uncloaked" enriches the common version of the tale with its backstory. When "Little Red Riding Hood" was first published, by Charles Perrault in 1697, it was intended as a warning to the loose ladies of Louis XIV's court. Our heroine donned red to signify harlots. The wolf's big arms were "the better to hug" her with. The Brothers Grimm revised the tale in 1812, trading in sex for violence, in order to scare kids into staying on the right path. Instead of big arms, the wolf now had big hands, "the better to grab" her with. The Grimms upheld the patriarchal standard of the day, sending in a man to rescue Red. As a final savage touch (these are the people who cut off Cinderella's stepsister's heel to fit the slipper), Red fills the wolf's belly with rocks and lets him die. Even after Tex Avery's 1943 cartoon made the wolf gaga before the buxom Red and Olga Broumas's 1977 lesbian retelling excised the wolf, the tale would never fully recover from its sinister origins. "Of course it's a fairy tale," Orenstein tells NEWSWEEK. "But there's tremendous power in these simple stories."
This book offers the chance to revisit that power, including historical context and insight into odd details of the story. Didn't you always wonder how Red could be such a dingbat as not to recognize the wolf in bed? Some versions refer to the wolf as a "gaffer"-thought to be a contraction of "grandfather"-which suggests incest. As for the wolf's origins, Orenstein digs up evidence of a plague of wolf attacks in 16th-century Europe, including several instances when men were put on trial for supposedly transforming themselves into the mauling wolves. The real danger in a book like this is that the author will take the well-trod "women's studies" path, and Orenstein briefly does. She trips up with hackneyed ideas of how fairy tales and porn both depict the passive heroine as a sexual delicacy for men. "Somebody said I made too much of a fairy tale," says Orenstein. Well, maybe just a bit, but she also made an intriguing book.
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc. |
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Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Werewolf? How the little girl in the red hood became an enduring myth By Susannah Meadows (NEWSWEEK)
In the 16th century, French peasants told a tale that went something like this: Girl meets werewolf on her way to granny's house. Wolf beats her there and kills granny, shelving her flesh in the pantry and her blood in a bottle. Upon arrival, girl snacks on granny, then strips naked and slides into bed with wolf. As the wolf's about to eat her, girl says she has to go to the bathroom. Wolf lets her outside. He asks, "Are you merding a load?" but girl's already gotten away. |
