Wall Street Journal

Quite a departure from the original tale, one might assume. Not so, argues Catherine Orenstein in her beguiling "Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked." Begun as an undergraduate thesis in Harvard, the book explores the ways in which each age adapts the fairy tale to convey its morals and -- more interestingly -- to betray its anxieties. The Grimm brothers popularized the story as an obedience lesson for 19th-century children in which the heroine is punished for her curiosity but rescued by a father-figure woodsman once she has learned her lesson. But when Charles Perrault first penned "Le Petit Chaperon Rouge" in 1697, it was a sexual morality tale for adults. Its purpose was to warn demoiselles at Versailles not to "go with the wolf" -- i.e., squander their virginity (and with it their father's opportunity to turn a profit with a favorable marriage contract). The wolf seduces Little Red into stripping and climbing into bed with him, where he eats her up.

The moral? Perrault writes: "As you're pretty, so be wise, / Wolves may lurk in every guise . . . / Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth!" Ms. Orenstein displays her own narrative gifts in her vivid re-creation of the Sun King's decadent court, where the unwed must remain chaste but adultery is so celebrated that the sleeping chambers of husbands and wives are built with hidden passages leading to the street, for private visitors.

Ms. Orenstein regards the tale's many versions as cultural artifacts, showing how "as pen meets paper, characters freeze in time and space, like the chef caught in the act of slapping the kitchen boy in Sleeping Beauty's palace." While some of her analysis overreaches -- or relies too much on French literary theory -- for the most part she cleverly excavates the meaning of specific versions of the tale while exploring its perennial themes of innocence, identity, sexuality and violence.

Of the more than 100 versions in print today, many offer an "empowering" ending for the heroine. Sometimes she does away with the wolf herself; other times she joins forces with her grandmother. But there are also versions that cast the wolf as a cross-dresser or that reach their dramatic high point with Little Red becoming a werewolf. There is even a wolf-as-victim Internet version. "Get your hands off that endangered species!" yells the woodsman.

Ms. Orenstein takes up several feminist analyses of the tale. Susan Brownmiller argues that it's a story about rape, Andrea Dworkin that, like fairy tales generally, it offers a blueprint for gender relations structured around sexual submission and punishment. But unlike "Women Who Run With Wolves" or other popular feminist-folklorist works, "Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked" is anything but dogmatic. Rather its tone is bemused as it examines how various ideologies have tried to harness the story for their own ends.

For the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, the red cap symbolizes menstruation; the bottle of wine she carries in her basket is the heroine's virginity. Bruno Bettelheim's 1976 best-seller, "The Uses of Enchantment," focuses on the red cap as a symbol of sexuality, prematurely transferred to the protagonist by her grandmother and eliciting a sexual hunger that she is too "little" to handle. "While Bettelheim mined fairy tales for their timeless and universal truths," writes Ms. Orenstein, " . . . one thing he missed is that fairy tales change."

Ms. Orenstein conveys both the stability of the tale's basic elements -- a girl, a beast, a meeting in the woods -- and their flexibility, which has allowed "Little Red Riding Hood" to survive for so long. Readers may end up asking what the story means to them. I myself had always read it as a tale of familial aggression: devouring love cloaked beneath ruffles of domesticity. As a child, I wasn't surprised one bit when grandma bared her fangs. Of course, that's about me (and my grandmother). But as Ms. Orenstein shows, fairy tales always are.

Nice Girl, Bad Wolf

By Melanie Thernstrom

The Wall Street Journal D14, LEISURE & ARTS

I FELT THAT if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood," sighed Charles Dickens, "I should have known perfect bliss." But the heroine Dickens pined for may not be the one we know today.

In a Pepsi One spot, Kim Cattrall is a strangely lupine Little Red: When she spots a handsome man, her eyes flash yellow and she gives a mental howl. Max Factor's 1953 ad promised young manhunters that their "riding hood red" lipstick would bring out the "wolves." And our modern Little Red knows what to do with the wolf once she has him. In the 1996 movie "Freeway," a retelling of the tale, a red-leather-jacketed Reese Witherspoon pins her wolfish stalker to the floor and does away with him. Roald Dahl's heroine views the beast as an opportunity to enhance her wardrobe. After putting a bullet to his brain, she gaily declares: "Hello and please do note / my lovely furry wolf-skin coat!"