Little Red Riding Hood

For a long time fairytales have been based on, and reinforced, by binary oppositions: male/female, nature/culture, passive/active, etc. They encouraged us, as little girls, to be small, beautiful, innocent and good, and so be well loved and cherished by our daddies, and one day rescued from danger by a dashing young (white) prince.

In the Grimms version of Little Red Riding Hood, the strong, male figure of the woodcutter saves the innocent little girl by killing the big bad wolf and thus removing the threat of the dark, feral sexuality that is found in the forest (of course, and what kind of forest might that be exactly?). The woodcutter cuts the grandmother out of the wolf’s belly and reinstates her safely into the large lacy bed of female passivity.

Helene Cixous argues that the figure of the grandmother regulates female sexuality according to patriarchal ideas of women. “Grandmothers are always wicked: she is the bad mother who always shuts the daughter in whenever the daughter might by chance want to live or take pleasure… [She] is there as jealousy… the jealousy of the woman who can’t let her daughter go.” (Cixous, p. 43-4)

But contemporary adaptations of fairytales (including a recent fashion spread in Vogue) actually encourage a blurring of traditional binaries and stereotypes, revealing that the tall, dark, evil stranger is not always lurking outside in the unknown, but often lives within us and alongside us.

In Angela Carter’s reinterpretation of Little Red Riding Hood in The Company of Wolves, as we try to “keep the wolves out by living well” (Carter, p. 115), the violent, sexual and dangerous are always present within the home, and within ourselves. You can “call on Christ and his mother and all the angels in heaven to protect you but won’t do you any good.” (Carter, p. 116)

What we are dealing with is not dangers, or wolves, from the outside but an inner sexuality, violence and darkness, that sometimes we cannot repress or keep down. For “men really fear not that they will have women’s sexual appetites forced on them or that women want to smother and devour them, but that women could be indifferent to them altogether.” (Rich, p. 1770)

In traditional versions of the tale, the wolf is a large, dangerous and cunning predator, the only site of sexuality. Whereas, in Carter’s version the grandmother is killed by the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood deliberately strips off her, and the wolf’s, clothes. She initiates sex “laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat” (Carter, p. 118). She is a capable young girl with a knife in her basket “too much loved to ever feel scared” (Carter, p. 113). The wolf, no longer the only site of sexuality in the story, becomes an agent of the girl’s own independent sexuality and desire.

It seems we are beginning to accept a new kind of woman figure, one that embraces rather than decapitates or drowns the mad, feral, sexualised, mystical and witchy aspects of herself. She is in a realm that is potentially outside the traditional roles and binaries prescribed by fairytales. She no longer gives and gives in an economy of desire, continually reinforcing male desire and reflecting male sexuality. Now she is wraithlike, and she laughs and laughs, in the company of wolves.

Carter, Angela (1979) “The Company of Wolves”, The Bloody Chamber, Penguin.

Cixous, Helene (1981) “Castration or Decapitation”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7 (1), pp. 41-55

Rich, Adrienne (1983) “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, NY & London: WW Norton & Co.