The Arresting Development of Little Red

Riding Hood
Joanne Waugh

Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale by
Catherine Orenstein. Basic Books, 2002. $25. ISBN 0–465–04125–6

‘I’ve been reading a book about a little girl who went to visit her grand-
mother and it’s a very good story.’
‘Little Red Riding Hood?’ suggested Polly.
‘That’s it!’ cried the wolf. ‘I read it out loud to myself as a bed-time
story. I did enjoy it. The wolf eats up the grandmother, and Little Red
Riding Hood. It’s almost the only story where a wolf really gets anything
to eat,’ he added sadly.
‘But in my book he doesn’t get Red Riding Hood,’ said Polly. ‘Her
father comes in just in time to save her.’
‘Oh, he doesn’t in my book!’ said the wolf. ‘I expect mine is the true
story, and yours is just invented . . .’1
CATHERINE STORR’S STORIES ABOUT a twentieth-century wolf’s pursuit of
a small girl are not included in Catherine Orenstein’s wide-ranging survey of
the Red Riding Hood tale, but the wolf’s retort above – ‘I expect mine is
the true story and yours is just invented’ – is a comic reminder of the differ-
ing versions of the tale which prove so fertile for scholars such as Orenstein.
Clearly, Polly has been given a version of the tale whose lineage can be
traced to the Grimms, where the paternal figure of woodcutter or hunter
saves Red Riding Hood and her grandmother from death in the wolf’s
stomach. In some instances, this impromptu caesarian section is also sup-
pressed, so that in a recent Ladybird edition, the wolf has simply hidden
granny in the wardrobe: Red Riding Hood deduces the situation and calls
for her father, and the wolf runs off, frightened but unmaimed. Storr’s wolf,
meanwhile, refers to the ending whose origins are to be found in Perrault’s
story Le Petit Chaperon rouge, which ends with the wolf eating up Red Riding
Hood, and no hope of redemption in sight: Andrew Lang’s 1889 transla-
tion of this Histoire ou conte du temps passé in The Blue Fairy Book ensured that
Perrault’s ending and his moral remained in currency well into the twentieth

1
Catherine Storr, ‘Little Polly Riding Hood’, in Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf
(London 1955) pp. 16–17.

© The Editors, The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 1 2004. All rights reserved
60 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

century and beyond. The Grimms wrote with a youthful audience specifi-
cally in mind, whereas Perrault’s tales were designed for circulation in and
around court. Lest it be thought, however, that the Grimms’ ending consti-
tutes a kind of Bowdlerisation ( just) avant la lettre, it should be noted than in
versions pre-dating Perrault’s, Red Riding Hood escapes the wolf by pre-
tending she needs to leave the bedroom to urinate outside, and then slips
off the rope by which she is bound. Perrault removed Red Riding Hood’s
salvation and her vulgarity at one swoop; having no truck with the symbolism
of the earlier versions, he gives us instead a suave and successful wolf –
clearly the ideal to which Storr’s wolf fruitlessly aspires. Much hinges, how-
ever, on differences between the tales, and not only for Polly and her wolf:
to what degree can any version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ be called ‘the real
story’, what is ‘only invented’, and why has it been invented?
It is with such changes that Catherine Orenstein engages in Little Red Riding
Hood Uncloaked, a text by turns analytical and personal, incisive and intui-
tive. Orenstein’s aim is to connect these changes with ‘society’s “vested”
interest in Little Red Riding Hood – in the messages she wears, and those
she covers up’ (pp. 13–14). Thus the changes made to the tale are largely
considered in so far as they relate to each wider society in which it has been
told. Orenstein embarks on ‘an exploration of how [Red Riding Hood’s]
tale speaks to enduring themes about men and women, of gender roles and
how they change’ (p. 14). Whereas Bruno Bettelheim analysed the effects of
fairy tales on children, Orenstein is concerned rather with adults – ‘men
and women’ – and the ways in which the tale’s manifestations and changes
mirror, rather than affect, society. She finds ample scope in this thesis, and
comments with acuity on twentieth and twenty-first century advertisement,
film, drama, and poetry. But where the text touches upon writing for children,
it becomes less effective and more cursory. Thus in chapter 7, ‘The Company
of Wolves’, Orenstein moves from ‘feminist or pseudo-feminist updates of
“Little Red Riding Hood”’ (p. 162), to Roald Dahl’s 1983 verse ‘Little Red
Riding Hood and the Wolf’, to Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods and
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, noting that Sondheim’s work is done
‘more stylishly’ than Dahl’s (p. 164) without acknowledging the differences
in context, intent, and audience between Dahl’s scatalogical verse and
Sondheim’s more adult brand of irony. Parodies and pastiches of ‘Little
Red Riding Hood’ designed for a young audience, such as those of Dahl
and Storr, have abounded in the last fifty or sixty years; the significance of
this postmodern treatment of the tale would seem to merit more attention
than it receives in Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked.
Orenstein’s documentation of the evolution of this tale, however, is both
fascinating and extensive. First examined are the two versions with the
most powerful influence and prominence: those of the brothers Grimm and
 LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD 61

Charles Perrault. In each case, the reading of the fairy tale is preceded by a
fairly lengthy discussion of the society in which it was revised and retold.
Orenstein’s section on Perrault’s Le Petite Chaperon rouge, after describing the
palace of Versailles and its heady atmosphere, discusses the famous illustra-
tion which Gustave Doré created to accompany it in 1862. Her approach
to Doré’s work is individual, direct, in the present tense: ‘It’s as if we’re
peering through the keyhole into an old Parisian boudoir. The girl’s loos-
ened hair tumbles over her shoulders; she clutches the sheets to her breast.
Saucer-eyed, she stares at the enormous snout emerging from the bedcovers
a whisker away’ (p. 22). To set the scene of Versailles, Orenstein reverts to
a swift, fluent, and effective amalgamation of facts, figures, and dates, and
Perrault’s seductive wolf is securely grounded in the licentious atmosphere
of the Sun King’s court. In her chapter on the Grimms’ version of the tale,
Orenstein’s prose on the rise of ‘children’ as an incipient social group in the
nineteenth century, and the resultant growth of ‘children’s fiction’, as well
as on the Grimms’ own backgrounds and careers, is, again, deceptively
casually presented, and impressively closely researched.
However, in chapter 3, ‘The Grandmother’s Tale: To Come of Age’, the
text risks becoming both sententious and reductive. Orenstein adopts an
almost possessive approach to the version outlined above, in which the
child gets into bed with wolf-disguised-as-granny, and escapes danger by
inventing the need to go outside. ‘The discovery of this global sisterhood of
oral tales has potentially profound implications for understanding “Little
Red Riding Hood”’ (p. 70), Orenstein states, before going on to suggest
that the psychoanalytic readings of both Bettelheim and Fromm are effectively
negated by the existence of this tale, and thus serve as a salutary reminder
of ‘the danger of interpreting a tale without knowing its history; and the
importance of examining its broader folkloric patterns’ (p. 75). Orenstein’s
readiness to castigate these analyses on such a basis seems more than a little
previous. When Bettelheim, for example, notes that ‘the literary history of
this story begins with Perrault’,2 the key word must surely be ‘literary’: it is
made clear just a few pages later that the writer is aware of the oral history
of the story. Bettelheim may have been a little inconsistent in his lauding of
‘original form’ (p. 19) at the outset of his study, before dismissing certain
original templates later on, but within their explicitly set out context his
analyses remain supportable even if they do not necessarily command
instant assent. In the case of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, he takes the Grimm and
Perrault versions as two important foundations of the tale – acknowledging
that both have other, older sources – and proceeds to build his analysis

2
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London 1976;
repr. 1978) p. 167.
62 THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY

around the Grimm version, considering it to be the most widely known

amongst children.
In the treatment of ‘The Grandmother’s Tale’ and of Dahl’s verse, then,
the same problem obtains: Orenstein generally neglects to acknowledge
either the existence of a youthful readership, or that body of research which
concerns itself with this readership. In her epilogue, she does touch on
infant perceptions of the tale, and it may be this unprecedented mention of
this facet of the tale’s appeal which results in the slightly dissonant feel to
this whole section. The epilogue begins with Orenstein’s memories of a doll
she played with as a child – a doll similar to that mentioned by Marina
Warner in From the Beast to the Blonde,3 which showed wolf, Red Riding
Hood and granny – and asserts: ‘Even when I was little, this doll must have
suggested to me what I now think of as the central lesson of the fairy tale.
Somehow the little girl, wolf and grandmother were all three one and the
same’ (p. 241), before moving into brief and – again almost unprecedented
– discussion of hermaphrodites and anatomy. These two subjects – the doll
and hermaphrodites – essentially form Orenstein’s conclusion, which is
based upon the twin ideas that ‘[ l ]ike a prism that refracts light and delivers
the spectrum of the rainbow, “Little Red Riding Hood” splits and reveals
the various elements of human identity’ (p. 244), and ‘[ e ]ach of us carries
within an intuitive understanding of what it means to be wolf, Grandma,
woodsman and Little Red Riding Hood’ (p. 245): these ideas being
grounded by the analogous state of hermaphroditism, since ‘[ l ]ike the fairy
tale, our physical bodies are cultural texts that are continually revised’ (p. 244).
This compound of the anatomical and the subjective, between adult and
infant arenas, sits uneasily with the rest of the text, particularly, perhaps,
as the entire conclusion covers only four pages: it also typifies the problems
encountered in the rest of the text. Where Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked
slips, stretches credulity, becomes reductive or simplistic, this tends to be the
result of a failure to contextualise matters concerned with childish readings
and receptions of the tale: where it is emphatically and explicitly focused
within adults arenas, it is lucid, well-researched, and insightful.

3
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (1994;
repr. London 1995) p. 181.