What Really Happened to Little Red Riding Hood?

Critical Interpretations of a Cautionary Tale

Nov 5, 2009

From removing her clothes before the Big Bad Wolf to shooting him with an automatic, Little Red Riding Hood is a fairy tale that has been told in many different ways.

A classic fairytale famously open to a host of critical interpretations, Little Red Riding Hood did not start out as a cautionary tale. In early oral versions the heroine was neither devoured by the Big Bad Wolf nor did she rely on the hunter to save her. In the version recorded in France in the 19th century, Red Riding Hood complies to the wolf’s command to remove her clothes and to throw them in the fire one by one but goes on to outwit him proving herself a resourceful trickster.

Perrault’s literary version published in 1697 has Little Red Riding Hood gobbled up by the wolf and saved by the huntsman who cuts the wolf’s belly open. Both Perrault’s Le Petit Chaperon Rouge and the Grimms’ Rotkaeppchen were cautionary tales warning about the dangers of vanity and idleness. Versions that had Red Little Hood taste the flesh and blood of her grandmother were promptly eliminated.

Critical Interpretations of Little Red Riding Hood story

There are those who see the classic fairytale as one of many simple cautionary tales warning children against the dangers of parental disobedience, vanity and idleness. The Big Bad Wolf is viewed in the context of the fear of wolves and the hysteria about werewolves prevalent in 17th-century Germany. At the same time psychoanalytic interpretations abound and generally evolve around sexual or sexual initiation issues:

The colour red, Little Red Riding Hood’s trademark, is taken to symbolise sexuality, passion, sin, menstrual blood.
The Big Bad Wolf is the male sexual predator who preys on innocent victims. His big mouth with the sharp teeth has been interpreted as symbolising female genitals. His long snout has been seen as “phallic”. His transgender appearance has been related to a child’s view of the mother as an extension of the father. The wolf has also been associated with satanic forces.
Little Red Riding Hood’s picking flowers in the forest is said to address the question “whether to live by the pleasure principle or the reality principle”.
The cautionary tale has been read as an allegory of rape and most famously as symbolic of a girl’s initiation into sexuality and adulthood.
The huntsman represents – in contrast to the Big Bad Wolf male seducer – the protecting patriarch. In early versions Little Red Riding Hood can fend for herself as happens, for example, later in the Roald Dahl’s and James Thurber’s versions where the girl shoots the wolf dead with an automatic. The patriarchal version is thus subverted.
According to some critical interpretations, the devouring of Red Riding Hood symbolises death and rebirth and also the sun being devoured by night and remerging at dawn. Biblical and mythological connections have also been made, most notably with the story of Jupiter and Jonah. The cake and wine that Little Red Riding Hood carries to her grandmother has been interpreted as symbolic of the Holy Communion.

What Really Happened to Little Red Riding Hood?

The red-cloaked heroine has been interpreted and analysed so many times in literary criticism and psychoanalytical treatises, art and entertainment and has appeared in different guises in a plethora of books and movies. As Orenstein writes the Red Riding Hood story though apparently simple embodies “complex and fundamental human concerns... brings together archetypal opposites” and “explores... what it means to be a man or a woman”.

Articles Related to Fairytales

The Rapunzel Story, Origins and Versions: Let Your Hair Down or Who Invented the Fairy Tale?

Who Invented Fairy Tales? Storytellers and the Brothers Grimm

Sources

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Complete Fairy Tales. London: Routledge, 2002.

C. Orenstein, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Perrault’s Fairy Tales. Trans. A. E. Johnson. New York: Dover Publications Inc, 1969.

M. Tatar, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2004.

Also see Sarah Bonner, “Visualising Little Red Riding Hood” in Moveable Type, no. 2 (2006) for further reading.

The copyright of the article What Really Happened to Little Red Riding Hood? in Fairytales is owned by Lito Apostolakou. Permission to republish What Really Happened to Little Red Riding Hood? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.