3 Literary Variants on Little Red Riding Hood

cw: mention of sexual violence.

One of my first reading assignments when I started taking French was a French storybook version of Little Red Riding Hood, with the assumption that the story was familiar enough for us to muddle through the unfamiliar vocabulary. It’s simplicity and it’s sing-song climax make it memorable, it’s threat of violence offers a transgressive thrill to little children who may grow up to love horror or fear wolves. It’s usually interpreted as a stranger-danger warning to kids; in more specific and darker readings, the wolf is a sexual predator. His tempting Red off the path is a mock seduction, his visceral interest in bodily consumption represents violently untamed sexuality. The heroic woodsman who appears at the very end is perhaps a more appropriate romantic interest, and offers a male heroism where otherwise the only male character is bestial. In its basic form, the story has a conservative bent, but its simplicity and ubiquity make it easy to remix. No surprise then that in my reading over the past few months, I’ve come across variants by three different authors, each extraordinary and each unique.

            The authors of the variants come from a wide range of cultural backgrounds. Angela Carter, a grandmother of the feminist fairy tale remix, was very English, working mainly in fantasy during the second half of the twentieth century. Her most famous collection, The Bloody Chamber, is rife with ornate Gothic writing, overt sexuality, and plenty of beasts. So fascinated was Carter by wolves that the collection includes three tales that draw from Little Red, only one of which I’ll discuss here, but all of which are worth reading. Nalo Hopkinson is a celebrated Jamaican-Canadian afrofuturist and science-fiction author. Best known as a novelist, her Little Red variant comes from Skin Folk, an anthology inspired by both Caribbean and European folklore, filled with a chorus of vernacular narrative voices and shapeshifters of all kinds. Helen Oyeyemi, the youngest of the three, is a Nigerian-born English novelist now living in Prague. She works in the kind of literary fantasy that is difficult to classify; her short fiction collection What is Not Yours is Not Yours presents everything from Victor-Hugo-esque sagas of lost love to feminist updates of twentieth century school tales. Her variant is easily the strangest. Interestingly, all three authors largely omit the woodsman (perhaps because of his aforementioned conservatism, or his deux ex machina narrative purpose) to focus on the triad of grandmother, granddaughter, and wolf. All three alter different aspects of these familiar relationships to say something different about violence, about womanhood, and about monstrousness.

            I’d like to begin with Hopkinson’s variant, Riding the Red, the closest to the original story. The brief tale assumes the spoken voice of the grandmother waiting for her granddaughter’s arrival. As quickly becomes clear, the grandmother also encountered the wolf as a young girl, as did her daughter and, we can assume, her own mother. This detail makes explicit an important argument about fairy tales; that they are not specific stories about individuals but archetypal stories about experiences. The grandmother frames her encounter with the wolf as a sort of youthful dalliance which she still looks back on fondly and eagerly anticipates revisiting:

           

“Ah, but wouldn’t it be sweet to ride the red, just once more before I’m gone, just one time when I can look wolfie in the eye, and match him grin for grin, and show him that I know what he’s good for.”

            Hopkinson’s grandmother is also clear about the purpose so-called “old wives’ tales” that the grandmother tries to tell her granddaughter to prepare her for her coming experience. They are a way to pass experiential knowledge from, in this case, woman to woman. The mother discourages this transmission of knowledge: it is suggested that she had a much more harrowing encounter with the wolf, and imagines that she can protect her daughter by keeping her ignorant. Hopkinson positions fairy tales as a valid and vital tool for the transmission of knowledge. Despite an inclination by some to dismiss fairy tales as childish (and, as the term old wives’ tales suggest, deeply gendered, some kind of feminine trifle), Hopkinson argues for their importance and their symbolic truth.

            “Riding the Red” could have easily (and validly) been a story of cycles of violence and abuse. Instead, Hopkinson presents the grandmother as a woman of agency and sexual appetite who she actively plays her role and enjoys the results, objecting to the idea that “wolfie” tricked her. Hopkinson changes the power balance of the story, giving Little Red a sex drive to compare to the wolves, because of course women are not merely passive victims of foolishness but active players in their own lives.  As the grandmother realizes, sex need not be merely violent or boring – it can be pleasurable, and she anticipates experiencing this pleasure again when wolfie returns for her. She also realizes that encounters with “wolfie” are inevitable – she “know[s] that it’s right, that it must be so.” Young people will transgress from the path, they may encounter delight or danger but (for the most part, at least), “it all comes right again.” This is the piece of information the grandmother longs to give her granddaughter, the comfort that she is not doomed to punishment for her transgressions, nor is she the first to transgress. It is in fact part of the normal course of a life. Without changing the plot at all, Hopkinson converts a fairly conservative tale in something radical.

            On a final note, in reconfiguring the women’s wolf encounters, Hopkinson creates a narrative of rebirth and sexual initiation. The belly of the wolf which the women inhabit is like a womb: “down in the dark,” “the hot wet dark,” a place of enclosure, of bodily interiors, of waiting. And though the woodsman makes an appearance in this variant, he is fairly unimportant, for as the grandmother puts it: “it’s wolfie gives us birth.” The wolf, endowed with a womb, becomes a medium of passage for the female characters. I do wonder if this is a reading that minimizes trauma, and yet I don’t want to force a reading of trauma onto a story that imagines a version of sexuality that isn’t frightening and women who are not subject to the whims of princes and wolves. Part of the point of folklore, after all, is that it is malleable, a skeleton structure from which we can craft the stories we long to hear.

            While Hopkinson’s variant imagines the characters of grandmother and granddaughter as inseparable, Carter takes a very different approach in her first Little Red story, “The Werewolf,” twinning grandmother and wolf. The part of the story where the wolf disguises himself as the grandmother is so familiar to most of us (and so often pastiched) that we may forget the horror of a family member replaced with something similar, and this piece of the story’s close relationship to “other mother” type tales of simulacra. Carter’s story is really two stories: the one we are told, that emphasizes the horror of this “other grandmother” having never been human at all, and the one that is implied, which reimagines Little Red as a ruthless trickster willing to kill her own grandmother to secure her own survival and comfort.

            In an inhospitable and unidentified northern country, still devoted to superstition, an unnamed Little Red goes to her grandmother’s. On route, she’s attacked by a wolf but fends it off and severs its paw. Upon arriving, she discovers her grandmother writhing in pain and that the wolf’s paw has become her grandmother’s hand. The neighbors deduce that granny’s a witch from the wart on her hand, surely s witch’s nipple, and dutifully beat her to death. The granddaughter receives the house, where, we are told, she prospers.

            The surface tale gains much of its ominous power from how it changes the tale we are used to. Grandmother has always been a wolf in disguise; we may find the terrors of the forest in the comfort of our own parlors. This granny is a great example of the trope of the monstrous feminine, a haggard woman with no more fertility to offer, a loss of the youth and beauty that women under the patriarchy are told is our dearest asset. Who knows what tricks she may be up to? Who knows if she might act with the desperate jealousy of an evil queen?

            Of course, it’s reasonable to not trust Little Red at all, the beneficiary of her grandmother’s murder. She easily could have severed the hand of her weak grandmother, taking care to snatch the one with the tell-tale wart, to exploit the fantast of the monstrous feminine for her own gain. This would be a lot easier than slicing through the bone of an attacking wolf. Conveniently, the fallen snow would have masked any wolf tracks, so there is no way of confirming her story. As we are told at the very beginning: “It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.” In this reading, Little Red becomes a sinister trickster, strategically using her community’s dense web of folklore for her own gain. Like Hopkinson’s Little Red/grandmother, she is a woman with agency, even if she uses it to ill intent. Carter also demonstrates another use for folklore: fear can be used to personal gain, to political gain. Stories have power. We see this more than ever today where, to name only one example, sensationalized and imagined stories of immigrant criminals have convinced a whole sector of the American population that it is permissible to tear families apart. Stories can empower and connect, as they do in the Hopkinson, but stories can also be sinister. We must be critical of them and their impact, of who is telling them and what their interests are. Not all stories are true.

            Finally, Oyeyemi’s variant, the loosest of the three: “dornicka and the st. martin’s day goose.” It is distinct in a number of ways: it has a concrete setting (the Czech Republic) and characters with first names. Its plot diverges greatly from the original: in this version, our Little Red is already at her grandmother’s and never meets the wolf at all. But it shares many commonalities with the Carter and Hopkinson, most notably a reflection on folklore as medium.

            The story follows Dornicka, an elderly widow living in a rural part of the country, who is eagerly awaiting a visit from her city-slicker goddaughter Alzbeta, and Alzbeta’s blind daughter Klaudie. She happens to be walking through the woods in a red cloak when she meets a wolf, or rather something wearing the rotting skin of a wolf. Their confrontation presents, as Hopkinson’s version does, fairy tales as cycles of experience that happen again and again. When Dornicka recalls that the wolf was killed by a huntsman, he replies: “Go back to the beginning and there he is again, ready for action. This is the beginning again, and I thought you were her.” Meanwhile, the iconic nature of the red-cloaked woman and the wolf is recognized by passers-by who “realizing they were witnessing the encounter of age-old adversaries they booed the ‘wolf’ and urged Dornicka on toward her fated triumph” like an audience at a pantomime.

            Afraid for the wolf’s victim, Dornicka promises to bring him something “juicy and young;” to ensure this, the wolf strikes Dornicka, forming a bruise. From the bruise grows a sort of tumor-ish lump, which Dornicka eventually is able to painlessly carve from her body in time for her family’s arrival. She buries the lump under the tree, but Klaudie finds the smell of the lump delicious and seeks it out. Dornicka locks it in a chest in her room; Klaudie visits Dornicka’s room and even tries on the red cloak. At wit’s end, Dornicka feeds the lump to a goose purchased for the St. Martin’s day feast. The goose grows in a size and gains a sort of self-awareness, urging Dornicka to drive it to the forest where it willingly goes to meet the wolf.

            Having established the cyclical nature of fairy tales, the story plays out as an intervention. Dornicka, perhaps because she is an individual rather than an archetypal grandmother, intervenes in Klaudie’s fate by making a sort of trickster’s bargain with the wolf. Though something (temptation? fate?) seems to drive Klaudie to the lump and to the cloak, Dornicka is able to prevent her from ever meeting the wolf, thus changing the story’s ending to protect her granddaughter. Like Carter’s Little Red, she is a character of agency and cunning, though she uses this cunning to rather more admirable ends.

            Let’s take a closer look at some unique elements Oyeyemi includes in the story: body horor and cyclical consumption. Dornicka sacrifices a piece of her flesh; though her sacrifice doesn’t hurt her, she still must engage in the horror of the lump and its removal, which she does without flinching. Her relationship with her body fascinates me. The lump resembles a pregnancy: “at times she felt it contract and expand as if it were suckling at her hip joint,” and we are explicitly told that Dornicka looks pregnant when the lump forms. It is not a part of her - half-tumor, half-fetus, it is its own thing – and when it becomes untenable, Dornicka defends the boundaries of her body and removes it. Are we to read her encounter with the wolf as an impregnation, and her act of severing as a symbolic abortion? I’m not certain that this is so; either way, it’s striking and delightful to encounter a character of such confident bodily autonomy.

            Finally, consumption. Little Red Riding Hood has always been a cannibal story (literal or figurative wolf, he always speaks and acts like a human). In Oyeyemi’s story, the wolf’s victims must eat before they are eaten. We wince both at the grotesque scene of Klaudie longing to eat her grandmother’s flesh and its consequences as we begin to expect that eating the lump spells doom. Finally, it is the goose, always intended as food, who eats the lump, and becomes food to a different appetite. Is this to say that we are what we eat? That in eating a piece of Dornicka, owner of the red cape, is to become her? Again, Oyeyemi allows for ambiguity and interpretation. One thing I can suggest with confidence; in this version, the rules are different. The role of Little Red is not passed down through families, but through an action, which is why Klaudie’s meeting with the wolf can be averted.

            Most of all, it is strange, and here is a story which revels in strangeness. But then all of these stories do. There is something inherently strange in taking a story we know from childhood, a story we take for granted, and changing it. It makes the story strange again, revealing that it was always strange. This is one of the things I love about stories that engage with folklore. These stories were never meant to have definitive versions, were always made to be retold and remade. These three masterful stories all do that, and in addition to reminding us of the purpose – and the dangers – of stories, each have their own unique message and pleasures to offer on the frame of familiar bones