LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD
The story revolves around a girl
called Little Red Riding Hood, after the red hooded cape/cloak (in Perrault's
fairytale) or simple cap (in the Grimms' version called little Red-cap) she
wears. The girl walks through the woods to deliver food to her sick
grandmother.
A mean wolf wants to eat the girl
but is afraid to do so in public. He secretly stalks her behind trees and
bushes and shrubs and patches of little grass and patches of tall grass. He
approaches Little Red Riding Hood and she naïvely tells him where she is going.
He suggests the girl pick some flowers, which she does. In the meantime, he
goes to the grandmother's house and gains entry by pretending to be the girl. He
swallows the grandmother whole, (In some stories, he locks her in the closet),
and waits for the girl, disguised as the grandma.
When the girl arrives, she
notices that her grandmother looks very strange. Little Red then says,
"What a deep voice you have," ("The better to greet you
with"), "Goodness, what big eyes you have," ("The better to
see you with) "And what big hands you have!" ("The better to hug
you with"), and lastly, "What a big mouth you have," ("The
better to eat you with!") at which point the wolf jumps out of bed, and
swallows her up too. Then he falls fast asleep.
A lumberjack (with the Brothers
Grimm, and always in German tradition, a hunter), however, comes to the rescue
and with his axe cuts open the wolf, who had fallen asleep. Little Red Riding
Hood and her grandmother emerge unharmed. They fill the wolf's body with heavy
stones. The wolf awakens and tries to flee, but the stones cause him to
collapse and die. (Sanitized versions of the story have the grandmother shut in
the closet instead of eaten, and some have Little Red Riding Hood saved by the
lumberjack as the wolf advances on her, rather than after she is eaten.)[4]
The tale makes the clearest
contrast between the safe world of the village and the dangers of the forest,
conventional antitheses that are essentially medieval, though no written
versions are as old as that. Specifically, the tale parallels how an innocent
victim can be taken in and controlled by a criminal mentality, therefore,
facilitating further subjection of a crime or harm against a vulnerable victim
through mischievous criminal intent by removing the victim from a familiar or
"safe" public location - facilitating the crime in an effort to
isolate the victim by drawing her to another location "away from the
public eye" where the criminal entity has complete control over the
victim.
CRITICISM
Archetypal literary criticism is
a type of critical theory that interprets a text by focusing on recurring myths
and archetypes (from the Greek archē, or beginning, and typos, or imprint) in
the narrative, symbols, images, and character types in a literary work.
Archetypal literature uses symbol
and in the story little red riding hood they use the wolf to symbolizes fear and power. The theme
of vulnerability is evident and represented in varying degrees. Through the
vocabulary and plot, we are shown how Little Red’s portrayal as innocent and
ignorant are dangerous and tragic personality flaws. It is interesting how the
child and the elder adult are portrayed in similar fashions in these fairy
tales. They each are portrayed as innocent, naïve, and trusting of the
‘unknown’; in this case the wolf. They are left in compromising positions in
each version of “Little Red Riding Hood”, demonstrating that women in
particular must be on their guard about men and strangers. The themes go beyond
just simple vulnerability in children and elders, but also touch on gendered
issues. The tales portray women as kind-hearted and naïve, while the men are
either portrayed as wolves or saviors. In the
Grimms’ tale in particular, the gendered roles are more obvious. Both the child
and grandmother are eaten up by the wolf without hesitation, showing how women
can be easily taken advantage of and hurt in society when they are not
cautious. The wolf is portrayed as ugly, hairy, and beastly; a stark contrast
to Red’s kind nature. In this particular tale, a hunter who knows the
grandmother saves the child
and woman. He is clever and quick thinking, cutting the wolf open to save the
women and avenge the wolf. These tales demonstrate many morals and lessons from
a viewpoint of traditional patriarchal societies.
