SEXUALITY VS. LITTLE RED 1

SEXUALITY VS. LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

MOLLIE DUDLEY

RADFORD UNIVERSITY

SEXUALITY VS. LITTLE RED 2

Sexuality Vs. Little Red Riding Hood

Fairy tales are not so kid friendly after all. Sexuality is a recurring theme in the so called fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood. Reading in between the lines of this fairy tale story reveals how, in fact, the wolf is a rapist. The two stories that will be examined in this paper are Little

Red Riding Hood by Charles Perrault and Paul Delarue’s The Story of Grandmother. These two stories, both carrying a strong male lead by the wolf and the intentions for Little Red Riding

Hood, illustrate that he does not want physically to eat Little Red Riding Hood like told in previous stories, but wants to have sexual relations with her. In order to define why these stories have so much sexuality hidden inside of them, we need to look at the different eras, history, and types of culture in which they were written in.

““Little Red Riding Hood”” began as an oral folk tale and continued to be told to children for centuries before being published in a French version by Charles Perrault in 1697” (Delaney,

2006, p.70). In Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood, there are multiple scenes where you can obviously depict the wolf’s intentions to rape poor Little Red Riding Hood. Stated by

Jamshid J. Tehrani in The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood. “ Over time, the tales original forms were then adapted to suit different cultural norms and preferences, giving rise to distinct

“ecotypes”” (2013, p. 1). Perrault focused more on adults and young adults of the upper class and, “The Irony of his narrations suggests that he sought to appeal to the erotic and playful side of adult readers who took pleasure in naughty stories of seduction (Zipes, 1983, p. 9). This tale by Perrault was more than likely written to influence the seventeenth century era, the time period in which he wrote Little Red Riding Hood. “There were a virtual epidemic of trials against men accused of being werewolf’s in the 16th and 17th centuries similar to the trials against women as witches” (Zipes, 1983, p.4). These men were accused of taking little children and other harmful SEXUALITY VS. LITTLE RED 3 offenses to children. Like in Perrault’s tale of Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf represents a man during that specific time period in France and Little Red Riding Hood represents the innocent little child that the wolf captured. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France, rape was becoming more and more popular, “rapt and rape was described as violent, criminal offenses” (Johnson, 2003, p.327). Families in these time periods feared that their children, like

Little Red Riding Hood would be fooled by people like the wolf and be taken and raped

(Johnson, 2003). The violence and rape towards woman in this particular time era in France became a major problem and men’s reputations during those times were getting worse by the increasing number of rape offenses. Fairy Tales are not completely made up stories, they reflect everyday life and what was happening during a specific time period they were written in.

Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood, mirrors life in the seventeenth century.

Ironically, in Perrault’s version of Little Red Riding Hood, the girl is depicted as “the prettiest girl of the Village” (Johnson, 2003, p.329). While the wolf, on the other hand, is defined as the bad guy, who is mean, mischievous, and not to be trusted. “By choosing a wolf to represent masculine sexuality, the wolf’s brutality conflates with a male’s propensity for violence. Moreover, the wolf’s animality implies that male behavior also may be guided by instincts instead of reason” (Johnson, 2003, p.330-332). Interpreting these stereotypes in

Perrault’s tale, the wolf is already seen as the bad character and with Little Red Riding Hoods beauty, she is obviously a major target for the wolf’s sexual needs and desires (Johnson, 2003).

In Little Red Riding Hood by Perrault, Little Red is characterized as a little innocent girl who is only trying to take goodies to her sick grandmother. When Little Red Riding Hood meets the wolf for the first time he immediately asks her where she is headed, so he can be his sneaky self and figure out where it is that she is going so he can get there first and catch her off guard SEXUALITY VS. LITTLE RED 4 and rape her. Also, Perrault states that the wolf “wanted to eat her right on the spot” (1999, p.12). Perrault Clearly mentioned in the beginning how beautiful the little girl is, and how everyone loved her, so once the wolf set eyes on the little girl he did not want to eat her physically, he fell in love with her beauty and wanted to have her for his sexual pleasures.

Reading in between the lines, Perrault is saying that it was dangerous to be an attractive young girl, because it would be more likely for them to get raped, like Little Red Riding Hood and in

France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Later in Perrault’s version, when the wolf is in bed disguised as the grandmother, Little Red Riding Hood has no idea that her grandmother is the wolf who trying to rape her. So the wolf tells her to get into bed with him and she does, as any little girl would obey their so called sick grandmother. Letting the wolf’s plans fall right into place, the little girl gets into bed having no way of escaping so the wolf takes his chance and rapes poor Little Red Riding Hood. Zipes believes this version of the fairy tale is specifically for adults because it contains adult like content all throughout the tale.

According to Zipes (1983):

The curbing and regulations of sexual drives is fully portrayed in this

bourgeois literary fairy tale on the basis of deprived male needs. Red Riding

Hood is to blame for her own rape. The wolf is not really a male but

symbolizes natural urges and social nonconformity. (p. 57)

Perrault characteristics of Little Red Riding Hood clearly relates to Zipes statement of how the little girl is to blame her own rape because he perceives her a poor “Little” helpless girl that can’t fight her own battles and who doesn’t know who is good or bad. Rapist in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries resemble Perrault’s wolf very closely, by gaining the trust of their victim SEXUALITY VS. LITTLE RED 5 and leading away from their destination and often raping them (Johnson, 2003). Perrault obviously wrote his 1697, Little Red Riding Hood to reflect his Culture in France and that Era of time, because “In both Perrault’s tale and French Jurisprudence, women were faulted for the crime of rapt and rape, in part because they were perceived as weak, both mentally and physically (Johnson, 2003, p. 338). With the rape trials happening in France and the Wolf in

Perrault’s tale shadows the men in France that were under the rape trials. Fairy Tales weren’t just stories, they were lessons that teach you the morals of day to day life. Ultimately, Perrault’s moral of Little Red Riding Hood was to inform children, mainly girls that they should not trust anyone and those they should not talk to strangers.

Paul Delarue’s The Story of grandmother is a version of Little Red Riding Hood by

Charles Perrault. Delarue’s refined version of Perrault’s tale was recorded in France, in 1885. In

Zipes, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, “Wherever oral versions of the

Little Red Riding Hood tale was found later in the 19th and 20th centuries, the were primarily discovered in those regions were werewolf trials were most common in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries” (1983, p. 4). Exactly how Delarue’s version still contains the masculinity of the male figure as the wolf like in Perrault’s original tale.

Delarue’s version of Little Red riding Hood took place during the nineteenth Century.

This time period was a revolution for children. Shavit asserts: before this era, there was no room for the concept and the period of childhood in the human life cycle. Children were quickly forced into adulthood, thus decreasing the chances of survival of the adolescence. Childhood development throughout the nineteenth century spread like wildfire. This revolution led to the education of children (Shayit, 1999). Ultimately giving children a whole new definition and a chance for a new beginning. Since this dramatic change, writers during this time period like SEXUALITY VS. LITTLE RED 6

Delarue, “adopted the new image of the child” (Shayit, 1999, p.327). Therefore, explaining why the different endings of these two versions of Little Red Riding Hood are how they are. In

Perrault version, the wolf rapes Little Red Riding Hood; because the education system was not yet introduced during the time he wrote his version. While Delarue’s rewrote his version during the era when the new beginning for child and their education was happening, his ending of the story was happy. The little girl gets away and outsmarts the perverted beast. Even thought these two stories have different endings they both still contain many similarities within the theme of rape and seduction from the wolf toward Little Red Riding Hood.

Much like Perrault’s original version, Delarue’s tale still has the innocent little girl who doesn’t know that it is wrong to talk to strangers and the wolf is still forceful by trying to seduce the little girl. The story of Grandmother clearly states and calls the child a “Little Girl” so clearly her characteristics are a harmless child who is only obeying her mother’s words. Identical to Little Red Riding Hood, in The Story of Grandmother when the girl and the wolf run into each other in the woods the wolf immediately ask the girl where she is going, to find out where, so he can beat her there to get her alone and rape the poor child. Again, when the wolf is dressed up like her grandmother in bed, he asks the little girl to get into bed with him and take off her clothes and put them in the fire, so she would not have any clothes to escape with. But unlike

Perrault’s, Delarue’s end with the little girl escaping before the wolf raped her. In this story, the little girl is portrayed as confident. She is not afraid of the wolf, she knows how to handle herself and what to do to keep out of danger. In this version, the little girl seems smarter than

Perrault’s Red Riding Hood. In Jack Zipes book he states, “The sexual cravings of the wolf are debunked and treated as harmless because the little girl knows how to take care of herself in nature” (1983, p.53). In the end, Red Riding Hood outwits the wolf and escapes his trap. Even SEXUALITY VS. LITTLE RED 7 thought these two versions were written in different time periods and by different authors, they still have obvious similarities pertaining to sexuality and how the wolf’s main objective was to rape Little Red Riding Hood.

Sexuality is a major theme throughout both of these fairy tales. In these two versions of

Little Red Riding Hood, The wolf is the dominant male lead rapist and Little Red Riding Hood is the poor little weak girl who is the wolf’s victim in this violent act of raping. Both stories have backgrounds of real rape and seduction cases pertaining to the eras in which they were written in.

Once analyzing the eras, history, and culture in which these fairy tales were written in proves how, in fact, these stories have rape in them.

References SEXUALITY VS. LITTLE RED 8

Delaney, B. (2006). Perrault's Little Red Riding Hood. Explicator, 64(2), 70-72.

Johnson, S. P. (2003). The Toleration and Erotization of Rape: Interpreting Charles Perrault s Le

Petit Chaperon Rouge within Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French

Jurisprudence. Women's Studies, 32(3), 325-352. doi:10.1080/00497870390187548

Perrault, C. (1999). Little Red Riding Hood. In Maria Tartar (Ed.), The Classic Fairy Tales: A

Norton Critical Edition (10-24). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Shavit, Z. (1999). The Concept of childhood’s Folktales: Test Case—“Little Red Riding

Hood”. In Maria Tartar (Ed.), The Classic Fairy Tales: A Norton Critical Edition (317-

332). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Tahrani, J. J. (2003). The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood. Plos ONE, 8(11), 1-11. doi:

10.1371/journal.pone.0078871

Zipes, J. (1983). The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: versions of the tale in

sociocultural context. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc.

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