On a frigid February morning my brother and I set out to go sledding. I was 10 and he was 6. The park was at the end of our street, but the sledding hill was on the far side and we had to trek a long way through an eerily empty terrain. Normally the area would have been full of fellow sledders all eager to get the best spot on the hill. But we were alone.
When we got there the hill was icy and hard-packed. Going down was easy, recovering was much more work. After two or three runs we decided to leave. It was then that we saw the man in the green trench coat standing at the top of the hill. It wasn’t unusual to see grown ups there. They liked to watch the kids playing in the snow. But he was alone, like us.
When we finally got to the top of the hill he began to talk. We stood in the cold and listened for a minute, minding our manners, but finally turned to leave. It was then that he said, “Did we know there were abandoned puppies near by? Someone has left them in a box under the bridge. Did we want to see?”
We followed him down the path.
I don’t tell this story very often. The memories are too strong and too painful. Like all the other young girls, or teenagers or grown women who have had their own Man in the Park I’m still left with residual feelings of fear, and worse, guilt and shame. I know there is a kind of recovery in speaking out about these events but the details seem tawdry and pathetic.
That’s why Little Red Riding Hood is so upsetting.
Red, like Cinderella is ubiquitous. She can be found all over Europe and far into Eastern Asia. Some of the earliest variants are over a thousand years old. People never seem to tire of this story and I’m hard pressed to understand why.
I’ve always known the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Most kids do. I must have read it, but some stories seem to just be there, where everyone has it in their heads but aren’t sure how it got there. If I did read it, it was long before the man in the park, and I didn’t read it very often. It was too unsettling for me. I was too young to understand the sexual implications that drive this story, but I could feel them.
At the same time that Red first appeared in oral stories there was a sister story that was also told. Called “The Wolf and the Seven Kids,” it tells a similar tale of a hungry wolf who tricks young kids left by their nanny goat mother into letting him in. He eats them up, falls asleep and is found by their mother when she returns. She cuts him open and the kids jump out unscathed.
Unlike this story or even “The Three little Pigs,” Red’s wolf is more than hungry, he is a predator or worse, a pedophile. He is after far more than a meal.
I’ve been teaching fairy tales for more than ten years now and hardly anyone ever asks for this story. It’s part of the cultural landscape but no one wanted to study it in class. I wondered if they too felt the same unease.
But recently, the request was made and with some trepidation I began the class.
I asked them as I often do what they made of the story. They said it was a cautionary tale. It was a way to teach ‘stranger-danger’ to children. Someone said it was a Good versus Evil tale and another said, “You should always listen to your mother” and “stay on the path.” One woman thought it was a subversive way to provide feminist warnings about the ways of the world. In the Charles Perrault version that’s exactly what he does. At the end he warns young women about men (wolves) and their behavior, particularly the quiet ones who are the “most dangerous of them all.”
These responses are all valid, but they’re answering a different question. They’re telling me what the story is for, not what it is about. There was still a reluctance to engage with the actual events in the tale, to speak about the monstrous details. Understandably, this story is pretty horrifying.
I can see why storytellers might love this story. There is so much drama and tension, plus it has that excruciating litany at the end, that seductive repetition of all the body parts before the actual consummation when Red is eaten. There is also the fact that in most versions, Red is told to undress and get into the bed. There is no denying this story’s intent.
Charles Perrault was a French courtier who published his version in 1691. In that story Red doesn’t make it. Red is dead. Perrault’s audience of fellow aristocrats at the French court must have been greatly amused. It’s easy to imagine their sly winks and knowing glances when hearing this story. Such naïveté, such foolishness, what a stupid little girl. Doesn’t everyone know that ‘wolves will be wolves?’
This shaming, if not blaming the victim, is a pretty typical response even to this day. Whether we realize it or not we see Red’s end as a natural consequence of her behavior. We don’t even consider the wolf’s part in this twisted tale. The Grimm brothers, writing for a different audience, inserted The Huntsman, who would kill the wolf and rescue both grandmother and Little Red. Perhaps they felt the need to soften the harsh outlook of the original.
The idea of naïveté is misleading. In all the versions of this story, Red is called Little Red Riding Hood. She is meant to be a child, not a teenager, not a knowing city kid with street smarts. No one ever says Little Hansel and Gretel or Little Jack and the Beanstalk because the actual age of those characters has no bearing on the story. Red is little because she is innocent not naïve, and there is a world of difference between the two.
I have often wondered: Is this actually a fairy tale or not?
The fairy tales I know and love all have the same elements – the notion of transcendence or triumph through tests and tribulations. As a young reader those elements gave me hope. This story has none of that.
I don’t have an answer about Red. I do know that I absolutely hate this story and the way it is told. There is something lascivious about watching the little girl being groomed by the wolf. He engages her in pleasant conversation and acts as if he’s after her best interests:
"Listen, haven't you seen the beautiful flowers that are blossoming in the woods? Why don't you go and take a look? And I don't believe you can hear how beautifully the birds are singing. You are walking along as though you were on your way to school in the village. It is very beautiful in the woods."
Once in the cottage, he devours the grandmother and disguises himself in the bed. When Red finally arrives, she is hesitant, feeling some anxiety but does what he tells her to. Once she has climbed into the bed the story begins the long dialog between them, as Red slowly, in her growing sense of unease, asks why he looks so different. He responds with tender endearments, “…all the better to see you with, my dear.”
Did the storytellers and the story collectors mean this to be so titillating and salacious?
Red is dead. Even the versions with soft endings don’t provide any real growth or change. There is no sense of her problem or deficiency being overcome or resolved through the arc of the story. Red is young and innocent. She dies because she has no cause to feel afraid. Her mother sends her off into the woods without a word of warning or guidance. In fact, she is more worried about Red dropping the wine or spilling the basket than she is in Red’s safety.
The fact that Red suffers and dies is inescapable given the way this story is told. Red’s demise is tragic and as real now as it was millennia ago. Wolves will be wolves, we say, but do we need to be reminded of this with all the gory details? How is this entertaining? In what world is this amusing?
Human behavior in all its varieties is at the core of all fairy tales. That’s what makes them so powerful. They show us who we are, but they give us hope that we can survive and even thrive despite the dangers in the world and our own inclinations.
The man in the park was as real as the wolf in the woods. My innocence led me down a very slippery slope. The huntsman in my story was the policeman assigned to patrol the park. Only he was asleep in a warming shed just a hundred yards away. He was discovered by one of the fathers who had gathered like vigilantes to find the pervert.
From a hard won perspective I can see now that the man who exposed himself must have had mental health problems. Nothing short of sheer compulsion could have driven him to undress himself in 20 degree weather and to do it multiple times. Eventually he was caught, and no one ever spoke of it again.
The ending of my ordeal didn’t end my story. I wasn’t harmed physically but the emotional suffering lasted for years. The worst part of the encounter was the belief that I was going to die, and that I would be the cause for my little brother’s death. That and the absolute silence from everyone around me. It was as if it had all been just a story from a book.
The experience was like the icy hill from that long ago morning. It took a tremendous effort and most of a lifetime to climb back up.
Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash
Having to hit the "Like" button is very peculiar. No, your pointing out that there is something deeply unhealthy about finding this story a form of amusement is exactly right. I always find your articles interesting, but I put off reading this one. Yes, your story is well told--the freezing hill, the two young children all alone. The careful predator using the children's own kindness and curiosity to commit evil. It's terrifying even though we know the little girl will survive to become an articulate and insightful woman--as Little Red Riding Hood did not. But juxtaposing the fairy tale with a real, deeply traumatic, for so long incommunicable, actual childhood experience punches sentimentality right out of any reading. You've made us look at this story stripped of cuteness. Not only to ask why she is insistently called "Little," but why she is defined by the red garment, a "riding hood." What is a "riding hood" anyway. And why is it--definitively--red?
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