I don't think little good girls should...

[innerbrat]

Mother said, "Straight ahead;"
Not to delay or be misled.
I should have heeded her advice,
But he seemed so nice.
I Know Things Now from Into the Woods
by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine
The analogy in Little Red Riding Hood is so universally well known that it's impossible to find a take on it that isn't loaded with the implications: Girl talks to

Comments

Man I'm an idiot sometimes.

[confusiontempst]

I'd never thought to think of Red Riding Hood in that light before.

Re: Man I'm an idiot sometimes.

[innerbrat]

Really?

Maybe I just love the story more than I should.

Re: Man I'm an idiot sometimes.

[confusiontempst]

Well, I'm an unreflective male, right? I for the most part don't need to pay attention to most of the warnings and judgements society casts upon/about rape.

Which means I try to understand the forces, because, y'know, I know people who've had horrible things happen to them, and I like to be at least moderately useful when someone breaks down on me and I need to be supportive.

But still, it's very much outsider for me, and I've missed a lot of the allegories woven into societies base. I mean, now that you say it, Red Riding Hood is obviously a tale that can be thought of like that.

In defence of Bill Willingham's Bigby Wolf, Bigby is clearly shown as someone who has chained his nature and done a lot of things to redeem himself, and his crime in Fables is to have slaughtered people while the mythic representation of hunger? I think I should probably read them more closely (and again, and finish the series) if I'm going to continue any form of discussion about him though.

Re: Helpful butting in! Plus semi-appropriate icon. Hee.

[e_mily]

Well, the origin of the story itself is all about what IB's talking about.

It comes from France, and it was never certain whether or not they truly meant a girl child, or just a young woman.

And the wolf... well, wolf is/was slang for a sexual predator.

And there's a line that always gets cut out of translations.

"Grandmother, what big legs you have!" (in french, the penis is slang-referred to by the word leg)

"All the better to run with, my dear." (french to run = slang for to fuck.)

And there is no woodcutter in the original. She gets eaten, dies, scary moral is told, end of story.

Tadaaaaaaa, story becomes perfectly clear.

[bookelfe]

I love this post. Shockingly, I also love Into the Woods! So I am just going to say, word, and then add to the ItW analysis a little: one of the things I also really love about Red's character arc (and I don't know if I'd even call her a secondary character, really; she might not be The Baker And His Wife, but hey, she's one of the Big Four who survive at the end) is the way that the moral is explicitly not, Don't talk to strangers, but "Do not put your faith in a cape and a hood - they will not protect you the way that they should." Magical things won't protect you; you will protect yourself. Knowledge will protect you. A knife will protect you.

I also really like that after the first story is over, the story continues to avoid slotting her into a predictable fairy-tale role. If you've survived little girl-hood, in a fairy tale, you also tend to become either the Bad Mother or the Good Mother, and ItW veers just close enough to avoid that:

Red: *nobly* I'll be your mother now.
Jack: I don't want another mother. I want a

[darksunlight]

I've never actually seen it as a sexual story, but that may be because every story I've read with Red has her at a preteen age. I've always seen the moral as more of a 'Don't talk to strangers' or 'Listen to your parents' then anything to do with rape.

And, then again, in many versions, after red and granny are cut out of the wolfs belly, the two ladies gather up a good load of stones, before sewing his belly back up again, so the poor beast has to drag himself around weighted down by his own great hunger.

[furikku]

I don't have much to add, but I wanted to say that this is a very awesome post.

[q_pheevr]

Dahl's take on the story is a little bit like Thurber's, in Fables for Our Time:

She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.

Thurber's moral ("It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be") is clearly addressed to wolves, and his version of the story is wholly consonant with his view of the male as the weaker sex, or at least the perennial loser in Teh Battle of Teh Sexes (metathesis added for purposes of derision).

But Dahl's Red is clearly a boy in drag. "Whips a pistol from her knickers"? Come on. It's like this gag from The Duchess of Malfi II.ii:

First Servant: There was taken even now a Switzer in the duchess' bed-chamber-

Second Servant: A Switzer!

First Servant: With a pistol in his great cod-piece.

Bosola: Ha, ha, ha!

[confusiontempst]

Really? I always thought of Dahl's Red as being one of those Noir/Frank Miller ladies.

[innerbrat]

I'm not sure about Dahl's Red as a boy in drag. I think it's just that 'knickers' is a really funny word.