little red riding hood original story charles perrault

Long before it was first written down, 'Little Red Riding Hood' was a folktale told for centuries.

No wonder the fairy tale was changed – it’s for children, after all! Photo: user uploaded image

The versions circulating in 17th-century France, when Charles Perrault first wrote down the story in his collection called Mother Goose Tales, featured a cannibalistic granddaughter and a pedophile wolf who tells Red to strip down before she climbs in his bed. And that’s only the beginning of the horrible things that happen in 'Little Red Riding Hood.' Unlike the modern version, where a naive and trusting girl who can't tell the difference between a wolf and her grandmother escapes in the end, in most older versions, Red is eaten alive.

Little Red Riding Hood’s full story is pretty dark. And even popular collections of fairy tales like the one from the Brothers Grimm include stories like “The Girl Without Hands” and “The Death of the Little Hen.” In the Hans Christian Andersen version of The Little Mermaid, the mermaid commits suicide. Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off parts of their feet before the ball. While offering a queer reading, this essay does not attempt to offer a template for queer reading of fairy tales rather, it suggests that situated and specialized cultural knowledges are integral to queer reading and are therefore not available to, or accepted by, all audience members at all times.Fairy tales are full of creepy and terrible things, and the original 'Little Red Riding Hood' is no exception. The suspension of “what everybody knows” about the tale and the wolf figure in particular, opens space for a repositioning of the wolf-man through the representation of the wolf but also via the relationships between the cinematic visual, verbal, and musical channels and extra-textual references to Vaslav Nijinsky and Quentin Crisp. This invitation to queer reading demands the suspension of the culturally dominant versions and interpretations of the tale by Grimms and Perrault, while activating gay cultural knowledges of celebrity intertexts in their stead. I propose that queer reading is activated by the acceptance of the queer invitation initiated primarily by the wolf figure in the film. The concept of “queer invitation” is explored in this reading of David Kaplan’s short film Little Red Riding Hood (1997).

Little red riding hood original story charles perrault