little red riding hood uncloaked by catherine orenstein

Perrault's cynically cute rhyming epilogue serves as a warning to tender young maidens about the perils of seduction: 'Never trust a stranger-friend no one knows how it will end. Red is gobbled up whole in this ruthless version, without anyone coming to her aid. It fairly drips with sexual nuance: 'Little Red Riding Hood undressed and climbed into bed, where she was quite astonished to see the way the grandmother looked undressed.'

Charles Perrault amused himself by fashioning a titillating morality-tale out of the old folk legend in 1697. Did you know, for example, that this wasn't originally a children's story at all? The first published version was called Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, with its intended audience the pampered, jaded denizens of Louis XIV's Court of Versailles. 'But most people don't know the tale as well as they think.' Versions of the story crop up, eerily, 'on every continent, in every major language,' Orenstein tells us. The deeper you dig into this tale, the stranger it gets.

For is not our old friend the wolf really just a transvestite in an elderly woman's clothing, his bulging belly suggestive of an advanced pregnancy? It's a feminist writer's dream because it plays around with gender roles, all that potent male-female power stuff, which in this case is strangely subverted. Judging by the countless pop-culture spinoffs we see in advertising, film, music and cartoons, Red's story still reverberates with sexual danger and the irresistible lure of the forbidden. In Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Story, women's issues journalist Catherine Orenstein has hit the mother lode of Mother Goose, peeling back layers of literary embroidery to reveal the raw, primal tale within.

As she eats, a talking cat taunts her, 'She is a slut who eats the flesh and drinks the blood of her granny!'īut the next line is even more chilling: 'Undress, my child,' said the bzou, 'and come to bed beside me.' He then demands she do a slow, item-by-item striptease, throwing each article of her clothing into the fire: 'You won't be needing them any more.' The fairy tale we tell our innocent little children was originally a much more gruesome European folk-tale about a half-man, half-wolf who murders Granny, grinds her up into hamburger and feeds her to the unwitting Little Red Riding Hood. Have you ever heard the story of Little Red Riding Hood and the bzou? Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale Reviews | Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked by Catherine Orenstein

Little red riding hood uncloaked by catherine orenstein