Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (review)

Abstract

Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale. By Catherine Orensiein. New York: Basic Books, 2002. xiii + 289 pp. Catherine Orenstein's book is a delightful venture into the European and North American textual tradition of Little Red Riding Hood. Beginning with Charles Perraults seventeenth-century French text and ending with Matthew Bright's 1996 American movie adaptation, Freeway, Orenstein explores the tales manifestations in jokes, cartoons, post cards, dolls, poetry, short stories, advertising, television, and movies, in addition to academic and popular collections of fairy tales and popularly marketed chapbooks and children's books. Along the way, she draws on eclectic mix of critical and theoretical approaches to the tale (social and historical, psychological, structural, and feminist, as well as the discourse on gender and sexuality) in order to develop a thesis that acknowledges the tale's timeless and qualities, but which ultimately is far more interested in the tale's culturally specific adaptations to time and place. As Orenstein explains, her purpose regarding the figure of Red Riding Hood is to explore some of her multitude of reincarnations, not in search of universal truths, but on the contrary, as evidence of how human truths (5). book is composed of Introduction, Cloaking the Heroine, Epilogue, Under the Cloak, and ten chapters, each focused on a different text or related set of texts and each mapping a cultural change in the representation of Red Riding Hood and the wolf. Each chapter is prefaced with one of the texts (verbal or visual) that will be analyzed in that chapter, a feature of the book that is particularly handy if one is thinking about adopting it for use in a folklore or literary course. first four chapters focus respectively on Charles Perrault's 1697 French text, Little Red Riding Hood, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's 1812 German text, Little Red Cap, Paul Delarue's published version of a French oral tale, The Grandmother's Tale, collected in 1885 by Achille Millien, and a 1590 pamphlet entitled The Trial of Stubbe Peeter, Werewolf. Each text is historically situated. For example, Perrault s text is read in relation to the social history of the French court at Versailles, sexually charged and notorious for its excesses, a playground for seduction in an age of institutionalized chastity (36). Grimms' text is read against the background of German and English, middle-class, Victorian, family values: discipline, piety, primacy of the father in the household and, above all, obedience (55). Set side by side the two texts, Orenstein argues, represent a shift from sexual parable to family fable (56), while also marking a shift in audience from adult to child and from upper to middle class. The Grandmother's provides Orenstein the opportunity to introduce a range of topics: male versus female narrators, printed literary texts versus oral texts, and the representations of Red Riding Hood as passive victim versus active heroine. Also addressed in this chapter are the benefits and detriments of universalist theories and interpretations of the tale (Emile Nourry, Arthur Lang, Erich Fromm, Bruno Bettelheim, Arnold van Gennep, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, Lord Raglan, Joseph Campbell) and of historically situated interpretations (Robert Darnton). At the center of this chapter is a discussion of the significance of the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index and the historic-geographic method in providing a point from which to critique universalist interpretations that too often have been based solely on a particular text, motif in a particular text or self selected set of texts, as well as to critique methods that treat any given text primarily as historical document, thus losing whatever meaning might exist in its broader folkloric patterns (75). A chapter on The Trial of Stubbe Peeter shifts focus from the figure of Red Riding Hood to the figure of the wolf and its premodern antecedent in the werewolf. …