The Little Red Governess: Mansfield and the Demythologisation of the Motif of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in ‘The Little Governess’

Abstract

Katherine Mansfield's interest in the literary rendering of subjective perspectives manifests a more general modernist questioning of a realist mode of representation, and her deployment of fantasy and fairy tale elements in her stories often testifies to a desire to account for a more complex portrayal of experience. However, fantasy can also be, for Mansfield's characters, ‘a deceiving friend’.1 This article seeks to analyse the ways in which Mansfield deploys the fairy tale motif of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in her story ‘The Little Governess’ (1915). The notions provided by Jack Zipes's socio-historical approach to the fairy tale foreground the transformations that ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ underwent in the process of being recorded, and the relevance of the ideological bias imposed on the most popular literary versions. In ‘The Little Governess’, Mansfield's refashioning of the tale already shows an acute awareness of the role of fairy tales as socialising agents, more specifically as perpetuators of gender notions. Through a characteristically modernist manipulation of narrative perspective which privileges the protagonist's point of view, Mansfield articulates a criticism of a model of education which not only relegates women to a state of undesirable naïveté but also punishes them for their own gullibility.