Red

Little Red riding Hood

Charles Perrault’s tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” (1697) is a view of how children, especially young girls, were viewed in the eyes of adults. It also depicts the traditional view of women as weak, vulnerable and in need of rescuing as we have read in stories such as “Snow White”. The evil mother character from the fairy tale of Snow White has been replaced with an evil male character making the women in the story appear even weaker, defenseless. 

But the most important part of the story isn’t how the women are seen but how they act and how their actions have an imperative effect in their lives. First of all LRRH’s mother seems careless, without any idea how to teach her child the important lessons in life such as do not talk to strangers, because bad things will happen to you. The mother also lets her little girl into the woods alone without any supervision, what kind of mother would ever do that is my question? Her character seems to lack caring, concern and willingness to guide her child in life. The grandmother is the one who is far away, sick; the question would be why is she not living with Red and her mother? She is the one “who adored her even more and made a little red hood for her” (Perrault 1^st paragraph); for someone with so much love for a child she should be there to help in raising her and not letting her either walk around in the woods with evil wolf lurking around.

The most important character, LRRH, is almost too vulnerable and too naïve to ever escape from the wolf after they first meet. “The poor child did not even know that it was dangerous to stop and listen to wolves” (Perrault 3^rd paragraph), and in the end of the story she was clueless that the wolf dressed as her grandmother actually wasn’t her grandmother. Today, if any child would be as careless and unaware of certain dangers in life, they would definitely end up like LRRH, eaten by the wolf. 

The great lesson of being a girl/woman in this story is that not much is expected from you other than acting defenseless, and the male character will come and eat/violate you. So little girls you better watch out for the wolves in disguises all around you.