Brothers Grimm's 'Little Red Cap'

Among all the fairy tales, Brothers Grimm’s “Little Red Cap” is probably the one of the most well-known and influential fairy tales of all times. If “Little Red Cap” is to be made into a movie, it might become a blockbuster in which the Grimms are clearly trying to tell some sort of the moral through the movie. In this movie, the character of the grandmother would not appear for longer than five minutes since the director just needs her there for the development of the plot. Is the grandmother just an ignorant old lady who only exists to achieve her fate: being eaten? Or does her side of the story just happen to be unknown to people? In “Riding the Red,” a retelling of “Little Red Cap,” Nalo Hopkinson presents to the readers the grandmother’s

At the beginning of the story, Little Red Cap’s mother has warned her that she should “walk properly” in the wood, should not “stray from the path,” and should not peep around in her grandmother’s house (Grimm 14). In her book Red Riding Hood for All Ages, Sarah Beckett states that “the Grimms’ Little Red Cap is expected, first and foremost, to be well behaved and obedient”(15). And the same is expected for the children who are reading the story. When Little Red Cap encounters the wolf on the path, the wolf offers her choices between staying on the path and going off the path: “Little Red Cap, have you seen the beautiful flowers all about? Why don’t you look around for a while? I don’t think you’ve even noticed how sweetly the birds are singing” (Grimm 14). In The Uses of Enchantment, child psychiatrist and writer Bruno Bettelheim points out that at this point, what is essentially being considered by Little Red Cap is “the conflict between doing what one likes to do and what one ought to do which Red Cap’s mother had warned her about at the outset” (171). It is the most significant point in the story because the moment Little Red Cap chooses to go off the path, it is decided that her grandmother would be eaten by the wolf. This choice would

In “Riding the Red,” the grandmother tells the readers that when she was a little girl she felt “all shivery and nice to see wolfie’s nostrils flare as he scented [her blood]” (2). Here the grandmother is actually saying that when she was young, she felt excited for the wolf to come rather than scared, which implies that she might even be fond of the wolf. When reading “Little Red Cap,” most people might think that the wolf seduces the little girl first. But the grandmother says otherwise: “some say he even tricked me into it, and it may be they’re right, but that’s not the way this old wife remembers it” (“Riding” 2). At this point, the grandmother is suggesting that she is the seducer and even the manipulator in her relationship with the wolf. Not only was the grandmother fond of the wolf when she was young, she also lost her virginity to him. After they met, they performed the “dance of riding the red” together (“Riding” 2). As mentioned above, “riding the red” is a metaphor for menstruation. So “dance of riding the red” is a metaphor for sexual intercourse. Now it makes perfects sense that at the end of the story the grandmother asks the wolf to go in to her house because she knows that it is the wolf at the door. She invites him in so they could have “one last sweet dance” (5). By creating this bold and