Little Red Riding Hood Symbolism

Nicole Zajac

Mr. Nowakoski

World Literature A¾

March 22, 2017

Joyce Carol Oates “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is an odd and troubling short story that presents a convincingly realistic portrait of a shallow normal teenage girl who is kidnapped and somewhat forced to comply with a strangers orders. Connie is pretty, vain, and a boy-crazy teen seemingly so air-headed and majorly influenced by images of romance from movies and pop music that, as her mother says, her mind is "all filled with trashy daydreams". Oates short story is viable for multiple interpretations. "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" may be seen as a realistic representation of a girl's seduction or entrapment by a disturbed man who will presumably rape

her, but also as a sort of mythical tale, the story may also be considered an allegory describing the seductive attraction of evil, for there are hints that the villain, Arnold Friend, is not purely "human," so he may even be compared to the devil or to the big bad wolf in the short story “Little Red Riding Hood”.

Both short stories present a parallelism between one another. Parallelism is demonstrated within these two short stories when the antagonists of “Where Are You Going, Where have you been” and “Little Red Riding Hood” mask themselves to portray other figures to gain advantage of the girls. Both protagonists, Connie in ““Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” ” and the girl in the “Little Red Riding Hood”, are being stalked by the evil ominous antagonists in which the girls just cannot escape. Sigmund Freud developed a theory of human personality in which he believed there are three components of the human mind: the id, the ego, and the superego. His theory of personality can be used to understand Connie’s and Little Red’s psychological process. In Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”, Connie’s decision on whether she will or will not go for a ride with an older man exemplifies the argument between the id and the superego, and her ego trying to balance the two. Ultimately Connie’s ego is unable to

balance the id and the superego, so she lets her desires take over. In Charles Perrault’s short story “Little Red Riding Hood”, Little Red encounters the several instances of id, ego and superego when she enters the woods and disobeys her mother’s words. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and “Little Red Riding Hood”, Connie and Little Red face a multitude of problems that seemingly unwillingly affect their future choices.
Connie’s desires, her id, are the most present in the story.

We can see her desires shown through the way she looks at herself, her relationship with her family, and her connection to friends and other boys. Her main desires that she wants to fulfill is to acquire the attention from others. In the first paragraph of the short story, Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates Connie’s obsession with her looks: “…she had a quick nervous giggle habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors, or checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right” (Oates...). Connie constantly checks other people’s faces for assurance that she is always looking better than they are. This quality of her personality is related to her id and her need for attention from others. It is also possible that her need for attention derives from her life at home because at home she does not get much attention from her family. Her mother is always on her back, telling her that she needs to be more like her older sister who helps out at home and is “plain and chunky.”, as Connie likes to say. Also, her father is rarely around at home and when he is, he reads the newspaper, eats supper, and then goes to bed. As opposed to her family, Connie had a different way of dressing, walking, and laughing when she was with her friends. When Connie is with her friend, she leaves with a boy where “she spent three hours with him, at the restaurant where they ate hamburgers and drank cokes in wax cups that were always

sweating, and then down an alley a mile or so away” (Oates 314). This is where her sexual desires and her need for attention begin to intertwine within the story. Connie shows that with her friends and random boys—away from her family where there are rules and morals—she is more herself, more her id.
On the other hand, Connie’s id is somewhat controlled when Connie is at home with her family, but often seemed to be more controlled with the presence of her mother. When Connie’s mother compares a not very respectable girl to Connie, she responds: “’Oh, her. That dope.’ She always drew think clear lines between herself and such girls, and her mother was simple and kindly enough to believe her. Her mother was so simple, Connie thought, that is was maybe cruel to fool her so much” (Oates 314). Connie comprehends that she is just like the girl that her mother brought up in the conversation, but she wants her mother to believe that she has more morals and values than the girl. When Connie pretends to be a respectable and normal teenage girl, just as society and her mother want her to be, she demonstrates the superego. Connies conscience wants her to fulfill her mother’s idea of being this normal teenage girl, but her sexual desires and her need for attention overweigh the task needed to be fulfilled by Connie to be what her mother expects her to be.
When Connie is presented with a situation in which she needs to decide whether she will or will not go for a ride with a man she does not know of. The situation challenges Connie’s ego by having it try to balance her id and her superego. When her whole family is gone, she hears a car pull up to her house, and finds it is a gold convertible with a person she remembers seeing briefly before. To many other people a familiar car pulling up to their house would be a sign to take cautionary steps, but to Connie she only is concerned as how she appears to this other human being: “Her heart began to pound and her fingers snatched at her hair, checking it, and she whispered, ‘Christ. Christ,’ wondering how bad she looked” (Oates ...). Connie talks to this boy, in which she later discovers he is actually a man of about thirty, who continuously asks her to come outside and go for a ride with him. Her id and superego fight on whether she should go with the stranger into his car, so he can presumably rape her. Later, he calls her by her name—which she never told him—and he knows all of her family members names are, and where they are in the time being. Connie fights her id by repetitively telling Arnold no, but is also deemed susceptible to her desires because she still stands behind her screen door talking to him. Connie understands that she is in a dangerous situation when “she thought, I’m never going to see my mother again… I’m not going to sleep in my bed again” (Oates ...). Though she comprehends the danger in the situation, she admires Arnold due to the countless amount of affection shown towards her. Connie’s id is taking control of her mind when she begins to remember him from the restaurant. According to the text, “and her cheeks warmed at the thought of how she sucked in her breath just at the moment she passed him—how she must have looked to him. And he had remembered her” (Oates ..). It was at this point that Connie’s ego was unable to balance the needs and desires of the id and the desire for social acceptance. Even though Connie knew of the harmful risks she would be taking when going with this man into the car, her id won over the ego and superego due to her incapability to resist to her desires.
In Charles Perrault’s story,