LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD // PREDATION
A little girl once dawdled on a woodland path while making her way to Grandmother’s house, and there she met a wolf both alluring and threatening. As an early and enduring tale of what today’s audience might call “stranger danger,” Little Red Riding Hood invites a lot of speculative interpretation. Freud and his ilk would (and did) have a field day, but they aren’t alone. Often, the potentially sexual elements of the story have been singled out for analysis – the slavering “wolf” stalking the innocent girl for unseemly purposes – at the exclusion of other noteworthy themes. Despite or because of this, Red’s story is sometimes rewritten as either a bawdy horror tale or one of sexual liberation.
Illustrators over time have chosen either to highlight or completely excise the more unsavory undertones. The bare bones of the story are provocative enough that doing so requires deliberate decision-making, with such scenes as the wolf accosting the child in the woods, or the climatic tableau in which the wolf – disguised as Grandmother – lays in bed and pulls her close.
In this collection of illustrative interpretations, Red’s journey begins with an unauthorized 1697 printing of Perrault’s “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge” in which the wolf eats the girl and that’s that. Over the course of almost 300 years of illustration, the wolf is shown as threatening, humorous, or both, while Red is either foolish or wary along the way to being eaten. No matter when or how the tale is illustrated, however, the two remain locked in their cycle of deception, devouring, and—only sometimes—escape.
