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Intertextuality / Little Red Riding Hood
Little Red Riding Hood, as in the traditional version of the fairy-tale familiar to present day English language audiences, has just been eaten by the Big Bad Wolf, then rescued from his stomach. This is what she has to say, in lyrics written by Stephen Sondheim for Into The Woods:
And I know things now, many valuable things
That I hadn't known before:
Do not put your faith in a cape and a hood,
They will not protect you the way that they should.
And though scary is exciting,
Nice is different than good.
Now I know, don't be scared:
Granny was right,
Just be prepared.
Isn't it nice to know a lot?
And a little bit not… (Sondheim 69)
Sondheim is quite consciously allegorizing the story of Little Red Riding Hood as a story about a girl's experience of puberty. But how did Red Riding Hood manage to turn its wolf into a sexual predator? The same tendentious reading of the fairy tale is echoed in the 2005 film Hard Candy, which starred Canadian actress Ellen Page. (That Page would later become Oscar-nominated for a film about a pregnant teenager demonstrates that her metier as an actress apparently involves narratives of adolescent sexuality.) In...
I am using this term to mean something specific -- something more than allusion. If I made a film about a girl who robs banks, while wearing a red hood, and called it Little Red Riding Hood, that would be an allusion, even I were to name her antagonist Police Commissioner Wolf. The reason this hypothetical film is not intertextual is because although it alludes to the Little Red Riding Hood story, it does not also allude to an Interpretation of that story. Intertextuality not only requires a knowledge of some original text, it requires a knowledge of a school of interpretive thought about that text. Calling two characters Adam and Eve is an allusion -- but using them to make a point about Original Sin is intertextual, since it requires not only knowledge of the text (in this case, Genesis) but also a knowledge of traditions of how to read that text (in this case, Christianity). In this case, Hard Candy is doing something more than alluding to Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Although in one crucial way Hard Candy sets itself up as its own form of cinematic fairy tale, insofar as it invites us to read Ellen Page's Hayley Stark the way that we read Little Red Riding…
Remake of Little Red Riding Hood Once there was a boy who lived with his mother in a town called Alamo. The boy, named Red, was a kind son to his mother. Every time his mother tells him to do something, like watering the plants in the garden, or washing the dishes, Red always follows happily. One day, Red's mother called him while he was playing with his friends outside their
The most glaringly obvious difference between the tales of Little Red Riding Hood and Little Red Cap is the ending. The Perrault version ends swiftly and gruesomely with no chance of redemption, no moral being taught and no real purpose to the story other than to tell a frightening and entertaining story. The moment the wolf devours Little Red Riding Hood, that is the end. In the Grimm version however,
Red Riding Hood is an interesting folk tale which has been very popular among children and adults alike. Several versions of the story are found but the most common elements remain the same whereby a young little girl is asked by her mother to visit her grandmother and give her some food. Upon her arrival however, she finds that a wolf has replaced her grandmother but just when he
Red Riding Hood and its variants is one of the best known fairy tales, but the different versions of a little girl's experiences while going to visit her grandmother have textual differences which serve to change the tone, if not the overall arc, of the story. However, these differences can actually help one to understand the wide range and reception of fairy tales, because even though different versions of
In fact, he stresses that these stories should be read without any commentary about the possible unconscious content. "Fairy tales can and do serve children well, can even make an unbearable life seem worth living, as long as the child doesn't know what they mean to him psychologically" (Bettelheim 57). This destroys the story's enchantment. More recently, different authors have returned to the earlier usage of fairy tales, or conveying
Red Riding Hood in the Red Light District by Manilo Argueta Reviewed through Ant's perspective So Alfonso, you are my wolf, are you not? That is what Manilo Argueta calls you in his book entitled Little Red Riding Hood in the Red Light District. He wrote this book during the 1970's, during the height of the oppression suffered by the El Salvadorian nation, and imposed upon us by the military regime