Friday, September 23, 2011

Little Red Riding Hood - The Clean Version

A woman came up to me a couple of weeks ago and asked me to find her some books with Little Red Riding Hood in them. Before I could even get up she went on to explain further that she had a woman in her ESOL class that had told her a version of the fairy tale;

Little Red Riding Hood goes to visit her grandmother. The wolf beats her there and swallows her grandmother whole, steals her clothes, and lies in wait. LRRR and the Wolf have their witty banter and the wolf swallows her whole too. A woodsman hears screams, comes to investigate, administers a C section on the wolf and out pop Grandmother and LRRR safe and sound. The woman who spoke to me now was appalled at the graphic nature of the story and I used Wikipedia to further explore the story and tell her that this was how it was originally written by Perrault and later Grimm. She went on to say that her student claimed that this was the original story too but the woman wanted a cleaner version to show her to prove that in America, the wolf isn't bisected.

"The theme of the ravening wolf and of the creature released unharmed from its belly is reflected in the Russian tale Peter and the Wolf, and the other Grimm tale The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids, but its general theme of restoration is at least as old as Jonah and the whale. The Theme also appears in the story of the life of Saint Margaret, where the saint emerges unharmed from the belly of a dragon." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_red_riding_hood).

I didn't go into this much detail with the woman but instead we went over to the children's non fiction shelves and went through several books of Little Red Riding Hood, trying to find one that would suit her. Ironically nearly every book I picked up had some version of the wolf being cut open by the hunter. I swear in one book it had the hunter "snipping the wolf open with scissors" like one would undo a stitch. There are cleaner versions of the story as stated in the wikipedia article:

(Sanitized versions of the story have had the grandmother shut in the closet instead of eaten, and some have Little Red Riding Hood saved by the hunter as the wolf advances on her, rather than after she is eaten.)

I was able to find one clean version, published by Random House, that has the grandmother attacking the wolf and running away into the Forest. Little Red Riding Hood comes to visit the wolf in grandma's clothing and the hunter comes and bops the wolf on the head with his axe (double tap) and saves the day.

I ended the reference interview by telling the woman I was just as surprised as she that the children's books would maintain the original version of the story and yet we don't see Cinderella's stepsisters cutting off their toes to fit into the glass slipper as portrayed in Grimm's version.