Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked! -A Book

http://www.amazon.com/Little-Red-Riding-Hood-Uncloaked/dp/0465041264

"... She is every Girl Next Door, every Damsel in Distress. She debuted in Walt Disney’s first animated cartoon in 1922, six years before Mickey Mouse. She was Charles Dickens’s first love. “I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood,” he declared, “I should have known perfect bliss.” “Little Red Riding Hood” is told on every continent, in every major language. But most of people don’t know the tale as well as they think.

Once upon a time, hundreds of years ago, “Little Red Riding Hood” was a bawdy morality tale for adults, quite different from the story we know today. New stories have been made out of the old, and its original meanings are now buried. Only recently has it become a children’s tale. Now the tale is rife with symbols and glaring peculiarities left over from its colourful past lives, but most of us overlook them. We pass it down from one generation to the next, unaware of its history and power.

Her basket of wine and cakes, it’s said, represents Christian Communion; her red cape stands for menstrual blood. Some see the tale in Freudian terms as the Ego overcome by the Id; others see it as symbolic of the relationship between Man and Woman. Tellers have consciously and subconsciously manipulated the plot to portray a seduction by a temptress, the rape of a virgin of the passage of a young girl into womanhood. From a structural perspective, the plot is powerfully simple. Opposites collide- good and evil, beast and human, male and female.

In the earliest written version of the tale, the girl strips off her clothes, joins the beast under the covers- and dies. A rhyming moral at the end warns women to watch out, because man can be a “wolf”, popularizing the use of that term, still common today, to mean a seducer. In later versions of the story a hunter or woodsman comes to the rescue, imparting the revised moral that a good man-father, or perhaps a husband –can save a woman from her folly. With his knife, or sometimes scissors, he cuts her free, lifting her out from the belly of the beast as if from a bad dream and giving her a second chance to walk the straight path through life. In modern versions of the story, which echo themes of the earliest known oral folktale, the girl escapes on her own. Teaching that women can save themselves. She carries her own pair of scissors, or tricks the wolf with a clever ruse, or sometimes fights."

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