Little Red Riding Hood

“Little Red Riding Hood” exists in more than fifty variants in cultures around the world. It is the story of a young girl who travels through the woods to visit her grandmother only to find that her grandmother has been devoured by a wolf who, disguised as the grandmother, devours the little girl as well. Scholars disagree about the origin of the tale, but they agree that the tale was deeply rooted as an oral narrative long before a Belgian priest produced the first written version, a poem in Latin, in the eleventh century. Mined for meaning by ethnologists, psychoanalysts, and feminists, Little Red Riding Hood has so permeated Western culture that it can be found in varied guises in poetry and prose, in visual arts, and in film.

Brief History

Frenchman Charles Perrault included “Le petit chaperon rouge” in his collection of literary fairy tales, Histoires ou Contes du temps passe (1697). Perrault’s version consists of a brief prose tale followed by a rhymed moral that warns young ladies to beware wolves, especially the gentle ones who deceive with sweet words. Scholars credit Perrault with introducing the detail of the red hood in his version, the first to appear in print. Although Perrault wrote his tales to amuse an adult audience, Robert Samber intended Histories, or Tales of Past Times. Told by Mother Goose—the first English translation of Perrault’s book—for children. Samber also followed the order of the tales in the 1721 French-language edition by Desbordes, a major publisher in Amsterdam, rather than Perrault’s original order, placing Little Red Riding Hood first. Samber’s titles and Desbordes’ order were followed in most subsequent translations.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s version of Little Red Riding Hood appeared in the first edition of their collection Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812), a serious, scholarly work heavy with footnotes, although later editions were edited with children in mind. The Grimms acknowledge Perrault as a source, but their version has none of the sexual suggestiveness of Perrault’s tale. It cautions young girls to mind their mothers and not stray from the path to wander in the forbidden woods. The ending has a passing hunter hear the wolf snoring and cut open the wolf’s stomach to allow Little Red Cap and her grandmother to escape unharmed. The hunter then fills the wolf’s stomach with stones, and the wolf falls dead when he tries to arise from the bed. Translated into more than 160 languages, the Grimms’ version is the source of most retellings.

In the twentieth century, literary scholars focused on the text through various critical lenses—social-historical, Freudian, and feminist among them. Bruno Bettelheim, for example, saw oedipal meaning in the grandmother’s death. Feminist critics have viewed the wolf’s eating the grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood as a metaphor for rape and insisted that the savior-hunter represents a protective patriarchy that rescues the women only to return them to a life that denies them agency.

Topic Today

Poets, novelists, and other writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have transformed the story of the girl in the red hood through satire and socially conscious works. James Thurber, in 1939, presented Little Red Riding Hood as a modern miss who pulls a gun from her basket and kills the wolf. The moral, Thurber notes, is that little girls are less gullible than they used to be. In Roald Dahl’s verse version “Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf” from his Revolting Rhymes (1982), Little Red Riding Hood not only disposes of the wolf with a gun, but she also exchanges her red garment for a new coat made from the wolf’s pelt. Stephen Sondheim uses these details and pushes them a step further in his 1986 musical Into the Woods. Sondheim’s Little Red develops a blood thirst after killing the wolf.

The wolf is a pedophile in the 1996 illustrated poem “Little Red Cap” by Dutch poet and artist Wim Hoffman. In Portuguese author Manuel António Pina’s “The Story of Little Red Riding Hood Told to Children and Perhaps Not” (2005), published with the Little Red Riding Hood paintings of Portuguese-born artist Paula Rego, the predatory wolf who preys on young girls is a neighbor and respectable engineer named Mr. Wolf. In “Wolf,” Francesca Lia Block’s Little Red Riding Hood story in The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold (2001), the rapist/wolf is the stepfather of the protagonist.

Not all revisions of the story present Little Red Riding Hood as an innocent. In “Red,” the first story in The Empress’s New Lingerie and Other Erotic Fairy Tales (2001) by Hillary Rollins, Red “thrills” to the wolf’s violence. In “The Company of Wolves,” British author Angela Carter’s feminist retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood,” from The Bloody Chamber (1979), the girl, rather than fearing the predator, laughs at him, tears his shirt off, and casts it, along with her clothing, into the fire. The story ends not with her death but with her sleeping soundly with the “tender” wolf. In Matthew Bright’s 1996 movie, Freeway, Reese Witherspoon plays a street-smart Little Red Riding Hood who with great difficulty makes her way to grandmother’s house where she kills the serial killer wolf. In Once Upon a Time, an ABC television series that premiered in 2011, Red Riding Hood/Ruby is both girl and wolf. In a 2007 Campari ad, actress Eva Mendes, wearing a red-hooded cloak, controls a chained wolf with her right hand while a bottle of Campari in her left hand rests provocatively against her bared leg. There is a futuristic dystopian retelling of the story in the Netflix anime series The Grimm Variations, which premiered in 2024.

Little Red Riding Hood continues to serve as a resource for storytellers, writers, visual artists, and filmmakers. In 2013, Jamshid Tehrani, a member of the Department of Anthropology at Durham University in the United Kingdom, reported the results of his phylogenetic analysis of the story. He concluded that the common ancestor of Little Red Riding Hood tales originated in Europe rather than Asia as earlier scholars believed. Sandra L. Beckett’s Revisioning Red Riding Hood around the World: An Anthology of International Retellings (2013) includes fifty-two modern retellings of “Little Red Riding Hood” from twenty-four countries and sixteen languages, more than half published since 1990. Red Riding Hood, a 2011 American gothic film produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, has the Red Riding Hood character living in her dead grandmother’s house with her husband, a werewolf. Critics have compared Gina Litherland’s 2011 painting Little Red Cap to Gustave Doré’s etchings for Perrault’s version of the tale.

Bibliography

Beckett, Sandra L. Revisioning Red Riding Hood Around the World: An Anthology of International Retellings. Wayne State UP, 2014.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Vintage, 1975.

Dundes, Alan, ed. Little Red Riding Hood: A Case Book. U of Wisconsin P, 1989.

Greenhill, Pauline, and Steven Kohm. “Hoodwinked! and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade: Animated ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ Films and the Rashômon Effect.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 27, no. 1, 2013, pp. 89–108.

Heiner, Heidi Anne. “History of Little Red Riding Hood.” SurLaLune Fairytales.com, Mar. 2010, www.surlalunefairytales.com/oldsite/ridinghood/history.html. Accessed 11 Feb. 2025.

Magnus-Johnston, Kendra. “‘Reeling In’ Grimm Masculinities: Hucksters, Cross-Dressers, and Ninnies.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 27, no. 1, 2013, pp. 65–88.

Orenstein, Catherine. Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale. Basic, 2002.

Tehrani, Jamshid J. “The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood.” Plos ONE, vol. 8, no. 11, 2013, doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078871. Accessed 11 Feb. 2025.

Zipes, Jack, ed. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood. 2nd ed., Routledge, 1993.