This research compares and contrasts two narratives of the story of Little Red Cap, or Little Red Riding Hood, John B. Gruelle and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Though there are obvious differences between the tales that might be attributed to the national cultures in which they emerged, what they share is a common view of the vulnerability embedded into ordinary female experience that, despite the fairy-tale pattern of ideas and events, appears to reflect certain social realities and social expectations of women. Accordingly, both of these versions of Little Red Riding Hood can be interpreted chiefly as exercises in social instruction; in the differences between the versions can be detected articulations of the extent of moral agency of women.
Langer's analysis of fairy tales is that they are a literary exercise in wishful thinking and that their fantasy stories are "never believed by adults even in the telling" (175). If that is true as far as the difference between the nightly news and make-believe bedtime stories goes, Langer's analysis does not capture identifiable linkages between normative social values and the figures of fairy-tale narrative, including but not limited to "Little Red Riding Hood." One difference between the Gruelle and Grimm versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" is that Gruelle's tale has a prepubescent child at the center of the story, while the Grimms refer to "a sweet little maiden" who is old enough to be trusted to carry wine and food into the woods, clever enough to promise not to stray from the path, but naïve enough to share personal family details with a stranger--and curious and suggestible enough to be distracted from her mother's injunction by a stranger's promise of aesthetic fulfillment (the flowers). Gruelle's Red Riding Hood is straightforwardly childlike--fearless as only child can be and both brimming over with ideas and easily distracted from them. That explains why she asks her mother to take c...