Introduction:
The Grimm Brothers’ Little Red Riding Hood (1857), and Roald Dahl’s contemporary spin on the well-known fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf (1982), both endeavored to shape the meaning of the traditional fairy tale. Although Dahl relies on an audience familiar with the original fable to appreciate his alterations, both texts are aimed towards a target audience of children. Through comparison of the two differing versions, connections will be identified. Similarities and differences in relation to form, purpose and language will be explained; and subsequently, how these similarities and differences impact the target audience.
Form:
Encapsulating the traditional fairy tale structure, Grimm’s tale is presented in the form of a narrative, featuring a clear introduction, plot, and resolution. Grimm preserves the phrase symbolic to traditional fairy tales, “once upon a time”, introducing the audience to a familiar world of fantasy. The events unfold through a chronological sequence: “After that the aged grandmother”, “Then all three were delighted” and “Soon afterwards the wolf knocked”, followed by informative sentences: “the door sprang open, and without saying a word he went straight to the grandmother’s bed, and devoured her”, complimenting Grimm’s formal and instructive intentions, embellishing and providing the audience with a sound understanding. Grimm embraces the use of a third-person voice to gain authority of the audience, and sufficiently sculpts each character into their conventional protagonist and antagonist roles: Little Red Riding Hood as a ‘dear little girl’ and wolf as ‘wicked creature’.
Dahl offers a significantly different interpretation, transforming the traditional folk tale into a poem. The consistent use of rhyme and rhythm appeals to the audience, allowing smooth transition and flow between sequences. The several stanzas composing the poem feature short sentences which add clarity; eventually compacting at the final plot twist, “The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers”, to represent an acceleration in pace and create audience suspension. Dahl also begins his version with the wolf–a perspective not usually seen–to ensure the audience identifies with the wolf.
The tradition of telling fairy tales to children effects not only the listener but also the reader. Maria Tatar, in her book Off with Their Heads!, analyzes how fairy tales instill and reaffirm cultural values and expectations in their audience . Tatar proposes that fairy tales fall into three different tale-types: cautionary tales, exemplary stories, and reward- and- punishment tales. These three types portray different character traits as desirable and undesirable. Due to the tale’s varying literary methods it can change the effectiveness of the tale’s pedagogical value. In Tatar’s opinion, all of these tales are similar in the way they attempt to use punishment, reward, and fear to encourage or discourage certain behaviors. In the cautionary fairy tale “The Virgin Mary’s Child”, the use of punishment and fear to discourage certain behaviors is enhanced by the Christian motifs and values employed by the tale. These literary devices encourage the audience to reflect on and internalize the lessons that are presented in the fairy tale.
Once upon a time, there lived a girl named Little Red Cap. Everyone believed that she was a sweet and innocent girl, but did someone else lay beneath her exterior? In the Brothers Grimm version of the story, Little Red Cap takes on the persona of childlike innocence. In the animated movie Hoodwinked!, she is seen as a young girl who is smart, independent, and named Red. There are numerous fairy tales that have been told throughout the course of history. Many of the tales remain independent and true to the original version, and then there are those that have been altered in many different ways. “Little Red Cap” has been revised into the version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” which many of us are familiar with, to the different and modern film version of Hoodwinked!. These stories are updated to appeal to modern generations, cultures and societal views. Consequently, they do pose many similarities, but their differences make each work unique in their own way.
The view point of an author can be determined easily by comparing works of the same basic plots and characters. Also by contrasting the same two works is equally as important. “Little Red Riding Hood'; by Charles Perrault and Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves'; are perfect examples. The writer’s purpose, characterization, and readability shows one of many ways of pinpointing the author’s bias.
Little red riding hood is about a girl on a trip to her sick grandmother’s house but she had met a wolf on her way there. There are many different versions of this story, the Perrault version and Grimm version. There was also a parody of Little Red Riding Hood called Hoodwinked!. In all of the stories they all start with a mother giving something to give to her daughter. For her daughter to travel into the forest to give her grandmother what her mother had made.
As a child, I was told fairytales such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs every night before I went to sleep. Fairytales are an adventurous way to expand a child’s imagination and open their eyes to experience a new perspective. Modernizations of fairytales typically relate to a specific audience, such as adolescence, and put a contemporary spin on the old-aged tale. Instead of using whimsical themes heavily centered in nature, the contemporary poems connect with the reader in a more realistic everyday scenario. Also, many modernizations are written in poetic form to help reconstruct a flow in the piece and to develop or sometimes completely change the meaning from that of the original fairytale. Comparing Grimm’s Fairytale Snow White
Folktales are a way to represent situations analyzing different prospects about gender, through the stories that contribute with the reality of the culture in which they develop while these provide ideas about the behavior and roles of a specific sex building a culture of womanhood, manhood and childhood. This is what the stories of Little Red Riding Hood of Charles Perrault (1697) and Little Red-Cap of the Grimm Brothers (1812) show. This essay will describe some ideas about gender in different ways. First, the use of symbolic characters allows getting general ideas about the environment in the society rather than individuals. Second, it is possible to identify ideas about gender from the plot from the applied vocabulary providing a
Folktales has created men as the most powerful character in most stories but that does not mean always as there’s a difference in Grandmother’s tale and Little Red Riding hood. Different genders have different expectations according to their characteristics. The Red Riding Hood and Grandmother’s tale has produced ideas such as how a girl’s life is looked upon in the past and how the male has the upper hand in most situations according to the stories. This essay will argue about how the girl’s gender played a major role in the context of the story and how the wolf is represented by a male character and why the male is not always the most powerful character in all stories and the comparison
Conversely, Orenstein maintains that, by focusing on only the historical dimension of the tale as opposed to its larger social context, Darnton misses vital elements of the tale’s broader themes as well as the changes which occurred in the transition to the male-dominated written tradition. Orenstein begins by noting the wide breadth of oral cognates to “Little Red Riding Hood” which had been discovered across Europe and in Asia (Orenstein 69). Citing the work of folklorist Paul Delarue, she establishes that “Charles Perrault - whose 1697 text is the presumed source of the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap” - had dramatically revised the original folk tradition” (Orenstein 71). Most significantly, Orenstein observes - and criticizes Darnton’s lack of observation - that when authors began to put these stories onto paper, “the sense of female authorship - literally, female authority” (Orenstein 83) disappears from their tales. Fundamentally, Orenstein advances an interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood as a hero story whose “heroic heroine” (Orenstein 82), her cleverness, and most significantly her triumph over evil have all but vanished from the popular literary tradition.
Reading fairy tales or seeing them represented has become part of an everyday routine for children. As Baker-Sperry states, “Through interaction that occurs within everyday routines (Corsaro 1997), children are able to learn the rules of the social group in which they are a part” (Baker-Sperry 717-718). For example, through Red Riding Hood, children learn to listen to their parents and to be wary of strangers. Some of these messages are harmful though; not all girls have to be naive and weak while boys are predacious wolves. Not everyone has to play the role that society assigns them.
Fairy Folk Tales are the most popular types of literature. The tale is an orally transmitted tradition by generations through the time; some events are changed to fit reality and society. Folk fairy tales deal with the dualism of the good and the evil. They are basing on a conflict between the good and the evil forces. The conclusion comes from aspirations of the human desire to achieve the justices. There are no known authors and sources for ancient literature. We have many versions of the story; they are credited by many authors later. Each tale is very like some other culture’s tale. Each culture has own tales, but all the tales are similar and different in some points. This essay will compare between two
In Tatar’s article, An Introduction to Fairy Tales, she draws us in by describing childhood books as “sacred objects.” She takes a quote from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. describing how the stories give lessons about what a child subconsciously knows - “that human nature is not innately good, that conflict is real, that life is harsh before it is happy - and thereby reassure them about their own fears and their own sense of self,” (Tatar 306). She describes how many adults long for the simplicity of enjoying those stories in their childhoods, only to realize that they outgrew them, and instead have been introduced to reality. The original stories were more for adults rather than for children. Nowadays, stories have been adapted to be more suitable for children. Fairy tales may allow a kid to wonder due to their charm, but they also can
Most modern fairytales are expected to have happy endings and be appropriate for children, nonetheless, in past centuries most were gruesome. Consequently, fairytales have been modified throughout time. The stories “Beauty and the Beast” by Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont and “The Summer and Winter Garden” by Jacob and Wilherm Grimm share similarities and differences. The two stories are distinct because of the peculiar year they have been written in. LePrince de Beaumont’s story is written in London of 1783 and Grimm’s in Germany of 1812. At the time, wealthy people in London, were educated and had nannies who would read to their children; whereas, in Germany, the Grimm brothers created their own interpretation into a short story.
Original fairy tales restrict the opportunities of female protagonists, allowing their fate to be controlled by male characters and society’s restrictive expectations of women. Authors such as Perrault of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ were quick to provide advice to their suggestible female readers in moral that girls should not try to drift from the path that society has laid out for them. Thus they became ‘parables of instruction’ (Carter) to indoctrinate the next generation in the values of a patriarchal society. Fairy tales of this time consistently remind us that those of the female sex will not prosper if they choose to ignore and defy the social constructs. Pre 1900s, the roles of women were entirely predetermined. A clear female dichotomy was established portraying them as either ‘the virgin’ or ‘the whore’. Stereotypical perceptions of women reduced them to biological functions and stated that they should acquire the role of wife and mother – objectified to such an extent where they were essentially their male counterpart’s possession. Both authors scorn the importance placed on domesticity and conformity, stressing the vital nature of being able to choose and uncover the consequences of societal ignorance. Carter highlights to her literary audience a passive generation of women who face the inability to vocalise their thoughts and opinions in the context of oppressive patriarchy. Within her work ‘The Company of Wolves’ “The
When imaging the ideal audience of fairytales, children are quick to come to mind, although, our perception of Little Red Riding Hood as an innocent fable is far from the truth. Alternatively, the origins of this story are derived from Italo Calvino’s “The False Grandmother”, a story immersed in symbolism and metaphorical symbols intended strictly for a mature audience. The preceding tale was “Little Red Cap “written by Charles Perrault and then later the “Little Red Riding” written by the Brothers Grimm. Although the details of these tales vary, they all maintain similar storylines. The stories revolve around the young female character Little Red Riding Hood who is sent off on a mission to bring her grandmother a basket of goods. During her adventure she encounters a wolf who engages in a hot pursuit to eat both the Grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood, only to succeed in the earlier rendition of the story. In this essay I will prove that when the Grimm’s Brothers and Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood stories are critically analyzed, it becomes evident that they are inappropriate tales for children as they exemplify the consequences of a minor transgression by Little Red Riding Hood as being the misleading cause of the violence and seduction that occurs thereafter.
The folk tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” has numerous variations and interpretations depending on what recorded version is being read or analyzed. “Little Red Cap,” by the Grimm Brothers, and “The Grandmother,” as collected by Achille Millien, are different in numerous ways: the depth of the narrative structure, characters involved, length – yet, the moral lesson is largely unchanged between the two versions. One of the more glaring differences between the two versions is the way that the narrator and the actions of the characters are used to describe the young girl, female, and the wolf, male. Being either female or male are matters of biological makeup. The characteristics of femininity and masculinity that are associated with being