ABSTRACT
In her analysis of Little Red Riding Hood the anthropologist Mary Douglas contrasted ribald sixteenth-century French versions of the tale with the saccharine adaptations of the modern period. In the rural-peasant rendering, Hood is tricked into eating and drinking her grandmother’s flesh, enticed into bed with the wolf and subjected to his rakish attempts to seduce her. Using her initiative, the girl escapes with the assistance of washerwomen on the riverbank. Linguistic clues indicate that Hood is not so little, but at the age of puberty. The wolf seeks to initiate the girl into the world of sex but a network of older women assist Hood in retaining her virginity. The transition from girl to woman is fraught with sexual danger, embodied in the form of the wolf with his lusty masculine desire, which must be navigated by a combination of youthful guile and older women’s wisdom. Douglas notes that Mother Goose stories operated to transmit generational beliefs about physiology, sex and culture. Allegorical tales regarding pubescent boys depicted crude and brutal associations between male sexuality and culture (epitomized, Douglas tells us, in vulgar anecdotes about pigs’ testicles at the annual slaughter season). On what she terms a dignity register, in genre and goriness, Douglas suggests that stories ranging from the gross to the refined can indicate the level of dis/respect and dis/honour shown for different parts or stages of different bodies. The dignity index is pivotal to interpreting the meanings of stories. Thus, early versions of the Little Red Riding Hood story indicate respect for the alignment of female physiology with Nature and identify a coherent feminine world pitched against the vulgar world of corporeal masculinity.1
