Little Red Riding Hood - Tale

Tale

The story revolves around a girl called Little Red Riding Hood, after the red hooded cape/cloak (in Perrault's fairytale) or simple cap (in the Grimms' version) she wears. The girl walks through the woods to deliver food to her sick grandmother.

A mean wolf wants to eat the girl but is afraid to do so in public. He approaches Little Red Riding Hood and she naïvely tells him where she is going. He suggests the girl pick some flowers, which she does. In the meantime, he goes to the grandmother's house and gains entry by pretending to be the girl. He swallows the grandmother whole, (In some stories, he locks her in the closet), and waits for the girl, disguised as the grandma.

When the girl arrives, she notices that her grandmother looks very strange. Little Red then says, "What a deep voice you have," ("The better to greet you with"), "Goodness, what big eyes you have," ("The better to see you with) "And what big hands you have!" ("The better to hug you with"), and lastly, "What a big mouth you have," ("The better to eat you with!") at which point the wolf jumps out of bed, and swallows her up too. Then, with a fat full tummy, he falls fast asleep.

A lumberjack, however, comes to the rescue and with his axe cuts open the wolf, who had fallen asleep. Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother emerge unharmed. They fill the wolf's body with heavy stones. The wolf awakens and tries to flee, but the stones cause him to collapse and die. (Sanitized versions of the story have the grandmother shut in the closet instead of eaten, and some have Little Red Riding Hood saved by the lumberjack as the wolf advances on her, rather than after she is eaten.)

The tale makes the clearest contrast between the safe world of the village and the dangers of the forest, conventional antitheses that are essentially medieval, though no written versions are as old as that. Specifically, the tale parallels how an innocent victim can be taken in and controlled by a criminal mentality, therefore, facilitating further subjection of a crime or harm against a vulnerable victim through mischievous criminal intent by removing the victim from a familiar or "safe" public location - facilitating the crime in an effort to isolate the victim by drawing her to another location "away from the public eye" where the criminal entity has complete control over the victim.