Little Red Riding Hood (LRRH) Connections to Morals, Literary Devices, and Emotions

     When it comes to fairy tales, if there was one to leave any long-lasting impact on me, then that title would go to Little Red Riding Hood, as it gave me a larger, in-depth sense of how I view suspicious people and their victims in general. Hearing about LRRH for the first time wasn’t through any book. I only got the gist of a summary, with it being a young girl (LRRH) being sent out to deliver food to her grandma, but slowly drives towards her misfortune when she decides to take a shortcut into a forest. She encounters a sly wolf who manipulates her into revealing the location of where she is headed while giving suggestions of what she should bring to her grandma to buy time for himself. With the girl distracted, the wolf goes to the location of the grandma’s house and presumably eats her, which he later does to LRRH when she arrives shortly after while he’s dressed up as her grandma to deceive her which can be seen as a way of playing with his meal. There could be different endings or versions of LRRH, although I believe the wolf ate both LRRH and her grandma in the end.

     To me, LRRH gave the morals of avoiding dangerous areas as you could come across an unfortunate demise of someone or something lurking. You don’t know what they’re capable of or what they’re planning as they can take away anything valuable from you to fuel their selfish desires. From experience, I’ve heard about stories that involve perpetrators luring potential victims on Craigslist by setting up fake listings that could probably be seen as too good to be true, which end up with the unsuspecting victim going to the unknown location that was given to them and being robbed as a result. In this case, the wolf takes away LRRH and her grandmother’s lives, which in turn, causes a chain reaction that also greatly affects LRRH’s mother (who is never mentioned?).  Children like LRRH are unsuspecting, making them more vulnerable to danger because they aren’t mentally developed to determine the difference between right and wrong or what’s safe and what isn’t. This is seen in real life, with many cases of kidnapping involving children being lured out by an abductor with the intent of giving gifts, but only for their victims to end up in a ditch, an example being Cherish Perrywinkle,  an eight-year-old girl who faced the same fate after interacting with Donald Smith, the man behind her murder, on the impression that he was going buy her family fast food. Going back to LRRH, someone that the blame can be pinned on is her mother for sending out LRRH while not giving her proper warnings. It means that she wasn’t a very good parental figure or one who cared enough. However, this is probably an exaggeration and the mother may have thought LRRH knew better than to not get involved in such matters. As a comparison, backtracking to Perrywinkle’s case, her mother (whom Cherish was with) when she first met Smith, accepted his offer to buy clothes that she couldn’t afford for her family, with this being her first mistake as she triggered the unwilling concord of Cherish’s final moments. After he fulfilled his offer, Smith then offered to buy them fast food which they also agreed to, with Cherish deciding to follow him shortly after, being the final nail in the coffin to her demise. Because of this, I believe that some of the blame should be put onto the mother, as she should’ve known better as an adult to not trust a random stranger around her kids and needed to keep a better eye on Cherish. 

     Emotionally, this fairy tale didn’t evoke any strong feelings within me, however, in some versions of LRRH, I can appreciate how grim and more complex it becomes with morals compared to the clean version. An example is Angela Carter’s “Company of Wolves” which is based on “Little Red Riding Hood”, that follows a different version of LRRH being much older and well-bred, and the wolf is a werewolf (an anthropomorphic creature disguised as a human). When LRRH encounters the wolf in his human form, he charms her with his looks, building up the trust he needs to tear down the unsuspecting girl. The ending is the same, however, the message/moral is conveyed differently, with it being that children such as LRRH shouldn’t talk to strangers, as they may end up as a wolf’s dinner, similarly making a connection to how predatory behavior around prepubescent children exists in the real world, which is whole other problem of itself. 

     When talking about how LRRH improved my literary skills, I can’t say that it did so, however, it does highlight the use of symbolism, personification, and irony. The use of Symbolism is prevalent within LRRH as she’s portrayed as an innocent soul who’s naive of her surroundings while the use of Personification is applied to the sly wolf as he’s considered predatory and manipulative. With both characters feeding into each other’s contrasting characteristics, it becomes a dramatic irony as the audience can already predict what’s about to happen to LRRH because of the wolf’s temptation to eat her and his already suspicious behavior.

     Overall, the story of LRRH gave me an insight into the ideas of people who can serve as a potential danger to anybody. Not everyone has good intentions and when it comes to scenarios that LRRH faces, you shouldn’t trust suspicious strangers and should always maintain a level of self-awareness within others and your surroundings. As a connection to the real world, when it comes to abductions that involve children/minors, most of them are carried out by depraved individuals who have no concern for the well-being of their victims, with most of them being child predators, people who have a sexual attraction towards children and will commit to their fantasies if no one else is watching. They put up a facade to gain their victim’s trust, with their only intention being to carry out their sexual desires onto the child and possibly leave them dead in an unknown location afterward, as an attempt to cover up their crimes. Because of this, children are considered to be more vulnerable and unsuspecting which is why they should be kept an eye on/around you to ensure their security, with LRRH not in the latter, and her short-term relationship with the predatory wolf, despite the wolf having different malicious intentions, demonstrates the potential consequences of not being vigilant enough.

MLA Works Cited

Company of Wolves by Angela Carter: 

https://genius.com/Angela-carter-the-werewolf-annotated

https://genius.com/Angela-carter-the-company-of-wolves-annotated

https://genius.com/Angela-carter-wolf-alice-annotated

Movie Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir34SoEgik0

Cherish Perrywinkle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Cherish_Perrywinkle

About Craigslist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist#Criticism