LITMIR.BIZ

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cabbages, and mud to brick, stone, and iron (Graham and Shefrin 1988).

      The Grimms’ tale “The Wolf and the Seven Kids” (ATU123) contains motifs related to both the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap” and The Three Pigs. As in The Three Pigs, the wolf comes knocking on the goats’ door looking for a meal. The wolf’s fate is similar to that of the wolf in the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap”: the wolf’s victims are rescued from the wolf’s sleeping body. Although not as popular in the United States as either Little Red Cap or The Three Pigs, there are several noteworthy nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and French illustrated versions. It is also a story that shares motifs in several of Aesop’s wolf and goat fables. This indicates the long-lived nature of these tropes.

      The collection and study of tales about little girls and wolves reveal that there are many variants of the tale we know as “Little Red Riding Hood.” At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, French folklorists working in southern France and northern Italy recorded and transcribed 35 versions of an oral folktale featuring a girl’s encounter with a wolf, known collectively as The Grandmother’s Tale. Folklorist Paul Delarue (1956) traced these tales to an initiation ritual of the sewing communities from this region. He also compared them to Perrault’s “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge.” Of these initiation tales, 20 were distinct from Perrault’s tale, two were oral retellings of Perrault’s tale, and 13 were hybrids of Perrault’s tale and The Grandmother’s Tale. Although the source for Perrault’s “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge” remains unknown, its similarities to The Grandmother’s Tale help support the contention that Perrault modified an oral tale to make it suitable for an aristocratic audience. Subsequent comparisons of Perrault’s text with transcriptions of the oral versions suggest that Perrault cleaned up the language, added details (such as the red headdress) not present in the oral versions, and simplified and sanitized the plot by omitting scenes (i.e. the young girl unknowingly eats part of her dead grandmother; and the girl removes her clothing before getting in bed with the wolf). Several of the oral versions end with the girl outwitting and escaping the wolf. Perrault ends his tale with the girl’s death. Perrault also added a moral in verse warning young children, especially girls, of the dangers of courtly and aristocratic wolves.

      Some tales, such as Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty, share similar plots, characters, and motifs with tales found in different parts of the world. For instance, variants of Little Red Riding Hood/The Grandmother’s Tale have been found in France, Italy, and Germany but also in China, Korea, and Japan (Delarue 1956). Several theories attempt to explain the origins and evolution of tales and their variants. One theory popular during the nineteenth century was monogenesis. It posited that all folktales came from a single point of origin, specifically Indo-European culture, from where they emerged, evolved, and diffused. As people and cultures dispersed, they carried their stories with them, adapting them to reflect new social, cultural, and physical environments. During the late nineteenth century, a second theory, polygenesis, began to emerge. It argued that tale variants arose independently in different places as different cultures evolved and responded to the challenges and concerns that confront all humans (Thompson 1977, p. 380; see also Warner 1994, pp. xxi–xxii).

Literary scholar Jack Zipes (2009) proposed an explanation for the persistence of tales variants across time and cultures. Drawing on relevance theory, mimetics, and evolutionary psychology, Zipes proposed that the enduring and widespread appeal of certain folktales lies in story memes. Story memes are cultural artefacts that act like genes: they replicate, adapt, and spread. Embedded in our neurons, they have become part of our genetic make-up and are triggered by different situations to help us cope. And as with genes, story memes are passed on from generation to generation. Zipes cautioned, however, that not all folktales become memes. Only those tales that benefit or are perceived to benefit humans (tales such as Cinderella, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, and The Frog Prince) become embedded in our neurons, surviving through adaption and dissemination. While Zipes does not offer a theory for the origin of tales, he does attempt to explain the persistence of tales across time and cultures.

      Early folklorists looked to myths and mythic rituals to help uncover a tale’s meaning. Charles Ploiz (1891) saw the wolf as representing the night that swallows the light (Little Red Cap) and the hunter as the Greek hero who cuts open the wolf’s belly and releases the “light” of a new day. In P. Santyves’s (1923) analysis of the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap,” Little Red Cap represents the German May Queen and the wolf is akin to Fenrir, the wolf that swallows the sun in Norse mythology.

      Other scholars have turned to psychoanalytical theory to explain a character’s behavior. Erich Fromm (1955) and Bruno Bettelheim (1975) base their analyses of Little Red Riding Hood on the Grimms’ version, “Little Red Cap.” Fromm, focusing on details present in only the print versions (i.e. the red cape), sees the wolf’s feasting on both the grandmother and the little girl as reflecting male–female conflict and women’s deep-rooted hatred toward men. Bettelheim, although aware of the oral versions of the tale, also narrows his focus to the Grimms’ print version. Fromm interprets “Little Red Cap” as a cautionary tale about the loss of virginity and the dangers of sex. For Bettelheim this tale is about pleasure principle (id) or the conflict between doing what one wants to do and what one ought to do. In his reading, Little Red Cap ignores her mother’s instructions and allows herself to be seduced by the wolf, because she wants to be seduced. Géza Róheim (1953) and Alan Dundes (1988) look beyond the two main print versions of the tale to the oral version The Grandmother’s Tale. For both of them, the cannibalism of the girl partaking of her dead grandmother’s flesh and blood underscores oral aggression and intergenerational conflict. Dundes, who also analyzes the defecation scene found in some versions of “The Grandmother’s Tale,” offers yet another layer of meaning: anality. As the wolf moves to devour the girl, she announces her need to defecate. Although the wolf (the adult figure) invites her to defecate in the bed, the girl insists on going outside, thus ensuring her escape. Dundes reads this reversal of the parent–child toilet training roles as a form of anality (p. 225).

      To better understand how a tale or group of tales were adapted to function within specific social, cultural, or political contexts, several researchers have begun to treat them as historical documents. Historian Robert Darnton (1984) looked to the oral tales recorded by French folklorists at the end of the nineteenth century – tales that would have been passed down from generation to generation within families and communities – to better understand how eighteenth-century French peasants (a group of mostly illiterate people who left no written records behind) viewed the world.

Research on the historical and cultural contexts within which the collectors of tales worked have helped to dismantle the perception that folktales are timeless, universal, and the voice of the volk. Marina Warner’s (1994) and Lewis Seifert’s (1996) research on late seventeenth-century France and Charles Perrault’s work situate his collection of folktales within the cultural debate known as the Querrelle des Anciens et Modernes, or the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns,” which lasted from 1687 to 1694. The debate focused on whether France’s cultural greatness lay in modeling its artforms on those of Ancient Greece and Rome or whether it could be found in its own vernacular artforms, of which fairy tales (les contes de fées) were one (Seifert 1996, p. 906). The debate was played out at the court of Louis XIV and in the salons of Paris. Perrault, as a champion of the Moderns, reworked and published oral folktales into narratives appropriate for an educated, aristocratic adult audience of the salons.

      Similarly, studies focusing on the Brothers Grimm and their collection of tales have helped to debunk the Grimms’ claims that their tales were uniquely German and reflected the timeless wisdom of the German volk. Their sources included not only oral tales but also literary ones. That only German volk contributed the tales was also a myth. Although the Grimms idealized the peasant storytellers, they obtained most of their tales from educated, middle-class and aristocratic tellers, including Wilhelm’s wife, Dortchen Wild. Most of these tellers came from the regions of Kassel and Westphalia. One group of contributors were the Hassenpflugs, descendants of French Huguenots. The Hassenpflugs recounted tales such as “Little Red Cap” and “Briar Rose,” both of which suggest that the tellers knew Perrault’s tales of Little Red Riding

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