“Mother said, ‘Straight ahead, Not to delay or be misled’ ”: How “Little Red Riding Hood” has Changed through Social and Historical Context to make a Return to the Oral Tradition’s Ideals

Table of Contents:
I: Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..…2
II: General History of Fairy Tales………………………………………………………....3
III: “The Story of Grandmother”: the Original “Little Red Riding Hood”………………..6
IV: The Beginning of the Written Tradition: Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood”…….18
V: Familiar Tales: The Grimm’s “Little Red Cap”……………………………………...37
VI: The ‘Victorian’ Moral Tradition: Richard Henry Stoddard, Sabine Baring-Gould’s “Little Red Riding Hood”………………………………………………………..57
VII: “Little Red Riding Hood” Revised in the 20th Century…………………………..…64
A) Heather Amery and Stephen Cartwright; Mary Ann Hoberman              (children’s tales)………………………………………………………………....67
B) James Thurber; Roald Dahl; Merseyside Fairy Story Collective
       (gun-toting and fur-wearing Little Reds)…………………………………….…72
C) Angela Carter; Serena Valentino and FSc
        (“Little Red Riding Hood” as a love story)…………………………………....80
VIII: Conclusion………………………………………………………………………....87
IX: Appendix of Figures and Illustrations……………………………………………….91
X: Works Cited……………………………………………………………………..…..111
XI: Recommended Further Reading ………………………………………………..….114

Thesis Statement
The meaning of “Little Red Riding Hood” was lost in the Victorian sanitation of the fairy tale, and only recently has some of it been brought back, with modern versions looking to the historical past and the oral version of this complex work.   As a result, the place to look for real meaning in a fairy tale such as “Little Red Riding Hood” is not the Victorian written versions we have grown accustomed to, where the good triumph over the evil, children are saved, and lessons are learned by all without excessive violence; to understand a fairy tale’s original intent and  all it has to tell, it is essential to either go back to the oral tale itself or to look at recent versions which take the tale’s history into account while adding back the violence and taking away the appended ‘morals’ that made up nineteenth-century versions.





I: Introduction
A little girl skips through the woods to her grandmother’s house, basket in hand.  She meets a wolf and talks to it, revealing where her grandmother lives.  The wolf beats her to her grandmother’s.  We all know what happens next, right?  The grandmother is eaten, so is the little girl, then both are saved by a passing huntsman and the wolf dies. With her experience, the little girl learns the important lessons not to talk to strangers and to obey her parents as she is taught about rape the hard way.  It is simple and easy, without much interest for adults, a fairy tale fit for small children.  But that explanation is far too simplistic for this tale, otherwise it would not have endured when thousands of other tales which moralize small children about the many dangers of the woods, and the perils of disobedience have fallen by the wayside.  Most people’s assumptions are wrong.  In fact, “Little Red Riding Hood” has literally been rendered in hundreds of varying versions around the world for centuries and is a complex tale dealing explicitly with the little girl-in-red’s rape by a hungry wolf.    In the beginning, Little Red Riding Hood was far from a disobedient, slightly sexual young girl learning what she can and cannot handle; she commits an act of cannibalism, performs a strip tease, and escapes from the wolf using her own wits, no huntsman needed.  She does not even wear a cape, hood, or otherwise red item of clothing.  
The version most people are familiar with as the ‘original’ is a take on the nineteenth-century bowdlerization  of the tale, after all of the sex, the subtle meaning, and historical references were taken out so as not to offend.  The meaning of “Little Red Riding Hood” was lost in the Victorian sanitation of the fairy tale, and only recently has some of it been brought back, with modern versions looking to the historical past and the oral version of this complex work.   As a result, the place to look for real meaning in a fairy tale such as “Little Red Riding Hood” is not the Victorian written versions we have grown accustomed to, where the good triumph over the evil, children are saved, and lessons are learned by all without excessive violence; to understand a fairy tale’s original intent and  all it has to tell, it is essential to either go back to the oral tale itself or to look at recent versions which take the tale’s history into account while adding back the violence and taking away the appended ‘morals’ that made up nineteenth-century versions.  

II: General History

After undergoing centuries of change through thousands of pens and mouths, modern versions of fairy tales, whether for children, adults, or some age in between, are in fact much closer to their original oral counterparts than the nineteenth-century written versions which most learned while growing up.  In these versions, the meaning was almost, if not entirely, lost in the moralizing, while the heroes and heroines were watered down in the process.  Since it is in reading/listening to these layers of meaning that all levels of readers are able to purge their fears and desires, as well as where the deeper meanings of the original roots from which the story comes from are passed down, this loss greatly altered and diminished the value of the stories.  In more modern versions, however, as social restraints fell away again, and the historical constructs behind them once again changed to include a more contemporary, violent era, the universal truths and lessons were restored to these texts without the reliance on additive morals or fears aimed at young audiences.   
Essentially, historical changes altered the story itself, but not its ultimate meaning, despite occasional roadblocks in transition from written to oral versions on into the nineteenth-century of high moralization.  This transformation in some cases served to almost bury the story’s layers of meaning, even as it professed to be exposing them.  Not only a trend in “Little Red Riding Hood”, this pattern repeats itself from fairy tale to fairy tale: a ‘violent’, relatively unformed general tale filled with meaning for its adult audience—historical, social, and symbolic—is transformed by writers into something less violent and formulaic, suitable for young children. The images and details of this new version conform to the demands of a ‘higher’ society, with the added morals and ideas that society feels necessary for children to learn.  
But in the process of such a watering down, the characters themselves become devoid of their original meanings and the story’s undertones are often lost at the expense of the only redeeming symbolic features, which served to allow the audience to come to terms with their fears. This trend continues with few exceptions up through the nineteenth-century, with the meaning behind the tale subtly changing as morals and new social codes are forced into the story.  As fairy tales become more recognized as literature for adults, however, and with the rise of a more skeptical, modern society breaking away from past ‘norms’, the fairy tales begin to reverse their process of moralizing.  Some renditions may still continue to basically re-tell the eighteenth-century versions, but more tend to lean toward the original oral tradition, with the original violence, symbols, associations, and often frank sexuality returning to the tale, especially in literature created for adults or young adults.  Even modern children’s literature often seeks to revoke the strict ‘moralizing’ of the earlier eras and experiments with the themes of the story more than ever before, to create new meanings, reinforce old ones, and even, at times, suggest almost a whole return to the oral tales to which they owe their versions.  
But, regardless of how they are written, all of the later tales harken back to earlier ones, borrowing ideas, images, and meaning, both overt and concealed, from their predecessors.  “Little Red Riding Hood” is no exception to this; it moves from a bawdy, explicitly sexual oral tale of a girl’s courage, too-early sexual awakening, and ability to avoid trouble on her own, to nineteenth-century adaptations.  These tales told of a too-curious, and too-spoiled young girl who is seduced by a wolf through her own folly, and must look to a father-figure to rescue her after she experiences sex before she is fully ready.  It is not until recent times that Little Red Riding Hood has been able to escape from danger through her own wits again, seek a fully explicit sexual relationship with a wolf, or even talk to the original creature of the oral tale, who was not a wolf at all.  In these recent versions, a mixture of the old written tales and the oral version appear, bringing back the violence, the sex, and the able female heroine.  Even children’s fairy tales now contain some of these previous taboos again.  But there are many factors other than a literary tradition which created the path “Little Red Riding Hood” took.  Each version was influenced by its society, its time period’s events, the audience it sought, and in modern versions, the decision to look back into history in hopes of recreating the ‘feel’ of the tale while still being able to apply it to contemporary life.

III: “The Story of Grandmother”: the Original “Little Red Riding Hood”

The path a fairy tale takes from its oral to its written versions is nearly impossible to trace, winding through languages, cultures, and millennia.  Even what we may see as the ‘original’ version, meaning the version first written on paper, typically is not the closest to its oral counterparts, which were in fact often told around the hearth and sometimes only resemble the written versions in their most basic facets.  Such is the case with the European “Little Red Riding Hood.”  French writer Charles Perrault’s 1697 conte de fees , often mistakenly considered the forerunner for all other “little red riding hoods,” was not entirely a faithful written version of the oral tale, although it is typically cited as such.  Rather, it was a version of the oral tale heavily edited to fit the needs of the French court, and it barely resembles its sources (Zipes, 2; Tatar, “Classic” 3-4; Orenstein, 28).  Instead, Paul Delarue’s version, “The Story of Grandmother”, written down in 1885 after both Perrault and the Grimm Brothers’ versions, is the version which most closely resembles the oral tradition (Tatar, “Fairy”).  One of the basic variations on the oral tale, it was recorded in Nièvre, Brittany, from Louis and Francois Briffault’s tellings, which spread in different variations around Europe (Zipes, 5; Tatar, “Classic” 10; Windling).  It also makes Perrault’s ending of a dead grandmother and girl look tame by comparison.  
In Delarue’s version, an unnamed “little girl” is sent off to her grandmother’s house with some fresh bread and milk; along the way, she meets a “bzou” ( translated as werewolf) at the “the crossway” between the path of needles and the path of pins (Zipes, 5-6; Tatar, “Classic”, 10, Windling) .  She tells the werewolf where she is going and that she is taking either the “path of needles” or the “path of pins” to get there, depending on the version (Windling).  Delarue’s recording has her taking the path of the needles.  Of course, the werewolf takes the other path and beats the girl to her grandmother’s house while the girl, in Delarue’s version at least, “entertain[s] herself gathering needles” and generally dawdling along the slower path.  The bzou kills the grandmother (not devours) and turns her body into meat and her blood into wine before the girl arrives.   While a talking cat scolds, “Phooey!...A slut is she who eats the flesh and drinks the blood of her granny,” the girl, at the bzou’s bidding, eats the meal.  Some versions also add a talking bird who warns about the blood she drinks (Windling).  
The fear of literally being devoured, being “eaten” as “the little girl” ate her grandmother and as the werewolf threatens to eat and therefore kill the girl with his “big” mouth, is a large factor in this story for young children, rising above their unconscious sexual curiosity with the striptease and other obvious sexual details (Tatar “Classic” 9, Bettelheim, 179-180).  While adults would pick up on the sexual context right away, children would not, and there is data to suggest that when the tale was told, the storyteller “would grab ahold of […] the children nearby when the final line of the well-known dramatic dialogue with the wolf was to be pronounced—‘the better to eat you with!’ ” (Zipes, 7)  Most children would have been afraid of literally being eaten by the bzou, usually played by the grandmother or mother telling the story, and, given the “firm Christian belief in werewolves” in their day they would have had reason to do so (Paradiz, xii-xiv; Zipes, 49; Warner, Introduction-Chapter 9).  So, the fact that the heroine avoids this fate would have stood for her self-assertion and ability to take care of herself, to begin to be worthy of the adult path she chose.
The story then becomes even more odd, as the werewolf states, “Undress yourself, my child […] and come lie down beside me”, leading to what is essentially a striptease, for “each time she asked where she should put all her […] clothes, the bodice, the dress, the petticoat, and the long stockings” the werewolf instructs her to throw them in the fire, since she “won’t be needing them anymore”.  In oral tellings, the storyteller would draw this part out, with each article of clothing undergoing a treatment much like the girl’s classic questions about the wolf’s features later asked (Delarue, 231).  Once in bed, this familiar list of “big” features is gone over, including nails, shoulders, “nostrils” and how hairy ‘granny’ is. This dialogue continues until the werewolf states that its big mouth is “the better to eat you with, my child!” and the little girl claims she needs “to go” and convinces a reluctant werewolf to let her outside after it ties a rope to her leg.  She then ties the same rope to a plum tree and makes her getaway, still naked.  The werewolf humorously questions what kind of business she’s doing before discovering she’s gone, and then chases her, reaching her home “only after she had gotten inside”.
At first glance, this tale may not seem to be much more than a simple tale of entertainment told to bored people around an inn fire.  For the most part, admittedly, that is what it was.  As John Updike once stated, most fairy tales were, in their original forms, “the television and pornography of their day, the life-lightening trash of preliterate peoples” (qtd in Tatar “Annotated” xiii).  The little girl’s provocative and drawn-out disrobing, stated item by item, appears to serve no real purpose other than to entertain, and is definitely not intended for a young audience to fully understand, despite the fact that children would have been present at many of the tale’s tellings (Tatar “Classic”, 3, 8).  However, while seemingly another amusing detail, the fact that she runs naked down the path to her home is set with rebirth, since she is not literally killed (Bettelheim, 179).  Instead, she is reborn a ‘new’, wiser and older child more experienced in the ways of the world because she escaped from being eaten (Bettelheim, 179).  Children would have subconsciously recognized the significance of a naked child, like a young baby, heading home with new knowledge, having escaped one of their biggest fears: being eaten by the unknown wilds (Bettelheim, 179, 180).  Most of the language also works to make this tale more sexually suggestive or simply provide crude jokes for a slightly bored adult audience seeking titillation.  There is the listing of the bzou as “hairy” with “big shoulders,” both characteristics generally associated with men, as is the idea of it having large “nostrils… the better to snuff [its] tobacco with” (Zipes, 6).  This sexually charged idea of the girl in bed with what has essentially become through the description an anthropomorphic beast well capable of doing naughty things (as is no doubt hinted by a hungry wolf despite his having “killed”, but not eaten, the grandmother) is coupled with literal bathroom humor in how the little girl manages to escape, with the werewolf finally questioning if she is “making a load?” and asking her to “go in bed” before she wiles her way outside (Zipes, 6).  
Behind this there is quite a bit of cultural and historical value in the story to be found as well as the beginnings of the psychological and symbolic meaning of the tale, some of which was passed on to more modern versions.  In this fairy tale, like all others, the places and names are kept purposefully vague, which allows the listener to identify with “the little girl”, and to see the “the crossway” as their local crossway (Zipes, 5-6; Bettelheim, 40).  No matter what town or village the story’s characters may live in, every element in the story is kept simple or easily mutable, such as what meal the girl eats made out of her grandmother’s flesh (Warner, xx).  This is done not only so that the story could have been easily adapted to fit the locale it was being currently told in, but also so that it could more easily articulate its truths without worry of ‘real’ names in order to express both the real and the supernatural (Warner, xx).  Yet, like other oral fairy tales “The Story of Grandmother” also concludes with a return to reality (Warner, xx).
In “The Story of Grandmother”, the realities of life at the time and the layers of meaning that could vary based on the audience (for no doubt young children did hear this tale in this form) were passed through the seemingly innocuous, and sometimes downright fantastic, details.  For example, “the little girl” can choose between the path of needles and the path of pins in each version, and she sometimes differs on this subject.  While Delarue regarded this as a nonsense choice, Yvonne Verdier, who studied “the folklore, traditions, and rituals of rural women in remote areas of France”, connected the choice to pubertal rites of passage (Windling; Zipes, 7).  Once a young girl reached puberty, she would be sent off to serve as an apprentice with a local seamstress, learning more about social customs than how to sew, a custom that was referred to as “gathering pins;” boys used to show their affection to young girls through the gifts of numerous pins (Windling).  The needle, on the other hand, especially when threaded, “implied sexual maturity” (Windling).  Similarly, pinning something together is much easier than taking the time to sew it with a needle and thread, so an immature or impatient girl would choose the path of pins rather than the path of needles.  In those versions where the girl chooses the path of needles, and takes extra time “entertain[ing] herself gathering [the] needles” from the path, thereby giving the bzou time to kill and cook her grandmother, she can be seen as attempting to grow up too quickly, and taking on a sexual maturity which she is clearly not ready for despite her feelings, as the rest of the tale suggests (Windling).  Yet, “the little girl” does believe that she is ready for such a change from girlhood to maturity.  
She meets the bzou, the werewolf, at the crossway, and when it asks where she is going, she gives it specific directions.   In this early oral version at least, she also specifically chooses the slow, adult way, then lingers on her path.  Talking animals may be commonplace in fairy tales, but any “little girl” in France from the fifteenth to as late as the seventeenth-century would have recognized the bzou and what it stood for.  Werewolf attacks and trials were commonplace, with famous trials such as Bourgot’s, where he confessed to killing “a seven-year-old boy with his wolf’s teeth and paws” in 1521, rumors of which spread across the country (Zipes, 4). As Windling so succinctly describes, “any man might be a wolf in disguise, and any wolf, a man” (Windling).  The same applied to women, as witches and werewolves were long connected in France, with numerous tales such as that of Clauda Jamprost and her coven, who “haunted the wood of Froidecombe” and were sentenced to death in 1584, or Francoise Secretain, a witch accused of werewolvery who later confessed to killing numerous children and women  (Summers, 229-230).   The areas where “The Grandmother’s Story” was most popularly told were particularly rife with werewolf violence, and the tale’s popularity in such regions was partially due to the simple entertainment factor in telling a werewolf tale that ended in daring escape (Windling).  But, its popularity was probably also partially due to the realization that such predators were real, and could kill a grandmother, just as much as they could transform to talk to a little girl, cook a meal, and impersonate a grandmother.   It is odd that the girl cannot tell the creature from her grandmother until the end, unless it is truly a shape-shifter, able to change the way it looks through the devil’s help as claimed in thousands of years of tales told in the history of France (Windling, Summers, Warner, 181-182).  To the people who would have told and heard “The Story of Grandmother”, werewolves were real and taken seriously, so none of the bzou’s abilities would have been seen as odd; he kills the grandmother, because, as Windling points out, wolves kill things.  But because the bzou is not merely a wolf, but that special type of beast, a bzou, and because she has herself on the path of needles, the heroine has made herself vulnerable and open for a very different type of hunger.  Young children and perhaps adolescents would only understand this at a very subconscious level.  However, due to all of the bawdy details, the adult listeners this tale was originally intended for would immediately pick up on this higher level.  It is after all, an adult level of sexual craving, both on the bzou’s part, which is complicated by and simultaneously allowed by the fact that he is neither man nor wolf, and on the child’s part, since she is a bit too curious for her age and still not positive about what it is she wants.
This second level of “the little girl[‘s]” attempt to subconsciously bring about her sexual maturity before she is ready for it, and of the bzou’s rather obvious attempted seduction, is most clearly seen in the semi-burlesque details given at the end of the story.  Even if she cannot originally tell the transposed wolf from her grandmother because the clever bzou used his devil’s potions or wizard’s magic to look like her grandmother (or at least human), she is given plenty of warnings; she must have some awareness of her situation partially through the “big” litany if not before (Summers, 119, 121; Jones, 102).  For example, when she meets the wolf, significantly at the crossway between the path of needles (adulthood) and the path of pins (childhood), he is quite blunt about his desires, asking where she is going, but she gives him the answer in a way that seems truly naïve as the story says explicitly that she is talking to a bzou, who is not at all disguised (Windling, Jones, 102).  On a literal level, she has essentially told a dangerous predator exactly where to find her grandmother then skipped off merrily on her way, giving the predator more than enough time to eliminate her grandmother in the meantime.  But the fact that in Delarue’s version she has chosen the adult path, and takes her time picking up needles is of major significance, for it brings us back to the conclusion that this child, still young enough to tell a stranger (and a dangerous one) where her grandmother lives, is attempting to become an adult.  Her dallying along this path suggests that somewhere in her subconscious she’s aware that she is attempting to take on that adult role by getting rid of the only ‘real’ adult mentioned in the story--her grandmother--by allowing the wolf to “kill” her (Zipes, 7-8; Warner 182).  This passive role in overtaking her grandmother and the tension between her childlike behavior and wishes for adulthood also suggest that she might not be ready for the true adulthood that lies at the end of the path.  
At the same time, her own curiosity about adulthood is brought up in a much more extensive manner when she arrives at her grandmother’s house and finds only the bzou there.  She is directly called a “slut” by the cat, yet appears to either ignore or simply not hear this animal in Delarue’s version, though other versions have the werewolf telling the little girl to throw a shoe at the noisy cat (Windling).  Rather, whether by throwing the shoes at a vanishing cat as the werewolf asks, or simply undressing for this figure still simply referred to as the bzou, she follows naively on according to the directions of her ‘granny’, leading her ever closer toward an actual sexual act (Windling).  It is at this point where the sexual implications of the story are truly made clear to the adult listeners, while even children would have some grasp of the fact that “the little girl” is now flirting with something more unorthodox and dangerous than being killed by a werewolf.            
As mentioned earlier, the listing of the bzou’s characteristics is highly sexual in nature; with the bzou’s hairiness, “big nails”, “big shoulders”, and the concept of “big” in general when related to being in bed, the majority of features are directly connected to images of the male figure, and sexual power in particular (Jones, 102).  This suggestive listing is put directly after the heroine undresses as the bzou asks her to, article by article.  While going to bed with granny after a meal would have been an innocent affair, and perhaps even undressing for bed, throwing each article of clothing into the fire is not. Any child would recognize this simple truth, while the adults hearing the tale would immediately recognize the sexual connotations of this virtual striptease.  At this point before her escape, “the little girl” is in serious trouble of falling prey to the bzou, a creature known to have an unhealthy appetite for young children (Jones, 103).  From the slightly “menacing” way he answers her questions about what to do with each article of clothing and his entreaties to get her into bed before “eat”[ing] her, it becomes much more obvious to both adult listeners and “the little girl” that this werewolf has a different kind of hunger for her than he had for the grandmother (Windling, Jones, 103; Zipes, 5).  However, this protagonist recognizes that she’s not ready to be eaten once the bzou states what he has in mind for her.   So, unlike many of her later counterparts, she recognizes the danger and escapes on her own.  This is truly a wiser “little girl” able to recognize her own sexual limitations in time when they become uncomfortable for her; even if she does not heed the warnings of the cat, she leaves with her virginity intact.
   Yet, her sexual encounter is not the only thing with which “the little girl” leaves the story.  By its end, in her attempt to grow up, she has effectively eliminated her grandmother and replaced her role in society in what has been viewed as a rite of passage story.  While her blatantly sexual encounter with the werewolf introduces her to sex a bit early, something which she is able to escape in this version through her own wits, her attempts to grow up before she is ready also result in the loss of her grandmother, for they allow the bzou time to “kill” her when she chooses the path of needles, then “entertain[s] herself” picking up the needles, a subconscious attempt, as mentioned earlier, to get rid of her only rival.  Next, she eats a meal made of her grandmother’s flesh and blood, despite warnings from the “little cat”, and sometimes a bird, in her grandmother’s house. Eating her grandmother can be seen as incorporating her grandmother within herself, taking over her role in life, as Vierdier commented (Windling).  The girl’s choice to slowly make her way to the house, seemingly the innocent choice of a bored child, and her eating of the meal are, in reality, “the necessity of the female biological transformation by which the young eliminate the old in their lifetime. Mothers will be replaced by their daughters and the circle will be closed with the arrival of the children’s children” (qtd Windling).  And, indeed, “the little girl” does begin to replace her grandmother in society by the end of the tale, encountering the bzou in a very real, very sexual way, and then acting the part of the adult when she realizes at some level that she cannot handle it and instead devises a ruse to trick the werewolf and escape.  
To listeners of this tale, however, there was an added bit of humor and perhaps danger with the grandmother figure and “the little girl’s” motions to replace her.  The grandmother, a figure who lives alone in the woods, was often viewed as a witch in the oral tellings.  The woods were the common dwelling-place of various crones in fairy tales, both good and bad (Windling; Warner, 181).  As mentioned earlier, talking animals are common in fairy tales, but cats in particular have always been associated with witches (Zipes, 48).  Additionally, there is the fact that “the little girl” apparently can’t tell the bzou apart from her grandmother until the very end; werewolves were also considered, along with cats, to be the “favorite cohorts” of witches, creating a strong connection between the grandmother and the bzou with whom both she and the “little girl” end up associating (Zipes, 48). To further this connection and the confusion for the “little girl”, witches themselves were often werewolves in France, and if a witch didn’t practice lycanthropy (a type of shape-shifting used by some werewolves), they had many similar techniques (Summers, 119-120; Zipes, 48).  If the girl’s grandmother was a witch, it follows that she would be hard put to distinguish her from a werewolf, which had many of the same characteristics, including pacts with the devil, odd knowledge, and a possession by their powers (Windling, Summers, 120; Warner, 181-182).   Witches were also associated with eating ritual cannibalistic meals in which they gained another’s power; the fact that the little girl eats her grandmother’s flesh, seen in this context, connects her to a ritual passing on of a witch’s powers as well as to her general role as an adult in society (Windling).  Yet, even if her grandmother was a witch, it does not ultimately save her.  It is a resourceful, almost trickster-like, little girl who ultimately saves herself using simple common sense, whether or not she has gained any powers from a grandmother who dabbles in witchcraft.  This is what sets this original version apart from many of its later, written counterparts.  “The little girl” is the true heroine and succeeds to escape from the werewolf through her own ingenuity without help from anyone else and, notably, without being swallowed.
It is a testimony to her self-assertiveness, the knowledge she has gained through her journey down the path in the woods and through her encounter with the bzou, that she recognizes him for what he is and escapes through her own means.  She also doesn’t use force, but wits, the typical signs of a trickster, making this “Little Red” a heroine children can easily identify with, and look up to; she has beaten the bzou in a way they can as well, by tricking it, not looking elsewhere for help or using a weapon no child would have the hope of wielding effectively, but by simply keeping her calm.  This is where the story makes its return to reality as well, for “the little girl”, after her encounter with the bzou, tricks it, only to return to “her house”.  Although she has definitely gained knowledge from her encounter (and perhaps magical skills if the grandmother whose role she replaces was a witch), the return is based in simple reality, and brings even the more ribald details of the story a basis in real life.
  “The Story of Grandmother” is, in the end, a story of a little girl who leaves her home in an attempt to grow up, and grows up a bit too fast for her liking, thanks to the motivations of the hungry bzou.  However, it is also that same story which is meant for adult’s entertainment, and for the general people of France.  This odd tale, a mix of diversion, life lessons, and quite real fears, was one of many that Charles Perrault would put on paper, allowing it to undergo its first major ‘transformation’ as it moved from an ever-shifting oral tale to a set piece of literature.