Uncovering, presenting, and analyzing versions of “Red Riding Hood” has become a sub-genre among comparative narrative studies. One of the earliest to appear was Hans Ritz’s anthology, Die Geschichte vom Rotkäppchen: Ursprünge, Analysen, Parodien eines Märchens (1981), which gathered principally German-authored tales and by 2006 had appeared in fourteen editions. Jack Zipes followed with Rotkäppchens Lust und Leid. Biographie eines europäischen Märchens for Diederichs in 1982, with a broader national representation (Germany, France, England, Ireland, USA, China) and a multi-chapter introduction (13–94), which was translated as The Trials and Tribulations of Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context and considerably expanded in 1983. More recently, newly composed and often parodic anthologies of Red-Riding-Hood tales have appeared, such as Straying from the Path: New Tales of Little Red, edited by Deena Fisher (2009). Then, of course, there is Alan Dundes, editor, Red Riding Hood: A Casebook (1989), a volume of essays by diverse scholars, and Catherine Orenstein, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (2002), as well as Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism’s Fairy Tales (2007), in which Ann Martin explores allusions to Red Riding Hood and a handful of other well-known fairy tales as ways for readers to make sense of the modernist literature in which they appear. Some of these titles are primarily folkloric in their focus; others are primarily literary, but most cross the disciplinary boundaries between folklore and literature.

Leaning on Jack Zipes’s understanding of Perrault’s “Red Riding Hood” as a tale that holds its heroine responsible for her own rape and death (14–15), the opening chapter, “Cautionary Tales for Modern Riding Hoods,” reminds readers that Perrault’s tale was a crossover text aimed both at girls on the threshold of matrimony and at adults, whereas the Grimm tale took children as its sole audience and told a non-sexual story emphasizing the importance of obeying parents. Beckett then explores a large number of modern “Red Riding Hood” rewritings which follow the Perrault or the Grimm pattern.

Chapter 2, “Contemporary Riding Hoods Come of Age,” considers versions that center around sexual initiation, beginning with Nalo Hopkinson’s Riding the Red (1997) and proceeding through a variety of works and interpretive approaches. Chapter 3, “The Wolf’s Story,” gives voice to a vulpine imaginary in a staggering number of literary, logical, and philosophic inversions and parodies, such as the wolf as closet vegetarian (87) or as mercy killer (88). It is perhaps the age of the intended reader that determines how the wolf is portrayed, sexually devouring at one extreme or humorously bumbling and misunderstood at the other. Comic books loom large, and there’s no way to render in this review their dizzying array or their antic intertextual play.

“The Wolf Within” (chapter 4) pursues the concept that an image of a wolf “crystallizes human fears” (133). Beckett amplifies this perception in analyses of novels and children’s books by Tanith Lee, Gillian Cross, Paul Biegel, and João Gruimarães Rosa. “The oral tradition provides examples of resourceful and courageous Riding Hoods who outwit the wolf and escape, often by running from him” (158) opens chapter 5, “Running With the Wolves.” Beckett must mean nineteenth- and twentieth-century oral traditions, because we have no evidence from earlier oral traditions about “Red Riding Hood.” Her principal point is that “[m]any contemporary versions prefer to have an audacious protagonist join the wolf and run with him” (158). This is to say that the very concept of wolf has been reformulated by these authors as an unplumbed and perhaps dark subconscious, with which it is desirable, or necessary, to be in tune. The writings of Clarissa Pinkola Estés with their conceptualization of long repressed instincts and of the consequences of their release are prominent in the early part of this chapter.

No book is without some problems. Considering a girl in Perrault’s day as marriageable at the age of twelve is an unfortunate historical lapse: marriage at twelve would probably have been commented upon unfavorably in the late 1600s, when girls from aristocratic backgrounds frequently married at fifteen (but never at twelve), and peasant women generally married in their twenties. Beckett also accepts belief that “Red Riding Hood” circulated among the French folk before Perrault “penned the first literary version of the tale” (44). In “Un Petit chaperon rouge médiéval? ‘La petite fille épargnée pa les loups’ dans la Fecunda ratis d’Egbert de Liège (début du XIe siècle)” in Marvels & Tales 5.2 (1991): 246¬¬–62, Jacques Berlioz made it clear that there’s no basis for thinking that “Le petit chaperon rouge” existed before Perrault composed it in 1695. Since well-founded doubt clouds any assertion about a pre-Perrauldian existence of this tale among the folk and since an earlier existence is unnecessary for any of the finely argued points that Beckett makes, she, and other scholars, should explain, qualify, or altogether avoid, referring to an oral existence of “Red Riding Hood” before Perrault.

In sum, Beckett consulted a remarkable number of tale versions to produce an exemplary comparative study that reflects the ubiquitous image of the character of Red Riding Hood, the commodification of that character, and that character’s narrative.

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[Review length: 867 words • Review posted on January 26, 2010]