Patching the Havoc: Fairy-tale Intertexts in "Little Red Riding Hood" and Sylvia Plath's "Stone Boy with Dolphin"

Abstract

Three years after Sylvia Plath bit into Ted Hughes’ cheek at a Cambridge college party, she fictionalized the moment in her short story “Stone Boy with Dolphin.” Sprinkled throughout the story are references to traditionally victimized fairy-tale characters—Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Little Red Riding Hood—women on whom Plath’s protagonist Dody models herself to go about sating her sexual and literary desire. In the moment Dody bites the poet Leonard’s cheek, she tries on the gender-bending role of Charles Perrault’s wolf, complicating and diversifying Plath’s engagement with Little Red Riding Hood. This article reads the oral variant of the Red Riding Hood tale group, “The Grandmother’s Tale,” Charles Perrault’s print “Le petit chaperon rouge,” and the Grimm Brothers’ print “Rotkäppchen,” against “Stone Boy with Dolphin” to reveal how Sylvia Plath engages with her fantastical source material “transgressively,” as defined by Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill in Queering the Grimms. The argument hinges on the little red textile and the oral tale’s striptease scene, two creative and destructive elements which persist through time and narrative permutations of the tale.