Origin and interpretation of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood
The story of Little Red Riding Hood goes back to the oral traditions of different European regions, and is transcribed sata, among others, by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. We know that the tale was told as early as the fourteenth century France. "The False Grandmother" is the title of an ancient Italian version of the fable in which Little Red Riding Hood is able to defeat the wolf based solely on their wits. Some argue that this version is closer to the original, and that the character of the wood-cutter was added later to suggest the idea that male-grandmother and grandson could not be saved without the help of a man. Despite being one of the most fairy tales told to children, Little Red Riding Hood contains numerous references rather than explicit sexuality and violence. Perrault's version is more left to the next (and best known) of Grimm. The main difference between the two versions is that the transcription of Perrault there is no happy ending and the fairy tale Hood and ends with his grandmother in his belly, while the version of the Brothers Grimm is inserted into the figure of the hunter, cutting his belly saves the two unfortunate. The story told by Perrault so there is a redemption of Little Red Riding Hood, but there is the purpose of terrorizing the children so they will not deviate from the path that metaphorically are the recommendations of the parents. At the end of the story, Perrault provides an explicit explanation of morality, from which it is difficult to extract the obvious sexual content: From this story one learns that children, especially young girls nice, polite and a good family, do much harm to listen to strangers, and it is not strange then if the wolf gets his dinner, it is quite clear that the wolf represents a seducer that shows the beauty of nature, the child has recently entered puberty. So the girl became a woman matures and faces the problem of sex. The admonition "not to depart from the path" is a clear warning against the dangers of sex and against those losing their virginity. The "Little Red Riding Hood" is a symbol of menstruation, which leads the child into the "dark forest" of womanhood, but in many folk in the woods a young woman is metaphorically associated with prostitution in seventeenth-century France, the red cape was a signal very explicit in this regard. The voracity of the wolf, her craving for meat, the sadistic child associated with the concept of "sexual intercourse", characteristic of the oral, pregenital, also called "cannibal" by Freud himself. In the oral phase of development is manifested by the sex drive nutrition. The wolf in Little Red Riding Hood using the shell a cannibalistic way of relating to her. At this point it seems clear that the wolf represents the man, seen as a cruel and cunning animal, sex and the act is described as an act of cannibalism in which the male eats the femmina.Nella Perrault's version, the tale ends with a regression of the child, trapped in the womb: no initiation occurs in the adult world, but allowed the Brothers Grimm version of the hunter. In the nineteenth century, two German versions of the tale were told by the Brothers Grimm Hassenpflug Jeanette (1791-1860) and Marie Hassenpflug (1788-1856). The Grimm became one of the two versions in the main story, and the second in a sequel. The first, entitled Rotkäppchen, was included in the first edition of their collection Kinder-und Hausmärchen (1812). In this version the girl and her grandmother were saved by a hunter interested in the skin of the wolf. In the second story, Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, through its experience with the first wolf, were able to capture and kill another. The Grimm continued to revise the story in later editions, the best known is the final revision of 1857, with the cutter in place of the hunter. Little Red Riding Hood, in its variants, can be linked with other similar fairy tales and myths. The theme of the victims safe and sound extracted from the belly of the wolf, in particular, is almost identical in the Russian tale Peter and the Wolf, and is a variant of an idea at least as old as the Book of Jonah. Another and far more unusual alternative version of the story of "Little Red Riding Hood" is Red Hot Riding Hood, the famous cartoon directed by Tex Avery, who sees the heroine as a female star used as a particularly provocative singer in a nightclub.
The hunter is the good side of man, the father, without which, in a male vision, the woman can not be saved. theme of the victims safe and sound extracted from the belly of the wolf, allows the child to remove the anxiety provoked by the story and confront their fears and their positive and negative aspects, and it works in this way a kind of catharsis.
Among the classic fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood is one of those that lend themselves more to an analysis of the subtext, or hidden or implicit messages. Even Bruno Bettelheim pointed out how the fairy tale lends itself to a Freudian interpretation. While it is clear the presence of sexual content in the history of the interpretations they disagree fundamentally on what could only be understood as meaning primary.