The Fairy Tale Sermons: Little Red

This is the first in a series of blogs titled "The Fairy Tale Sermons" wherein I take the stories both familiar and strange of childhoods past and write sermons on them much like your Sunday school teacher would do with Scripture. I invite, no, I request that you question the morals I set forth in these sermons and consider for yourself what these tales mean to you.

There was once a little girl, loved by one and all, but especially her grandmother. When she was small, her grandmother gave her a red velvet cloak. She liked it so much that she refused to wear anything else…

Here we find the picture of innocence robed in the passion of fresh blood, a foreboding sign if ever there was one. I'm sure most of you are familiar with this tale in many of its macabre and watered down forms, Little Red Riding Hood, popularized by those brothers Grimm, so I'll spare you too many of the details.

One day her mother called to Little Red, asking her to take a cake and bottle of wine to her grandmother. "She is weak and ill, and they will do her good. Go quick, but don’t run for you might break the bottle and dear grandmother will get no wine. When you get there, don't forget to say, 'Good morning," without being a nosy little ragamuffin."

Nowadays, Red would probably be sent along with some kind of locally grown, organic, whole food veggie loaf and a bottle of medicine to make dear grandmother better. She would probably prefer the wine.

Along the way to grandmothers house in the wood, Little Red Riding Hood came upon a wolf who asked her where she was going. Not knowing the danger those wolves represented to the isolated, Germanic, village-person, answered truthfully.

The wolf, knowing full well the potential treat in store for him if he played his cards right, distracted Little Red with some flowers and ran ahead to grandmother's where the greedy lump swallowed her up in one gulp.

Little Red Riding Hood wandered in soon enough with a fresh bouquet in addition to grandmother's wine and cake. Then of course comes the familiar bit with the Oh what big ears, eyes, hands and teeth you have before Red, too, finds her way down the wolf's gullet.

Enter the kindly woodsman, passing by, who steps in to check in on the kindly old woman living by herself out in the middle of the woods. He cuts open the wolf, freeing Little Red Riding Hood and grandmother who "came out, alive, but hardly able to breath."

Little Red then fills the wolf with heavy stones so that when he wakes and tries to spring away, he falls down dead from their weight. Woodsman gets a wolf pelt; grandmother gets her wine and cake; and Little Red Riding Hood gets a lesson. "I will never again wander into the forest as long as I live, if my mother forbids it."

At first glance, we learn from this story not to disobey our mothers and perhaps if we paid attention closely, not to trust strangers. Which are good morals, sure, but it would be limiting to leave it at that. Fairy tales are not parables, they do not contain but one lesson.

Within the framework of the story, we never question why it is that Red's mother sends her daughter alone into the woods to grandmother's house. The story after all suggests that Little Red is still quite little, perhaps as young as the 6 or 7 year-old audience is when we first start introducing our children to the story.

We identify with our heroine because we remember being vulnerable and innocent. Before they became big, bad wolves, they were just funny looking dogs.

It's this very naiveté that makes Red perfect host to this mission. She delivers because she doesn't know better not to. She's not some teenager who's going to sneak into the wine along the way, topping off the bottle with water from the stream and she's not some incompetent little toddler barely able to walk.

So Red's mother is right to trust her, though perhaps too irresponsible or busy to simply do it herself.

Within feminist literature, I'm sure, Little Red Riding Hood gets a bad rap because the women are helpless. Red is deceived by the clearly masculine wolf and she and grandmother need to be saved from the belly of the beast by the woodsMAN at the end of the story. The sexism is an inherent crossover from a time when the patriarchal society in charge told the stories.

But what is interesting about Little Red Riding Hood is the lack of male figures. I know, it's hard to imagine a lack when there are only five characters to begin with. But for a moment, let's take stock. We have Mother, Red, Grandmother, Wolf and Woodsman.

Or to put it in other terms, we have the innocent maid, working woman and old crone, plus the polar male opposites of the Man and Beast. Three women, like that other holy trinity, the Fates: Moerae, Parcae, the Norns. As much as Wolf and Woodsman may have played their parts as archetypal Tempter and Redeemer, it was the ladies in this story who sealed their fate, so to speak.

It was they who set this story in motion, who sent Little Red on her mission to begin with. The Woodsman may have cut the wolf open, but it was the actions of Little Red Riding Hood in filling his now-empty belly with stones that caused his death and it is the at the end of the story that we find ourselves once again returned to that essential three. The wolf is dead, the woodsman gone home, but the three remain.

Perhaps the warning is not for Red after all, but for the Wolf whose folly was his attempt to deny his fate. In impersonating kindly, old grandmother, he defied the natural order, and as much as Fairy Tales are about the fantastical, the talking animals, witches and fairies, et al, there are some things that don't get messed with.

So there's another lesson in Little Red Riding Hood, one of consigning yourself to your fate, which is all well and good for the medieval peasantry of its original audience, where social ostracism could quite literally mean the difference between life and death, but to the modern -- though perhaps by that I should mean postmodern -- reader of fairy tales the lesson is moot. In the American dream culture of anyone can do anything if they work hard enough, the wolf can be the grandmother. There are no explicit boundaries keeping you from that kind of success.

Fate has been overtaken by free will and Little Red has strayed from the path.