Daughters’ adolescence provokes changes in their maternal relationship, affecting the feminine, pointing to feminine psychosexuality. This happens in the familiar grandmother-granddaughter relationship in "Little Red Riding Hood" (LRRH), too, where a young girl in a red hood brings goodies to her grandmother in the woods, like in an old rite-of-passage. However, a wicked wolf interferes with the girl’s journey, eating the grandmother and later also the girl. Growing up can, indeed, be difficult for daughters, resulting in a likeness between grandmothers and witches together with girls’ growing up and madness in the article “’Grandmas Do Worse:’ The Kristevan Feminine in Contemporary Versions of Little Red Riding Hood,” published online in NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research.
While most studies (e.g., Bettelheim 1991, Henneberg 2010) dwell on female conflict in the LRRH tradition, explainable in terms of female rivalry and marginalization, this article here studies both conflict and possibilities in the grandmother-granddaughter relationship through the Kristevan feminine in Angela Carter’s short story “The Werewolf” (1979/2006), Kiki Smith’s visual story “Bedlam” (2001), and Gillian Cross’s young adult novel Wolf (1990). Besides Kristeva’s (e.g, 2004, 2007, 2019) own writing on the feminine in relation to daughtering, her feminine has often received marginal scholarly attention. Through the Kristevan feminine, this article illuminates the dynamics of (grand)mother-daughter relationships in LRRH to benefit daughters.
“In “Bedlam,” Smith outlines the madness of growing up, or what Kristeva terms the “adolescent malaise” because of the difficulties and suffering that mar maturation.” (Wide 2022: 5)
The article elucidates how the heroines in Carter's, Smith's, and Cross's tales navigate changes in their (grand)maternal relationship while developing and even exceling in the dimensions of reliance and relationality of feminine psychosexuality. Individuals' relationality, or object attachments, to others and the social begins in the relationship between them and their first caretaker, often the mother, which is subject to change during the adolescent years. Therefore, the feminine displays a real or imagined reliance, that is, dependence on or trust in (m)others and the environment.
“[A] recreation of the heroines’ grandmaternal bond is necessary for growth, healing, and opens to viewing time as new beginnings, facilitating the heroines’ maturity and development of the feminine, enhancing their skills in reliance and relationality with an environmental twist, which opens to an inclusion of nature as another object relation.” (Wide 2022: 13).
Seen above, the article’s results highlight a transformation of the adolescent heroines’ grandmaternal relationship for the better, involving female bonding and paradoxically conflict, demonstrating that while transforming the heroines’ grandmaternal relationship is a must, provoking some ambivalence, friction, or even matricide, the relationships here continue in a new and changed form, enhancing the heroines’ feminine, demonstrated in their willingness to preserve life, their belonging, their view of time as new beginnings, and their opening to the natural world, displayed in an excerpt of the articles’ visual results (Figure 1).
Find out more by visiting my academia.edu account, NORA, or receive a copy of the full article from the publisher here.
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