Feminist retellings of “Little Red Riding Hood” that return to the rape narrative, embedded in the history of the tale, are popular today. Scholars Jack Zipes (1993), Sandra Beckett (2009; 2014), and Elizabeth Marshall (2009; 2015) have written extensively about the rape narrative both in the tradition and in contemporary versions of “Little Red Riding Hood.”
Coming back to the rape story found in the "Little Red Riding Hood" tradition, feminist artists and writers Paula Rego's, Margaret Atwood's, Tanith Lee's, and Francesca Lia Block's contemporary retellings of “Little Red Riding Hood” transform rape into trauma stories of the heroines’ healing (Wide and Rodi-Risberg 2021). In trauma storytelling by Judith Herman (1994), the victim recalls traumatic events, resulting in post-traumatic growth (PTG). Through the protagonists’ trauma storytelling, the feminist versions offer a new take on “Little Red Riding Hood” for contemporary audiences (Wide and Rodi-Risberg 2021).
In their article “From Rape Trauma to Genius through Narration in Contemporary Little Red Riding Hood Tales,” recently published in the British fairy tale journal Gramarye (2021), Carola Maria Wide and Marinella Rodi-Risberg examine trauma storytelling in the feminist retellings. Paul Quinn writes in the “Editors’ Introduction” of Gramarye (4) that
“Carola Maria Wide and Marinella Rodi-Risberg present a complex, critically engaged, and compelling reading of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ tales, tracking the attempts by a diverse range of authors – including the late, great Tanith Lee, and Margaret Atwood – to move the story beyond the rape narrative found in Perrault.”
The feminist retellings are brought together by rape trauma storytelling. Paula Rego’s illustration series Little Red Riding Hood Suite (2003), consisting of 6 boldly colored illustrations, highlights Little Red Riding Hood’s making of her mother into a heroine for killing her daughter’s rapist Wolf. Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) is a story about Offred, who is a modern slave in Gilead exploited for reproduction but who tells herself stories about revenge to stay sane. In Tanith Lee’s short story “Wolfland” (1983), Lisel witnesses her grandmother Anna’s trauma narrative, in which Anna is raped and abused by her husband but turns the tide by transforming into a werewolf and killing Grandperè. Francesca Lia Block’s “Wolf” (2000) features a young survivor of incest, who takes control of her own destiny.
In their article, Wide and Rodi-Risberg (2021) argue, first, that the heroines’ trauma stories centralize the victim-survivors’ healing, female bonding, and heroism. This creates what Teresa de Lauretis (in Stockton 2006) coins an alternative “measure of desire,” appealing to contemporary audiences of “Little Red Riding Hood,” as well as affecting actual victim-survivors’ views of themselves. Second, by displaying PTG, the heroines’ trauma stories exceed traumatic repetition of most “Little Red Riding Hood” retellings which simply repeat sexual trauma. In the narratives here, PTG results in genuine imaginative work of the heroine subjects which can be ascribed to the genius in that following Julia Kristeva’s work on the genius, the genius is characterized as “creativity,” emanating from the imaginary (2004). Third, drawing on Marina Warner’s beast motif in women’s fairy tales in From the Beast to the Blonde (1995), the authors demonstrate how imaginative work results in the heroines’ identity change from beauties into beasts or to be more specific, into wolves, viewable in the visual results, the photographic illustration series Girl Geniuses’ Narrating Trauma in LRRH (2019-2021) by Carola Maria Wide, viewed below. Here, the beast and genius become alike by releasing and representing female desire and creativity which change the heroine subjects’ revenge into gratitude and healing.
You can continue to the full article here.
Girl Geniuses' Narrating Trauma in LRRH (2019-21) by Carola Maria Wide in Gramarye (2021).
Bibliography
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1986).
Beckett, Sandra. Recycling Red Riding Hood (New York: Routledge, 2009).
Beckett, Sandra. Revisioning Red Riding Hood around the World (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014).
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (London: Pandora, 1994).
Kristeva, Julia. ‘Female Genius, Freedom and Culture’, Irish Pages 2 (2004).
Lee, Tanith. ‘Wolfland’, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, edited by Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Lia Block, Francesca. ‘Wolf’, The Rose and the Beast (HarperCollins e-books, 2009).
Marshall, Elizabeth. ‘Fear and Strangeness in Picturebooks’, Challenging and Controversial Picturebooks, ed. Janet Evans (New York: Routledge, 2015).
Marshall, Elizabeth. ‘Girlhood, Sexual Violence, and Agency in Francesca Lia Block’s “Wolf”’, Children’s Literature in Education 40 (2009).
Rego, Paula. Little Red Riding Hood Suite. Paula Rego, edited by John McEwen (London: Phaidon, 2003/2006).
Stockton, Sharon. The Economics of Fantasy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006).
Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995).
Zipes, Jack. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (New York: Routledge. 1993).
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