Show Originally Aired: 8/12/2002 CALL 1 800-423-TALK
Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked
cover detail from "The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales" Email to friend
You know her. Wrapped in red cape, taking dinner to Grandma, traveling through the deep dark woods. Yeah, Red Riding Hood's been around longer than your grandmother, and her grandmother. Her story has more teeth than any big old wolf.
Writer Catherine Orenstein says it's a morality tale, not just for kids; that stories like Red's wend their way through the collective unconscious, that as we evolve, the content of Miss Hood's basket is food for the psyche, cherry pie for changing conceptions of gender and power.
Retold over hundreds of years in dozens of versions, the wolf dead or alive, granny eaten, hidden or triumphant. And Little Red, sex symbol, siren, or innocent.
