Fairytale Comparative Analysis: Little Red Riding Hood

In the novel the author uses the elements of good and evil from fairy tales to have an opposite effect in the novel. In Little Red Riding Hood the reader can see that the girl plays the good character as she wants to help her sick grandmother. The wolf is seen as the evil character as he wants to destroy the girl and the grandmother. Little Red Riding Hood gains power over the wolf with help of the hunter, due to that she defeats the wolf alone “Red Riding Hood, however, quickly fetched great stones with which they filled the wolf 's belly, … , but the stones were so heavy that he collapsed at once, and fell dead”. This is a similar case for Beauty and the Beast.

The wolf in The Little Red Riding Hood symbolizes a number of things as it does in several other fairy tales. First, it portrays the image of cunning characters in the society. At first, the animal looks harmless upon meeting the girl in the forest. It's questions to the girl appear as genuine and straightforward as they would to anyone else. The girl could not be skeptical in the way the wolf asks, “Where are you going”.

In the short story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” author Karen Russell uses short epigraphs to provide a reference for characters’ progress throughout the 5 “stages” present in the story. The story follows a pack of wolf-girls who have been sent to St. Lucy’s, a facility dedicated to helping human children raised by wolf parents adapt to human culture. These “stages” represent the five chapters in the process of adapting, each of which begin with an excerpt, or epigraph, from The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock. These epigraphs describe the emotions and difficulties that the wolf-girls are likely to experience, as well as how they are likely to act during the stage.

In Karen Russell's short story, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, a pack of wolf-girls are sent to a church to transform them into human-girls. As they journey through their transformation there is a guide called, The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock that helps the nuns running St. Lucy’s. The book describes the transformation in stages to help determine the girls’ place as a human. Claudette, the narrator, arrives at St. Lucy’s with her pack to begin their transformation.

They woke her up and she screamed and ran right of the house. These two characters had very similar choices but also very different choices. Red Riding Hood screamed in shock when she saw the wolf and so did Goldilocks when she saw the three bears. Both of the characters main trait is curiosity because Red Riding Hood was curious about her grandmother and Goldilocks was curious about the vacant house in the woods. Red Riding Hood called out for help when she was attacked on the other hand Goldilocks did not she just screamed and ran away.

Every child loves the story of Little Red Riding Hood not only due to her innocence and purity driving her in a great danger, but her fatal destiny also slightly implies the truth that the sweeter the strangers’ mouths speak, the sharper their teeth could be. The tales of Little Red Riding Hood describes a young girl’s journey to her grandmother along the path in the forest, breathtakingly discover that a wolf has eaten her ill grandmother, dressed in her clothes, and yet plans to devour the little girl. Upon reading the stories, many of the readers, even a four-year-old child, suspect the intention of this young girl of exposing the exact location her grandmother when a random wolf in a middle of the forest inquiries about her destination. In the various tales, Little Red Riding Hood seeks out a father figure in predatory negative male figures, therefore she suffers from oppositional defiant disorder afterward explicitly realizes the mortal consequences of indulging. The male antagonists throughout the evolution of Little Red Riding Hood interpret self-imbalance within a school-age child as well as the significance of a reverse gender role model during the stage.

What she means by “Sing you a lullaby where you die at the end” is she is going to poison and kill her kidnapper and break free from ‘The Big Bad Wolf’. The repetition is a sign of confirmation and empowerment that she is going to do what she says. The reader or listener has the sense of standing up for yourself is a good thing and not always for a good or bad reason. She also makes allusions to fairy tales and tales we knew as children. “Ashes, ashes, time to go down” makes a reference to the children's playground game “Ring around the rosies” signaling to the black plague, darkening the sense of death by showing that not everything is sweet and innocent, including death.

The first being the way in which women are portrayed. In “How Stories Came to Earth” women are seen as equal to men while in “Coyote Steals Fire” women are seen as less than men. In “How Stories Came to Earth” Anansi is reliant upon his wife for ways to capture the animals which shows it wasn’t a big deal for men to ask their wives for advice. In “Coyote Steals Fire” it can be inferred that women are less than men because when Coyote and Thunder-god are playing the game the dice have teeth carved in them and if the male tooth comes up it counted as two points, but when female teeth came up they only counted as one point. The second difference is the attitude of the gods when they are defeated.

In the beginning, she told herself stories of how she was a hero, rode horses and shot expertly. In these stories she “rescued people from bombed buildings” and shot “rabid wolves” as others were too terrified to act (p. 402). Later, the stories portrayed her as the person being rescued and were overwhelmed with details of her hair, her dresses and her overall appearance. She had also tried to make her “part of the room fancy” by making a lace bed cover and adding a dressing table (p. 411). The final acknowledgement of this change manifested when it came time for her father to slaughter Flora, who was an energetic horse that had been confine by her father waiting for him to need meat for the foxes.

Hansel and Gretel were skillful and quick-witted in hunting those foul creatures. Despite the success in hunting, the siblings faced a new challenge, where an extremely, powerful grand witch named Muriel, was known to be the culprit in abducting the poor and helpless children from the old, large city of Augsburg. The witch hunters also found out that the children that were kidnapped will be used in an ancient magical ceremony where they will be sacrificed on the night of the Blood Moon. They also knew that the witches need twelve children for the sacrifice, but since they already kidnapped eleven, they only need one left. Muriel attacked Augsburg along with her other witch.