“Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.” When Charles Dickens made this confession, he was living in an age that knew only the innocent child in stories collected by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. In those folkloric treatments, a villainous predator squares off against a sweet, trusting child and earns a bad name for himself as a ruthless, gluttonous beast. Dickens's first love had not yet grown up to become Red Hot Riding Hood, Little Red Running Shorts, Little Red Riding Crop, or any number of other seductive sirens, attractive fashionistas, and unyielding avengers who face down the horrors of beasts in the forest. We often think of “Little Red Riding Hood” as a story with a whiff of the archaic, but it is in fact alive and present in our own culture with near manic expressive intensity. So ubiquitous is the tale that it sometimes disappears from sight precisely because it is so familiar. The girl in red appears in story and song, on screen and on the written page, on the runway as well as on stage. A source of adult entertainment, she is also very much at home in the nursery, telling us not only about encounters between predator and prey but also about human interactions that foreground innocence and seduction. Hers is a story about appetite in all shadings of the term, from primal hunger to sexual desire, both tainted by the threat of desire turning dark and deadly—desire so rapacious that it feeds on human life. We are as much in the realm of myth as of fairy tale, with stories that provide a platform for staging the consequences of desires, sinister and benign, in their most vivid and extreme form. “Little Red Riding Hood” most likely emerged as part of a storytelling culture that took up the theme of predatory animals roaming the countryside in search of food. As Barbara Ehrenreich tells us, “human storytelling ... grew out of encounters with real animal predators and served as a means of fear management as well as a means to ready the group for future encounters.” The earliest versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” featured. “Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.” When Charles Dickens made this confession, he was living in an age that knew only the innocent child in stories collected by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. In those folkloric treatments, a villainous predator squares off against a sweet, trusting child and earns a bad name for himself as a ruthless, gluttonous beast. Dickens's first love had not yet grown up to become Red Hot Riding Hood, Little Red Running Shorts, Little Red Riding Crop, or any number of other seductive sirens, attractive fashionistas, and unyielding avengers who face down the horrors of beasts in the forest. We often think of “Little Red Riding Hood” as a story with a whiff of the archaic, but it is in fact alive and present in our own culture with near manic expressive intensity. So ubiquitous is the tale that it sometimes disappears from sight precisely because it is so familiar. The girl in red appears in story and song, on screen and on the written page, on the runway as well as on stage. A source of adult entertainment, she is also very much at home in the nursery, telling us not only about encounters between predator and prey but also about human interactions that foreground innocence and seduction. Hers is a story about appetite in all shadings of the term, from primal hunger to sexual desire, both tainted by the threat of desire turning dark and deadly—desire so rapacious that it feeds on human life. We are as much in the realm of myth as of fairy tale, with stories that provide a platform for staging the consequences of desires, sinister and benign, in their most vivid and extreme form. “Little Red Riding Hood” most likely emerged as part of a storytelling culture that took up the theme of predatory animals roaming the countryside in search of food. As Barbara Ehrenreich tells us, “human storytelling ... grew out of encounters with real animal predators and served as a means of fear management as well as a means to ready the group for future encounters.” The earliest versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” featured wolves on the prowl, looking for nothing more than a tasty meal. It was only in the course of the nineteenth century that the story bifurcated, taking two different paths in Anglo-American and European cultures. It migrated directly into the nursery to become a story with a disciplinary edge and all kinds of behavioral directives designed to teach the child outside the story lessons. At the same time, in more subtle and dispersed ways, Little Red Riding Hood entered adult culture, where she and a metaphorical wolf dance a tango of innocence and seduction, with a sultry Red Riding Hood perfectly capable, over time, of playing the wolf. The girl in red, now often positioned as a seductive innocent who stalks a monstrous predator as much as she fears him, is no longer a willing victim. When the heroine of the popular 1990s TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer dresses up as Little Red Riding Hood for Halloween, she carries weapons in her basket. Matthew Bright's Freeway (1996) takes us to the mean streets of southern California, with an urban Red Riding Hood named Vanessa Lutz who sports a red leather jacket as she tries to elude a host of predators, among them a pedophile serial killer named Bob Wolverton. In David Slade's Hard Candy (2005), a fourteen-year-old girl in a hooded red sweatshirt, brilliantly played by a sweet- looking Ellen Page, turns out to be not so innocent. She sets out to torture an on-line sexual predator in ways that are nearly unimaginable. Joe Wright, the director of Hanna (2011), reinvents Red Riding Hood as a genetically modified teenage assassin, who goes out for target practice dressed in pelts. In the cabin where she lives with her father, she spends cold Norwegian winter evenings reading the Grimms' fairy tales, pausing to reflect on “Little Red Riding Hood." The heroine's path to predator is not as unexpected as might seem at first blush. Fairy tales, as folklorists and historians never tire of reminding us, have their roots in a peasant culture relatively uninhibited in its expressive energy. For centuries, agricultural laborers and domestic workers relied on the telling of tales to shorten the hours devoted to repetitive tasks, ranging from hoeing and harvesting to spinning and sewing. Is it surprising that, in an age without radios, televisions, and other electronic wonders, they favored fast-paced narratives with heavy doses of burlesque humor, melodramatic action, scatological jokes, and free-wheeling violence? The French folklorist Paul Delarue published a version of "Little Red Riding Hood" that was recorded in Brittany in 1885 and part of a long-standing oral storytelling tradition that may have reached back many decades and even several centuries. "The Story of Grandmother" (see here), as he called the tale, recounts a girl's trip to her grandmother's house and her encounter with a wolf. But the resemblance to the Little Red Riding Hood story we know today ends there. This Gallic heroine escapes falling victim to the wolf and instead joins the ranks of trickster figures. After arriving at grandmother's house and unwittingly eating "meat" and drinking "wine" that is in fact the flesh and blood of granny, the girl removes her articles of clothing, one by one, performing a striptease before the wolf. She climbs into bed with the beast, but it soon dawns on her that she is in danger. No dimwit, she escapes by pleading with the wolf for the chance to go outdoors and relieve herself, and once released, she races back home. Although "The Story of Grandmother" did not make it into print until nearly two centuries after Perrault wrote down his version of the story, it is presumably more faithful to oral traditions than Perrault's "Little Red Cap." After all, the folklorist who recorded it was not invested in producing a book that would end up in the nurseries of aristocratic families. Instead he worked hard to set down the words of his informant, who may have gotten some parts of the story wrong (as each teller does) but who managed to capture the spirit of narratives that were part of an adult storytelling tradition. The heroine in "The Story of Grandmother" is, as Jack Zipes points out, "forthright, brave, and shrewd."4 She is an expert at summoning courage and using her wits to escape danger. Perrault changed all that when he put her story between the covers of a book and eliminated vulgarities, coarse turns of phrase, and unmotivated plot elements. Gone are the references to bodily functions, the racy double entendres, and the gaps in narrative logic. As Delarue points out, Perrault removed elements that would have shocked and startled potential buyers of a volume that pictured a woman who appears to be a domestic servant, holding a spindle and seated before a fireside, with three well-dressed, attentive children surrounding her. Scenes of barbaric behavior (the girl eats granny's flesh and drinks her blood) and deep impropriety (the girl asks granny about her hairy body and big nostrils) no doubt discouraged parents from reading these "tales from times past" to their children, even when they included "morals." Perrault worked hard to craft a tale that excised the ribald grotesqueries of the oral narrative and rescripted the events to accommodate a rational moral economy. His Little Red Riding Hood has no idea that it is "dangerous to stop and listen to wolves" (see here). She also has a frivolous streak, stopping in the woods to have a "good time" as she gathers nuts, chases butterflies, and picks flowers. And, of course, she is not as savvy as James Thurber's "little girl," who knows that "a wolf doesn't look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge," and shoots the wolf dead with an "automatic."a To drive home the point that the tale is on a mission to modify behavior, the story ends with the following lesson: From this story one learns that children, Especially young girls, Pretty, well-bred, and genteel, Are wrong to listen to just anyone. And it's not at all strange, If a wolf ends up eating them. Little Red Riding Hood's failure to fight back or to resist in any way led the psychoanalytically oriented Bruno Bettelheim to declare that the girl must be "stupid or wants to be seduced." In his view, Perrault transformed a "naive attractive young girl, who is induced to neglect mother's warnings and enjoy herself in what she consciously believes to be innocent ways, into nothing but a fallen woman."f "Fallen woman" seems something of a stretch, but Little Red Riding Hood is no longer a trickster who survives through her powers of improvisation. Instead of succumbing to a rapacious beast in the woods, Little Red Riding Hood falls victim to one of those "tame wolves" who are "the most dangerous of all." It may be true that peasant cultures figured the wolf as a beast of prey, but folk raconteurs had probably already gleefully exploited the full range and play of the sexual innuendos in the story. The Grimms' "Little Red Cap" (see here) erased all traces of the raw energy found in "The Story of Grandmother" and placed the action in the service of teaching lessons to the child inside and outside the story. Like many fairy tales, the Grimms' narrative begins by framing a prohibition, but this tale has difficulty moving out of the regulatory mode. Little Red Cap's mother hands her daughter cakes and wine for grandmother and proceeds to instruct her in the art of good behavior with a barrage of imperatives: "[W]hen you're out in the woods, walk properly and don't stray from the path. Otherwise you'll fall and break the glass, and then there'll be nothing for Grandmother. And when you enter her room, don't forget to say good morning, and don't go peeping in all the corners of the room" (see here). The Grimms' efforts to encode the story with lessons could hardly be called successful. The lecture on manners embedded in the narrative is not only alien to the spirit of fairy tales—which are so plot driven that they rarely traffic in the kind of disciplinary precision on display here—but also misfires in its lack of logic. The bottle never breaks even though Red Cap strays from the path, and the straying takes place only after the wolf has already spotted his prey. What we discover in new versions of the tale is a form of repetition compulsion on steroids. The Brothers Grimm show us a Little Red Riding Hood who has internalized the lesson she has been taught, and at the end of her story she declares: "Never again will you stray from the path and go into the woods, when mother has forbidden it" (see here). Pick up any one of the dozens of versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" available in child-friendly picture books today, and you will find that the girl invariably states that lesson, not only for her own benefit but also for the sake of the child outside the book. Even the versions that use humor and whimsy end up giving us the same old story, as if staying on the path would somehow have saved the girl from the predator in the woods. Never mind that the lesson itself is one that we probably don't want to transmit to children today. As Neil Gaiman writes in The Ocean at the End of the Lane: "Children ... use back ways and hidden paths, adults take roads and official paths."' Straying from the path is actually a good thing today, yet we persist in condemning it in a story that nearly everyone hears—in one version or another—as a child. The multiforms of "Little Red Riding Hood" are not all cautionary. But the ones we tell to children all point to a moral, resisting the notion that the tale might engage with a range of cultural binaries: the predator-prey relationship, the nature-culture divide, or the fraught tension between innocence and seduction. And the cautionary version of "Little Red Riding Hood" inevitably gives us a tableau of violence intended to drive home a lesson about the consequences of disobedience and transgression. Worse yet, the girl is faulted for her love of beauty. Bettelheim famously condemned the Grimms' Little Red Cap as beset by the "pleasure-seeking id," a girl seduced by the beauty of the flowers that line the path she takes to granny's home. The folly of trying to derive a clear moral message from "Little Red Riding Hood" in any of its versions becomes evident from Eric Berne's rendition of a Martian's reaction to the tale: What kind of a mother sends a little girl into the forest where there are wolves? Why didn't her mother do it herself, or go along with LRRH? If grandmother was so helpless, why did mother leave her all by herself in a but far away? But if LRRH had to go, how come her mother had never warned her not to stop and talk to wolves? The story makes it clear that LRRH had never been told that this was dangerous. No mother could really be that stupid, so it sounds as if her mother didn't care much what happened to LRRH, or maybe even wanted to get rid of her. No little girl is that stupid either. How could LRRH look at the wolf's eyes, ears, hands, and teeth and still think it was grandmother? Why didn't she get out of there as fast as she could? By analyzing the rhetoric of the story and showing how it subverts the very terms it establishes, Berne performs a kind of protodeconstructive analysis that challenges the notion of a straightforward moral message in "Little Red Riding Hood." For Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, the story itself never stood in the way of a message. Both their tales make the heroine responsible for the violence inflicted on her. By speaking to strangers (as Perrault has it) and by disobeying her mother and straying from the path (as the Grimms tell it), the girl in red courts her own downfall. For every act of violence that befalls heroes and heroines of fairy tales it is easy enough to establish a cause by pointing to behavioral flaws. The aggression of the witch in "Hansel and Gretel," for example, has been read as a consequence of the children's gluttony and greed. A chain of events that might once have created burlesque, surreal effects can easily be restructured to produce a morally edifying tale. The shift from violence in the service of slapstick to violence in the service of a disciplinary regime may have added a moral backbone to fairy tales, but it rarely curbed their uninhibited displays of violence. Nineteenth-century rescriptings of "Little Red Riding Hood" are, in fact, among the most frightening, in large part because they tap into discursive practices that rely on a pedagogy of fear to regulate behavior. A verse melodrama that appeared in 1862, for example, made Little Red Riding Hood responsible for her own death and for her grandmother's demise: phylogeny, with each child moving through the various phases through which humans passed as culture emerged from nature. This unit features two versions of "The Wolf and the Seven Kids," one from Asia and one from Africa. Some decades ago German folklorist and sinologist Wolfram Eberhard carried out fieldwork in the Kuting section of the city of Taipei in Taiwan. He had no trouble coming up, while there, with 241 versions of a story he called "Grandaunt Tiger," a colossal number that reminds us that we rarely have more than the tip of a very large iceberg when it comes to a folktale. Grandaunt Tiger is a hybrid creature, half-human, half-beast, and she preys first on a mother, then on her two "nieces," devouring one but unable to outwit the other, who is as nimble and sharp-witted as the Gallic heroine in the "Story of Grandmother." The version included here is a free translation of "The Tale of the Tiger Woman," published in 1803 in an anthology of tales. It was recorded by Huang Chengzeng at the end of the seventeenth or beginning of the eighteenth century. "Tselane and the Marimo" is a South African tale recorded in 1842 by two French missionaries, who, as they stated in the preface to the account of their travels, hoped to "seek out unknown tribes, to open up communication with their chiefs, to mark out plans suitable for missionary stations, to extend the influence of Christianity and civilization."16 They also wished to give their readers some instances of the "old wives' stories with which mothers put their little ones to sleep, and inculcate betimes the first principles of Bechuana morality—that is submission to parental authority, and dread of the Marimos." The story was translated into English by anthropologist James G. Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, who published it in the British Folk-Lore Journal in 1888. Everyone experiences the story of "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Wolf and the Seven Kids" in different ways. To illustrate how the tales have unpredictable effects—they have, after all, been told in countless different ways—we can turn to any number of testimonials. Two, in particular, illustrate wide-ranging differences in reception, with memories that touch radically different points on an emotional spectrum, from comic to tragic. The writer Angela Carter recalled reading Perrault's "Little Red Riding Hood" as a child: "My maternal grandmother used to say, lift up the latch and walk in,' when she told it [to] me when I was a child; and at the conclusion when the wolf jumps on Little Red Riding Hood and gobbles her up, my grandmother used to pretend to eat me, which made me squeak and gibber with excited pleasure." Carter's grandmother, by impersonating the grandmother-devouring wolf who was also impersonating grandmothers, turns the tables by turning on her granddaughter, the girl who feasts on grandmother's flesh and blood in folk versions of the tale. Carter's account of her experience with "Little Red Riding Hood" stages the tale as one about intergenerational rivalry and love, yet it also reveals the degree to which the meaning of a tale is generated through performance. The scene of reading or acting out a story can affect its reception far more powerfully than the morals and timeless truths inserted into versions of the tale recorded by Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and others. Consider Luciano Pavarotti's childhood experience with "Little Red Riding Hood" and how markedly it differs from Carter's. The renowned baritone heard the stories from his grandfather, who told "violent, mysterious tales" that "enchanted" his listeners. "My favorite one," Pavarotti declared, "was Little Red Riding Hood. I identified with Little Red Riding Hood. I had the same fears as she. I didn't want her to die. I dreaded her death—or what we think death is. I waited anxiously for the hunter to come."u Little Red Riding Hood's encounter with the wolf and her brush with death is no longer burlesque, playful, or erotically charged. Instead, it has become the site of violence, anxiety, melodrama, and mystery. The feeling of dread, coupled with a sense of enchantment, captures the fascination with matters from which children are usually shielded. Pavarotti, like Dickens, is enamored of Little Red Riding Hood, but his infatuation is driven by her ability to survive death, to emerge whole from the belly of the wolf For centuries now, we have fallen for the girl in red, even if and perhaps precisely because she is constantly shape-shifting, reflecting our own cultural and personal anxieties and reminding us of who we are and how we came to be that way.