To begin, Angela Carter is wacked out. Her stories are full of disturbed and unneeded additions to the traditional fairy tale stories. Specifically, the story of Little Red Riding Hood is severely tweaked by Angela Carter, not only once, but three separate times. It has become a norm to change fairy tales and put a spin on them since fairy tales started being told, but there is no lesson learned in describing a werewolf’s giant genitals and a paragraph that vividly describes a woman’s virginity in physical aspects. These unnecessary details are what intrigues and detracts people from the moral of the story.
Red Riding Hood is a story about love, adventure and mystery. More over, the main point of the story is to not tempt men with womanish lust, otherwise its is the woman’s fault for what ever the man will do to possess her. Although this is not a typical translation of the lessons that pertain to this story, it is a reoccurring theme in all the Red Riding Hood tales. The men are attracted to the Red Riding Hood by her beauty, virginity, and her will to be unafraid of the wolf. She ventures into the woods where no one dares go alone, she temps the wolf with subtle conversations while she does not even know the wolf, but she still yet maintains power of the wolf in many stories, including this story by Angela Carter. This creates a secondary theme that women are in fact a driving force in men’s lives and special in a way that men can show emotion to them.
This secondary theme is quite different from the previous. But the two coincide, especially in today’s modern culture. The wolf longs for human contact and intimacy, but can not receive this through convention means because of him being a murderous werewolf. The wolf then seeks this through luring a young woman to the woods and is then confronted by her stubbornness when he attempts to eat her. This correlates to modern culture because: A- men are not allowed to show emotion, otherwise they are considered wussies by other men; B- because women now take a stand in relationships, where as in the past women were expected to be submissive to men in marriage or relationships and are often the sole recipient of their man’s emotions. So, the werewolf represents men’s inability to express emotion and the Red Riding Hood represents a modern woman in Angela Carters view.
In the end, the in depth details of the sexual nature of these beings is also a modern take upon the story. After all, holly wood has glorified sex to be the pinnacle of life and this story simply adds to that. Sex is a driving force in everything; especially pop culture and entertainment among Americans. So why not add extreme details to make this story near erotica?
Angela Carter, your story is bit over the top, but I’m glad there are multiple takes on this story that you have produced. You have made a story that both gross’s me out and captivates me; this is a daunting task. Not all your stories are of material that I would choose to read for fun, but they do make superb literature to discuss and write about.
