Little Red Riding Hood Secrets

We receive the first lesson of initiation in early childhood, before we can read, between the ages of three and five. This teaching role is taken on not by parents, but by fairy tales. Only these lessons are very cruel, their therapy comes from the opposite – they tell us things that parents will never say. Here at least the legendary “Little Red Riding Hood” by Charles Perrault. Remember? Outwardly, everything is extremely simple: the mother sends a gift to the sick grandmother, a pie and a pot of butter, and instructs her sweet daughter, nicknamed Little Red Riding Hood, to carry the basket. Well, and so on …

Meanwhile, for a child, this tale is a form of shock.

Go! Take it! Grandma!

It turns out that’s the thing! You can be left completely alone, without a mother, and go out of your native walls onto an unknown path that goes through a dense forest. It’s scary to walk through the woods alone. So the child goes through the first existential lens of initiation – you will be alone for the rest of your life and you will never return to your mother’s house.

There is no such return in Perrault’s tale.

On a path in the forest, Little Red Riding Hood meets a wolf.

But who the wolf is – she has no idea, because she sees him for the first time in her life and takes him for a person. That is why she is so happy about this meeting. That is why, with such a willingness, he answers his question: I am bringing a present to my grandmother, who is sick. It is important for the girl that now the load of the assignment is divided into two, and it is no longer so scary to run along the path.

Meanwhile, a meeting with a wolf is a fork in the road.

Before that, the path had no bifurcations.

It turns out that you can turn off the path! says a scary tale.

This shock is also one of the first events in our lives.

The future is not guaranteed. There are no direct paths.

The wolf gallantly comes to the rescue here.

He offers to play:

“Let’s race. Who will run to the grandmother faster? Come on, you are on the left path, and I am on the right … ”And he runs away. Little Red Riding Hood is alone again. So it becomes clear to the child that the state of “being alone” is serial, it will always be – always! – repeat.

Meanwhile, in the original fairy tale, Perro’s fork is even more terrible: the wolf says: “Let me go along the pin path, and you along the needle path.”

What is the secret here?

And the fact that in the XVIII century the so-called safety pins were crowned with a round knob. That is, the wolf ran along a noticeable, bumpy path, jumping from bump to bump, and Little Red Riding Hood started running along a needle-shaped path, that is, barely noticeable, unkempt, similar to stitches from a thread with a needle in the canvas. In the Russian translation, this subtlety is generally lost, meanwhile, the material from which Perrault’s story is sewn is the thin scarlet fabric of a children’s hat. Here is her invoice. That is why here everything that has a point – needles, pins – is very dangerous, because the point pierces right through the rag universe. So Perrault skillfully prepares us for the culmination of evil – for wolf teeth – but the child’s heart is already beginning to beat with anxiety.

The fork generates a parallel montage of events. I remember this horror for myself: it turns out that something can happen where you are not yet, but where you are about to get, like Little Red Riding Hood in grandmother’s house. The future is waiting for you! The details of the wolf entering the house truly terrify the heart of the child: guessing that the wolf is evil, he overhears how the wolf at the closed door impersonates Little Red Riding Hood and hears in response: “Pull the rope, my child.”

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• What they tell us … fairy tales

At this point, the child suddenly realizes that the door of his house is also vulnerable, like that of his grandmother, and evil will easily penetrate his bed … Locks do not lock. The door is always open.

In the Russian translation, the woodcutters kill the wolf, they run to the cry, cut the wolf’s stomach, and the grandmother and granddaughter come out into the light alive. This is our Russian translators tried! In the original, Charles Perrault has none of this, the wolf ruthlessly eats first the grandmother, and then the Little Red Riding Hood.

“One day you will die,” the fairy tale whispers in your ear the terrible truth, the one that your parents will never tell you.

So, Little Red Riding Hood entered her grandmother’s house, she was out of breath, she was glad that she was ahead of the wolf. All these details are absent in the fairy tale, nevertheless, the child perfectly reads the patterns of the game in a race.

We know: the wolf ate the grandmother, went to bed and guarded the granddaughter.

This is how the second existential lens of initiation is experienced: the one who is nearby is not at all the one he claims to be …

So the story comes to an end.

Grandmother asks her granddaughter to undress and go to bed with her.

Little Red Riding Hood begins to undress with embarrassment, she is an obedient granddaughter … In Perrault’s draft, this scene is accompanied by a gloomy refrain. “Where to put the dress?” the granddaughter asks her grandmother. “Throw it into the fire,” replies the wolf, “you won’t need it again.” Throws into the fire of the fireplace. “And the skirt?” “Throw it into the fire too, you won’t need it again.” Throws. It’s the turn of the little red riding hood, which the girl loves more than anything else. “And throw it into the fire too,” says the wolf.

The heart of a child in this place beats like a hammer … Death is with you, child, too – too! – will happen.

By the way, Charles Perrault himself considered his fairy tale a warning for frivolous girls who are deceived easily by deceitful gentlemen. What he directly wrote in poetic morality (our translators do not translate it either). His wolf is a Frenchman, a seducer of simpletons. But the meaning of the tale turned out to be wider and deeper, which is why it became a classic.