Visualising Little Red Riding Hood- Sarah Bonner

In recent years contemporary artists have been appropriating and re-inventing traditional fairy tales. Subverting and interrogating received meanings, artists are challenging the traditional parameters of tales which convey ideas of gender role and racial identity. The fairy tale is being translated from literary text into visual culture. The artists recoding the tales address shifts in cultural attitude, engaging predominantly with issues of identity and discrimination. In this paper I examine the visual development of “Little Red Riding Hood,” investigating the manner in which the literary tale has been adopted by contemporary artists, how the visual responds to the textual, and cultural attitudes embedded in reiterations of the tale.

Critical literature dedicated to the field of fairy tale study is extensive, drawing its interpretive framework from historical and ideological discourses. Jack Zipes employs a socio-historical model for analysing the development and significance of the tales. Writing from a Marxist viewpoint, he argues that fairy tales embody the shifting cultural codes of history and, as such, they can be interpreted as records of social production. Zipes holds that the genre is as relevant to contemporary culture as it was for pre-literate society, especially in terms of gender politics and identity construction. His analysis of the illustrations of “Little Red Riding Hood” provides a sound basis for continuing research into visual representations of the tale. Where Zipes comments on the ideologies conveyed by fairy tales, Catherine Orenstein explores the historical and cultural meanings of “Little Red Riding Hood,”—its broad cultural incidences from cartoons and pornography to films and advertising, focusing closely on the construction and interpretation of gender. Bruno Bettelheim, a Freudian psychoanalyst of the genre, suggested that fairy tales were instrumental in developing children’s identity. For Bettleheim, children were able to locate in the text answers to their own trials and tribulations. Psychoanalysis constitutes significant research in this field, but it operates a closed system preferring universalities over individualities. Freud’s patriarchal meta-narrative favours boys’ development rather than girls’, and tends to ignore subjectivity as a whole in childhood development. Bettelheim’s assertions have been scrutinized by contemporary artists, who subordinate the prescriptions and constraints of fairy tale psychoanalysis to the interpretive freedom of narrative analysis—in particular, Roland Barthes’ conception of the relationship between text and image. These critical commentaries express the ubiquity of the tale in popular culture, emphasising its continued relevance on an individual and social level.

Although the critics mentioned above have informed my understanding of “Little Red Riding Hood,” my main aim here is to examine how contemporary artists are appropriating the tale and to what end. The text and image are intimately related, yet I propose that the image contains qualities that release interpretation from the strictures of tradition, making them more relevant and immediate in contemporary society. “Little Red Riding Hood” has sustained continued analysis and appropriation making it a forum for interrogation. References to the tale are abundant, indicating its presence in our cultural unconscious, and Maria Tatar identifies the tale as a place to “work through anxieties about gender, identity, sexuality and violence” (Orenstein i). In her 2002 study Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked, Catherine Orenstein claims that the tale “embodies complex and fundamental human concerns” (8).

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english/graduate/issue/2/sarah.htm