The ending of Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood”

The ending of Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood, that “the wicked wolf…gobbled her [Little Red Riding Hood] up” (13), is shocking because the girl’s only guilt here is her innocence.  The story’s brevity and simplicity magnify the psychological shock that the reader suffers from its ending – the grim finality of “the prettiest” village girl, “who did not know that it was dangerous to stop and listen to wolves” (12).  By using wolf as a metaphor for “the public world” (versus the private home), Perrault’s message with the story is unequivocal: the world outside home is dangerous for little girls.    The fact that this strategic, murderous wolf represents a male in the public domain not only limits female’s public space out of sheer fear factor, it also intimates female inferiority and her foreseeable doom in the public world.  succinctly, the story empowers men, not women.  Therefore, as a woman, I appreciated the other versions that empower women, not men.  Especially, Thurber’s The Little Girl and the Wolf, though considerably alters the literary value of the original text, was comical and entertaining.