The first wave of feminist studies focused on and found fault with some of the most popular tales (Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty) for reinforcing gender stereotypes and traditional hierarchies of power (Lieberman 1972). More recently, feminist approaches have also considered the gender of the tellers, writers, and collectors of folktales. Jack Zipes (1993), in The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, argued that the oral tradition of peasants (where women were storytellers) was coopted and transformed by Perrault into a story for aristocrats: “Perrault transformed a hopeful oral tale about the initiation of a young girl into a tragic one of violation in which the girl is blamed for her own violation” (p. 7). Marina Warner (1994, p. 238), in From the Beast to the Blonde, proposed a different understanding of Perrault’s tales, arguing that taken in its entirety, his collection of tales reflects the realities of life for seventeenth-century French women and thus serves as a warning about the potential hazards that await the young women at court.
Betsy Hearne’s (1989) Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale offers yet another way into the history of a particular tale. Instead of focusing on seeking out the tale’s elusive and ever-changing meaning, she provides a history of the tale through an analysis of how the tale’s structure, its art and artifice, has been revised over time and across different media. Similarly, in Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology of Fairy Tales and Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Christine Jones and Jennifer Schacker (Schacker and Jones 2013) demonstrate how a close reading of a tale like Little Red Riding Hood reveals its details, ambiguities and internal contradictions, as well as its connections to other literary forms and the culturally and socially specific meanings it carries. Intertextuality, or the web of references and connections between texts, takes several forms, including narrative conventions of a genre, such as the folktale genre, which trigger a reader’s expectations of characters, plot, and setting and the text or images that reference works of literature. Intertextuality is not limited to folktales and folktale revisions referencing other works of literature, since other works of literature also often reference folktale characters. For instance, Molly Clark Hillard (2013) argued that references to Sleeping Beauty in Victorian novels became a way to debate “gender relations in social and political life” (p. 546).
In her book Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales, Vanessa Joosen (2011) proposed another form of intertextual relationships: the relationship between fairy tales and literary criticism. Focusing on three key works of criticism, Joosen explored how literary criticism has influenced and shaped retellings and how retellings have influenced and directed literary criticism.
In children’s literature, illustrated editions of folktales, especially picturebooks, play an important role in telling tales. Picturebooks are made up of multiple narrative forms: the verbal (symbolic), the visual (iconic), and the visual and verbal together. From clarifying to expanding on, highlighting, and even contradicting each other, the relationships between the text and image are multilayered, dynamic, and complex. Further, illustrators use images to visually refer to other texts as well as other pictorial works. Images can reenforce or contradict particular aspects not only of the tale, but also of the cultural expectations of a character’s appearance (Beckett 2002; see also Mitts-Smith 2010).
Two studies examine the illustrations in Little Red Riding Hood. In “A Second Gaze at Little Red Riding Hood’s Trials and Tribulations,” Jack Zipes’s (1984) analysis of several of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century illustrated editions featuring the Perrault and the Brothers Grimm versions of Little Red Riding Hood stressed the socio-psychological repercussions of image and text. He noted that all the first illustrators of fairy tales were men who “projected their sexual phantasies through the images they composed” in which the young girl desires to be raped (p. 233).
In Recycling Red Riding Hood, Sandra Beckett focused on the “narrative strategies used to retell the fairy tale for contemporary children and young adults” (2002, p. xx). Beckett pointed out that “contemporary retellings of Little Red Riding Hood often use complex narrative structures and techniques, such as polyfocalization, genre blending, metafiction, parody, mise en abyme, fragmentation, gaps, anticlosure and the carnivalesque” (p. xx). In her chapter on illustrations, Beckett applied narrative theory to her examination of “visual interpretations of the classic tale [that] constitute truly original retellings” focusing on how an illustrator’s choice in matters of characterization, medium, and color affects the way in which a story is read and understood (p. xx).
My own study of the visual image of the wolf in children’s books included the wolf as depicted in Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Pigs, The Wolf and the Seven Kids, and the wolf fables of Aesop. A comparison of the images of the wolf within and across illustrated editions of these tales revealed commonalities in its depiction. Not only is the wolf shown as being physically larger than his victims, but since the wolf’s role in these tales is that of predator, the images emphasize the wolf’s mouth, the visual manifestation of the wolf’s predation. Whether wide-open with tongue hanging out or tightly closed, revealing just a hint of the teeth and danger within, the wolf’s mouth becomes the focal point of the image (Mitts-Smith 2010).
Reviewing the scholarly research and debates on folktales reveals a major pitfall in analysis and interpretation of the genre: the assumption that there is one true and original version of a tale. Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Pigs have shown there are different oral variants across time and place. And even in print (a medium once considered to preserve and freeze tales) there are different versions, from adaptations and translations of Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” or the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap” to retellings that modify, combine, or parody them. Picturebook retellings and revisions of tales like Little Red Riding Hood or The Three Pigs underscore their continued evolution through variations in text, visual images, plot, and characterization. Traditional European tales such as Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella have been the focus of much of the research on folklore in children’s books, yet since the mid-twentieth century, there has been an increase in the publication of folktales from a wider range of cultures (Bader 2010). The disparity between the publication of Western and non-Western folktales reflects a source of tension, raising questions of insider vs outsider, ownership, appropriation, and privilege. Further, as folktales in children’s books have become more culturally diverse, scholars need to focus on these tales as well. But one of the most important areas of research that is relatively absent from scholarship is the intended recipient of these books: the child. How does the child understand, respond to, or interpret these tales?
Folktales, whether in the form of anthologies, picturebooks and novels, or as references and visual allusions in other texts, add a richness to the landscape of children’s literature. Yet children’s books are only one of the spaces where folktales can be found. They are featured in cartoons and films and used to advertise a range of products from lipstick to plumbing fixtures and prescription medicine. Folktale characters adorn our clothing and household items. Their abundance in children’s books and beyond reflects an expectation that children will be exposed to these stories from an early age and that these stories are not only part of our common knowledge but are requisite knowledge.
REFERENCES
1 Anonymous (1813). The History of the Celebrated Nanny Goose. London: S. Hood.
2 Ashliman, D.L. (2008). The Three Little Pigs and other folktales of Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 124. https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0124.html.
3 Avery, G. and Kinnell, M. (1995). Morality and Levity (1700-1780). In: Children’s Literature: An Illustrated History (ed.P. Hunt), 46–76. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
4 Bader, B. (2010). Folklore: It’s a different story. The Horn Book Magazine (September/October 2010, 19–27).
5 Beckett, S.L. (2002). Recycling Red Riding Hood. New York and London: Routledge.
6 Bernoni, G. (1885). Three goslings. In: Italian Popular Tales (trans. T.F. Crane), 268–270.