Little Red Reading List

It was Roald Dahl and his Revolting Rhymes that set me on the course to consult variations. What did me in — was his mash-up of the Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood and Quentin Blake's illustrations capture the uproarious fun of [SPOILER ALERT] the fashion-conscious conclusion:

Ah Piglet, you must never trust
Young ladies from the upper crust
For now, Miss Riding Hood, one notes,
Not only has two wolfskin coats,
But when she goes from place to place,
She has a PIGSKIN TRAVELLING CASE.

And so I turned to the Virago Book of Fairy Tales Volume One edited by Angela Carter and found in the notes a useful reference to the work of Jack Zipes, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood and a search by author led to Don't bet on the prince : contemporary feminist fairy tales in North America and England edited by Zipes which contains the poem "Little Red Riding Hood" by Olga Broumas which is found in her 1977 book Beginning with O where one finds a whole set of fairy-tale inspired meditations on the love between women. And so one reads about Sleeping Beauty awakened by the kiss of a woman. The kiss is related in a mode of defiance and as a challenge to recapture the colonized quotidian.

a sign of betrayal, your red
lips suspect, unspeakable
liberties as
we cross the street, kissing
against the light, singing, This
is the woman I woke from sleep, the woman that woke
me sleeping.

But back to Little Red Riding Hood. After an opening about the mother-daughter relationships mediated by placental imagery, Broumas concludes that poem with lines that jump from being on the look out for wolfmen to participating in a community of sexual intimates, the jump is there for the reader to see inscribed on the page

minded. I kept

to the road, kept
the hood secret, kept what it sheathed more
secret still. I opened
it only at night, and with other women

Broumas is a good place to begin in constructing a reading list devoted to women-women relationships and the fairy tale. One could add Malinda Lo's contribution to young adult fiction Ash. And it could even be argued that (SPOILER ALERT) that the kiss at the end of Disney's Maleficent recasts the intergenerational relation between women in a manner that is both more and less than a riff on mother-daughter patterns and certainly is a figure that arises from the nature of friendships propelled by initiation into a shared world. It would be interesting to see how "true love" translates to the novelization of the movie by Elizabeth Rudnick.

And so for day 1193
20.03.2010