MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood” is often read as a cautionary tale to teach children to not talk to strangers, mostly due to the popularity of the versions written by Charles Perrault and the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. However, several retellings of the tale propose new meanings for the encounter with the wolf. Following the scholarly tradition to look at retellings of “Little Red Riding Hood” that interrogate gender expectations, this paper focuses on Angela Carter’s “The Werewolf” and Tanith Lee’s “Wolfland.” This study explores a similar strategy employed in these texts to renegotiate notions of femininity: both cast the grandmother as a werewolf and associate lycanthropy with witchcraft. The aim of this paper is to determine what it means to blur the boundaries among wolf, witch, and grandmother in this fairy tale. The literary analysis of these texts demonstrates that the takeover of the grandmother’s house by their granddaughters involves more than inheritance of a property but also the idea of replacement. The findings suggest that the encounter with the wolf is what symbolically leads these girls to their own independence, a power clearly associated in these texts with their embracement of wilderness. This paper concludes that the invitation to follow granny’s (paw) tracks is a call for self-discovery. As such, the transgressive imagery of a granny-wolf-witch allows us to reflect upon the multiplicity involved in the process of becoming.