MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This paper explores the way twenty-first century teleserials approach the story of Little Red Ridinghood, paying attention to feminine agency in the original texts and the erasure of/ emphasis on that agency in teleserial versions. I argue that the character of Little Red Ridinghood is alternately used as a trope to enforce masculine agency in Grimm and to hide an underlying message of enlightened sexism in Once Upon a Time. Perhaps one of the most well known western fairy tales, since her late seventeenth century emergence, Little Red Ridinghood has been positioned as a cautionary tale for young women to protect their virginity, a moral tale of female self- deprecation, and even a satirical look towards late twentieth century female empowerment. Contemporary television is the staging ground for two conflicting reinterpretations of this fairy tale that have been hovering in our cultural sight lines since the trend toward feminist re-tellings of fairy tales become fodder for popular media in the mid- 1990s. Once Upon a Time abandons any pretext of reference to the Grimm brothers’ or Charles Perrault’s original recordings of the Red Ridinghood tale, focusing instead on Disney’s “happily ever after” mythology. Grimm rejects the sanitized fairy tale that has become standard in American understandings of the genre, in favor of exploring darker elements seen in the original texts. Grimm occupies the blurred space between fairy tale and gothic horror story so often present in the original texts. Despite their contradictory approaches to the source material, both programs manage to undermine the cleverness, agency and strength Red typically possesses in pre-Disney texts. Red becomes a victim, either of her own sexuality or of a sexual predator and her television persona requires a savior absent from the original texts.