Until the beginning of the 20th century, that seems to have been the common attitude amongst fairy tale writers towards young girls. If she had only listened to her mother’s advice, gone straight to her grandmother’s house and had not talked to the wolf, nothing would have happened to her. Since Charles Perrault first published the tale of Little Red Riding Hood in 1697, her tragedy normally has been considered her own fault. Generations of writers never hesitated to blame the girl for her misfortune. Red Riding Hood was sent into the forest to be gobbled up or raped by the wicked wolf over and over again. In hundreds of adaptations, writers of children’s literature repeatedly let the young girl pay for her irresponsibility and her reckless talking to strangers. During the last three centuries, generations of male narrators and moralistic Victorian authors of both sexes have changed the once straightforward and clever peasant girl, who was capable of taking care of herself and outsmarting a seducing wolf by her own wit, into a passive heroine controlled by others to suit the traditional (male) view of how “nice girls” ought to behave. Little Red Riding Hood has never enjoyed an easy life. It is Not so Easy to Fool Little Girls Nowadays Nice Girls go to Heaven other Girls go Everywhereġ9th-century Victorian and Puritan Adaptations The Brothers Grimm and the Biedermeier Era Charles Perrault, Werewolves and the Fear of Female Sexuality
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