Three Authors Retell
the Story of Little Red Riding Hood

by Hila Katz

1

Cape and Prejudice

As told by Jane Austen

Lady Riding Hood of the Twickenham Estates beckoned to her young daughter and stifled a yawn. The afternoon heat was rather oppressive and the Lady, whose constitution was poor and whose frame of mind was tenuous at best, fanned herself as hot and cold flashes ran up and down her supine body.

"Dearest Red," she sighed. "Your Grandma Norris asked me to deliver this basket of tea and knitting implements to the parsonage where she awaits in an ever anxious state of mind. Please make good haste through the forest; your visit will be ever so felicitous to her."

Little Red doubted that, knowing that her Grandma Norris was a mean-spirited prying old woman who always forced her wear tight corsets and binding shoes. But she spoke nothing of her thoughts. Instead she merely curtseyed to her mother and took up the basket.

"Darling child," added the mother, her eyes glazed and unfocused, "be sure not to speak to any strangers along the way. Avoid the foxes and the coyotes and the wolves. You know that if you were ever seen conversing with such creatures of ignoble birth it would cast a dark shadow over our family fortune and your brother William would never be able to find himself a damsel worth at least six thousand pounds."

Little Red nodded in understanding and made her way out of the house. It was a cheery day in early summer when the trees are not yet full of leaves, yet one knows that they will be full of leaves quite soon, so one's thoughts and imagination are whetted in anticipation of the forthcoming emerald glory. Red skipped along a happy little path that afforded her both shade and sunlight, but she had to pause often because her constitution was also poor as her usual exercise was pony-riding and not walking. By the time she reached the parsonage she was quite fagged, and beads of sweat clung to her golden curls.

The parsonage was unusually quiet, and Red experienced some most unwelcome premonitions. But it was so dreadfully hot outside that she could no longer resist the coolness that the squat building would offer her. Sighing, she slipped through the door and announced her arrival in a breathless voice.

What a surprise awaited her in the parlor! Opposite her Grandma Norris, who was reclining on the sofa, sat the Big Bad Wolf himself, a creature of ill repute and base manners. Red swooned and clutched the doorknob. "Grandma, what are you doing in the company of this creature?" she cried, dropping her basket and spilling the tea and knitting needles.

"Foolish girl," the grandma chided. "Why the alarm? The Big Bad Wolf, as you know, has recently acquired an inheritance of thirty-five thousand pounds. He's a gentleman now. And what's more, he wishes for your hand in marriage. Personally I fully support his intentions, and I know that your father, when he returns from his business in Antigua, will sanction it wholeheartedly. Be more thankful, girl, at these felicitous tidings. You are nearing twenty and in danger of losing the interest of men. Fortunately for you, my good friend here is willing to take you, ungrateful, stubborn, and undeserving as you are."

The Big Bad Wolf grinned and bowed to Red, offering her a present in the form of a new crimson cape. Red accepted it with a smile, happy at last to have been found.

2

The Big White Wolf

As told by Herman Melville

Little Red Riding Hood sat brooding in her attic bedroom. The curtains were drawn to permit no light as the little girl rocked back and forth in her chair, her mind fixed on one object alone: the Big White Wolf. Her last scrape with the beast had resulted in the mutilation of her red cotton cape that her mother had imported from the West Indies. Afire with rage, Little Red picked up the tattered garment, pressed it to her burning cheek, and then, growling, cast it to the floor.

"Red shall not be whole without her cape," she soliloquized, a nervous tic forming above her right eye. "I shall wrestle with ye, wolf, soon enough, if I can find ye in the forests of the night. Red is not well without her cape, and never shall she rest until she grapples with ye, foul beast, again. Heathen Red is, robbed of soul and spirit. Who can not pity her? Join me, apparitions of the forest. I shall pursue him who plagues your dominion with his white and ghostly presence. I shall smite him with my picnic basket once I find him lurking in a forest lane."

Red wished to enter the forest, but needed an excuse she could use for leaving her mother's house. "Mother," she cried, licking the froth from her lips and smoothing down her wild hair, "I wish to visit grandmother."

"All right," her mother consented. "Here are seven gold coins for you to give her when you arrive. Be careful though, while crossing the forest. Take care not to run into any wolves."

"I'll take care, mother," Red murmured, eyeing the woman at whose teat she had suckled. "Will I ever see you again?" she wondered in a whispered aside. "Will I ever glance upon your careworn face? Woe to you if you ever discover the monster you have bred. But it is no matter. Today I meet my destiny."

"What was that, Red?"

"Nothing," the little girl muttered as she left the house and entered the boundless, fathomless wood.

Ill omens presented themselves from all sides. A tree erupted in flame. A snake slithered up to her and flicked out three forked tongues. Thunder clapped madly, although the sky was pastel blue. Deer skulls and squirrel bones lined her path and gleamed eerily white in the sunshine.

White—what a color! It expresses infinite terror and infinite goodness, blankness and fullness, stinging snow and fleecy clouds, purity and moral depravity alike. The wolf, stalking through the forest on his alabaster haunches, possessed the whiteness of a blind and filmy eye.

Oh, and did I mention that wolves are mammals? They are, it's true. They have the most provocative vertebral structures and their jawbones are simply enigmatic. Only once have I seen a wolf skeleton that was completely intact. How thrilling it was! How I wish you could have been there. The Teepookee Tribe of East Ponga Ponga worships the wolf as if the creature were a god. I once lived among them and learned of their strange nightly rituals. They insert their heads in the dead wolf's inanimate jaws, then grind up its bones and sprinkle them on the prostrate bodies of their warriors. They beat small wooden sticks upon the animal's ribs to produce a tinkling primal music, and lastly, ingest the fur with a draught of brewed berries and estuary waters. The intoxication, they claim, confers wisdom.

But enough about my travels. Little Red Riding Hood had reached her grandmother's house. She was in a state of all-consuming rage, and, uttering words that no little girl should utter, words that wilted the grass around her, Little Red cursed her misfortune. There had been no sign of the wolf along the way.

Then she sensed it. At her moment of greatest despair, her nose twitched. Was that a trace of urine she detected? Falling on all fours, Little Red sniffed the ground and followed the increasingly strong odor all the way to her grandmother's door.

"He's inside," she opined with sly insouciance, and then with a great, ear-splitting shriek, she kicked down the door.

She heard a growl and saw a streak of white. Screaming, she lashed out at it with her picnic basket. The seven gold coins clattered to the floor, rattling like bones on a stony mesa. With a great roar, the elusive white wolf shoved her from his path and bounded into the forest. Red was about to give pursuit when she heard the feeble cries of her grandmother from a room within. "Red, Red!" the old woman moaned, her voice piteous and weak. Exceedingly alarmed, the little girl raced up to her grandmother's room and gasped at the sight that lay before her.

The old woman sat weeping before her sewing machine, where a piece of red cloth hung in tattered ribbons from the jaws of the apparatus. "I had been trying to replace your cape," said the old woman. "But, alas, he got this one, too."

Red stumbled around the room for a while, possessed in full by her monomania, until at last she gathered up enough presence of mind to make her way into the forest once more. She resolved never to rest until she had avenged herself of her two red capes—one shredded in its infancy, the other in its prime.

3

The World According to Red

As told by John Irving

"Red," cried her mother, who was puffing nervously on a cigarette. "It's been months since you've visited your grandmother. Why don't you run along to her today? I need some time alone."

Her mother, thought Red, was a strange bird. After all, what normal woman would name her daughter Red? The little girl knew the gloomy origins of her name. She was the product of a short-lived romance between her mother and a disabled lion tamer named Red Channing who had been a regular at the Happy Top Circus until his unfortunate scrape with a feline of foul temper. "You must learn from your father, Red, and never take stupid risks," her mother would always say whenever Red came home with a scraped knee or a bruised elbow.

Her mother dressed her now in a red cape, the same one Channing had bestowed upon herself the night before she had learned of his affair with Dolores, the Bearded Lady in Residence. "I'm never going to wear this ugly thing," she muttered, the cigarette dangling from her lips, "so you might as well." She paused. "Here, take these candies to your grandmother. They're left over from Easter and I don't want to throw them out."

Only after Red was out the door did the mother realize that she had forgotten to warn her daughter about the possibility of encountering the Big Bad Wolf, a shady character who stalked through the forest and terrified children. "Oh, well," the mother shrugged, "it'll help build her character."

Red's journey through the woods was pretty uneventful, although her schoolteacher had once warned that child molesters and drug pushers lurked behind every tree. But everyone knew what a bag of nerves was Miss Julius, a classic example of barely repressed manic depressive paranoia. Without giving her teacher's words much thought, Red wound her way through the forest and at last found herself facing her grandmother's house.

Red had always wondered why her grandmother had chosen to live alone in the forest. Although people are generally pathetic and depraved, and though their lonely lives are dictated by chaos and confusion, Red still would have preferred company to loneliness. "Your grandmother's a hermit," her mother had told her some time ago. "She gave up on humans after your grandfather left her for Emmanuel, his gardener and second cousin twice removed.

The door happened to be ajar, and Red slipped in to announce her arrival. The house had a peculiar odor, a blend of Bengay, bulldog, and peat moss. Red crept up the stairs to the second floor and pushed open her grandmother's bedroom door. A shadowed figure, clothed in a flower print dress and a tattered shawl, sat hunched in a rocking chair.

"Grandma?" Red asked, drawing nearer.

"Come nearer, child," the grandmother commanded in a suspiciously raspy voice.

"Why?"

"The better to see you, my dear."

Red stepped forward a few more feet. She paused. "There's something very odd about you, grandmother." The figure lifted its head, and Red screamed. "You're the Big Bad Wolf!"

"Please don't call me that, child," said the creature, wringing its paws.

"What have you done with my grandmother?"

"Nothing. She left you this note." The wolf handed the little girl a piece of stationery.

Red scanned the note. "She's eloped with the woodcutter?"

"Yes," said the wolf. "Your grandmother's still pretty frisky for her years and the woodcutter, who grew up in an orphanage, found the perfect figure of motherhood in her. They're a happy match, I'd say."

"So what are you doing here, wearing Grandmother's clothes?" asked Red.

"She let me house sit, and, well, I like women's clothing. I can't very well wear them outside the forest, even though they're strictly for comfort." He paused. "Care for a piece of beef jerky?"

Thus Red spent an amiable afternoon with the creature, whose preferences in attire prevented him from making further appearances outside of the forest. He proved to be a very pleasant wolf, which just goes to show you that cross-dressing wolves are sometimes more normal and balanced than regular people.

Copyright © Hila Katz 2003