Victim, seductress, or executioner? The ambiguously feminist recycling of little red riding hood: from Charles Perrault to contemporary pop culture

64 victim, seductRess, oR executioneR? the ambiGuously Feminist RecyclinG oF lIttle red rIdIng hood: FRom chaRles peRRault to contempoRaRy pop cultuRe ¿víctIma, seductora o verdugo? el recIclaje ambIguamente FemInIsta de capeRucita Roja: de charles perrault a la cultura pop contemporánea silviano caRRasco yelmo Universidad Complutense de Madrid [email protected] 0000-0003-0317-5415 Recibido: 17/01/2024 Aceptado: 03/05/2024 Abstract Little Red Riding Hood is arguably one of the most famous fairy tales in the world. The tale has traditionally been interpreted as a Freudian learning experience (Bettelheim, 1976), and this popular character as well as its narrative simplicity allowed the renowned scholar Umberto Eco to use it as a parable on the limits of interpretation (Eco, 1994). This article will examine the recycling process that the tale has undergone from Charles Perrault to the present day, spanning various mediums such as comics, movies, anime, or songs from the late 20th to early 21st centuries. The strategies employed to retell and recycle the tale, especially in pop culture (whether from a structural standpoint or under a new conceptual framework), will be studied, along with their implications from the perspective of feminist empowerment. Keywords: Little Red Riding Hood, Feminism, Recycling Strategies, Empowerment, Narratives, Fiction. Resumen Caperucita Roja es posiblemente uno de los cuentos de hadas más famosos del mundo. El cuento se ha interpretado tradicionalmente como una experiencia de aprendizaje freudiano (Bettelheim, 1976) y tanto su carácter popular como su simpleza narrativa permitieron que el célebre Umberto Eco lo utilizara como parábola de los límites de la interpretación (Eco, 1994). Este artículo examinará el proceso de reciclaje que ha sufrido el cuento desde Charles Perrault hasta nuestros días, pasando por diferentes medios como el cómic, películas, animes o canciones de finales del siglo XX a comienzos del XXI. Se estudiarán las estrategias que tienen lugar para volver a contar el cuento y reciclarlo sobre todo en la cultura pop (ya sea desde un punto de vista estructural o bajo un nuevo marco conceptual) y sus implicaciones desde la perspectiva de empoderamiento feminista. Palabras clave: Caperucita Roja, feminismo, estrategias de reciclaje, empoderamiento, narrativas, ficción. 10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29866 64-85 65 Introduction Fairy tales and gender studies are not new to each other: in 1970, Alison Lurie published an article titled “Fairy Tale Liberation”, in which she made the case that fairy tales helped the cause of women’s liberation, because they depicted strong females. She elicited a strong response by Marcia R. Lieberman that came two years later as an article titled “Some Day My Prince Will Come”, denouncing that the most popular fairy tale stories (as portraited by Disney) do not depict strong female protagonist indeed and the corpus Lurie quoted as representative of fairy tales was hardly known by anyone but scholars. These arguments were seconded by Andrea Dworkin in her book Woman Hating (1974), as well as Susan Brownmiller in her book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975). The later argued that Little Red Riding Hood was a parable of rape (and we will examine this particular parable in our corpus) and that fairy tales taught women to settle into the role of rape victims. This back and forth on the topic was surpassed in 1979 when Karen E. Rowe wrote the pivotal article “Feminism and Fairy Tales”. She argued that fairy tales showed the concerns of contemporary women and how folklorists could use feminism to understand the genre’s sociocultural meanings.1 A young, apparently innocent girl meets a predator in the woods. Instead of running away, she enters a conversation with it/him, and she is offered a choice: the way of needles (i.e.: the way of the traditional duty, the safety of their own sexuality) or the way of pins (i.e.: the way of fun, the sexual initiation entering the world of men). The needles represent sewing, and this was a female activity at the time. From a psychoanalytic perspective, pins stand for penises and needles stand for vaginas. She inevitably chooses the way of pins and will face the consequences of her own choice, sometimes learning something, sometimes suffering for it. This choice is what makes Little Red Riding Hood unique (and at the same time, problematic) for it is complicated to cast her irrevocably into the role of a passive victim, all the more having in mind that the girl escapes (or even kills) the wolf in lots of versions. In the words of Natalie Hayton: The image of the Innocent Persecuted Heroine in folkloristics and Disney has never been associated with Red’s character and situation, and she is typically absent from any academic analysis of this fairy tale archetype. Yet, as a young girl subjected to violence, rape and sometimes murder, her relationship to the traditional list of long suffering females like those mentioned above, is analogous. As Zipes (1993 and 2011) and Marina Warner (1995) assert, the suggestion of her complicity in her own victimisation means that Red can never simply be ‘innocent’. (Hayton, 2013: 16) The purpose of this article is to examine how the classic character flows between three roles: the of the victim is reinforcing a negative stereotype about independent women making her own, daring choices. The role of the seductress is an ambivalent role, as the act of seduction may be sanctioned for the best or for the worst, depending on the success of Little Red. Finally, the role of the executioner means re-empowering the girl via her control of her own destiny and choices. These projections of the heroine are tied 1 For a more detailed overview of this process and its fruitful consequences up to the 2000, the reader may refer to Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (Haase, 2004: vii-7). 10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29866 64-85 66 to textual strategies in the different media we will examine, and it is our aim to decode the strategies operating each time the tale is recycled (i.e. rewritten for different media with new purposes). In order to do so, we borrow the methodological approach from Susana Tosca (see Tosca, 20132) committed to this approach concerning the recycling of LRRH in digital format. She established four main recycling categories: •Multimedial Remediation: this means transporting the old text into a new platform (2013: 198). • New Symbolic Layer: meaning “most of the traditional plot elements are preserved, but there is an additional layer of meaning added to the text” (2013: 199) •Dispersion/Fragmentation: “LRRH is mixed with several other fairytales in a pandemonium of themes” (2013: 199) •Transmedial World: as opposed to all the other examples and strategies, there is here an extra layer to the interpretive-evocative, as we feel we can navigate the universe of LRRH thanks to the richness of the recreation (2013: 202). Origins and shape-shifting strategies. It might seem superfluous to introduce our fairy tale via a brief summary of its plot: every person, whether literate or illiterate, has at some point in their lives listened to some variant of Little Red Riding Hood (hereinafter referred to as LRRH). Folklorists have discovered variants of the fairy tale not only in Europe but also all around the world (see Dundes, 1989: 21-63); where Wolfram Eberhard analyses and dissects different versions of the tale in Asia; see also Zipes, (1993), where 38 international versions of the tale are compiled (most of them are European or American, though). Some versions display interesting cultural changes: the traditional Chinese one, named Goldflower and the Bear, presents a plantigrade in lieu of the classic wolf and the red color is replaced by gold (283-292); the reader will find in Delarue & Teneze, (1976), up to 35 versions of the tale just in the oral French tradition. Thanks to the folklorists’ research, the plot can nowadays be trimmed down to its most basic form, from which all other versions seem to have sprung. Folklorists name this structure ur-plot (urmeaning primitive, original) borrowing the concept from Vladimir Propp, who famously studied the morphology of Russian fairy tales back in 1928. The reader interested in tracing back the genesis and variants of the tale around the world may refer to Jamshi Tehrani (2013). Presenting the dramatic structure of the tale could prove, however, more interesting for our study: for Catherine Orenstein, the core of the story lies in the fact that “Opposites collide -good and evil, beast and human, male and female. How the heroine negotiates this clash determines her fate” (Orenstein, 2002: 4). The author argues that it is this simplicity that allows for the tale to become “the quintessential moral primer”. Indeed, it is this simplicity that makes it possible to strongly convey almost any moral teaching for children, particularly girls, via the fairy tale: the story is about a simple choice and a simple consequence following the choice almost immediately. 2 Available online: http://www.neliufpe.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/11.pdf 10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29866 64-85 67 Despite the apparent simplicity of the plot structure, the tale has indeed elicited countless interpretations since Charles Perrault wrote it for the first time in 1697, echoing the French oral tradition in the anthology Contes de ma mère l’oye (Tales of Mother Goose). In this version, the tale ends abruptly for the modern reader when the wolf devours LRRH. We can read next the moral of the story in which the wolf is equaled to a sexual predator.3 There is undoubtedly something captivating about the tension underneath said simplicity: Erich Fromm famously stated that the red in the hood symbolised menstruation and the bottle of wine that Little Red Riding Hood carries in the basket was actually her own virginity (see Fromm, 1951: 235-240). None other than Umberto Eco used the fairy tale to illustrate the limits of interpretation and overinterpretation in his essay Six walks in the fictional woods, where he argues that we could interpret LRRH from multiple points of view, but the consistency of the text forbids us to use it to force a chemical interpretation where LRRH would be cinnabar and the wolf would be mercurous chloride (see Eco, 1994: 91-92). The power of the tale lays in the fact that it is both simple and deep enough to suggest lots of interpretations, and this is what interested Eco. The object of our study is not the different versions of LRRH per se, but rather the mechanisms of cultural recycling lying underneath some pop milestones in the last three decades and how they project a different ideological meaning for the heroine of the tale, be it through empowerment, overt sexualisation or victimisation. Tracing down versions or variants is certainly a task that has been undertaken by scholars countless times. Thus, Amie A. Doughty establishes the distinction between retellings (which include minor differences, due for instance to nuances in translations or even the iteration of the oral retelling itself which would vary some details) and revisions. According to this difference, “revisions of folktales, however, are versions of folktales, usually written, that take traditional tales, often well-known ones, and alter them in a much more elaborate manner than retellings” (Doughty, 2006: 14). These are revisions that we are naturally interested in, as they may accommodate new meanings, such as the new symbolic layer, the dispersion/fragmentation or the transmedial world. Doughty does not seem very much interested in transmedia, which is understandable, since she focused on stories updated for children, and as such, she just considers film adaptations in one chapter. Orenstein, on the other hand, offers an exhaustive compilation of retellings, ranging from traditional versions (Perrault, Grimm’s brothers, etc.) to films, rock songs, LRRH in advertising and even porn. She is, however, mostly interested in ideology, as the subtitle “Sex, morality and the evolution of a fairy tale” declares. We borrow the concept of cultural recycling from Jenkins (2013) and Reynolds (2011). They stress the idea of old content being re-entering the circuit through new media and acquiring new meaning not only because of the media itself or the new distribution model (which is different from the “retro” or “nostalgic” aspect), as McLuhan famously declared in his quote “the medium is the message”, but also because minimal changes could point to important ideological shifts in the tale. For instance, the Grimm brothers invented a woodman that saved both LRRH and her grandmother in the end. This implies ideologically that only a man can redeem LRRH and provide a happy ending, despite her mistakes. 3 This was the part most criticised by Bruno Bettelheim, as he argues that giving away explicitly the moral of the story removes the power of the imagination from children, which need to draw the conclusion and extract the meaning by themselves. 10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29866 64-85 68 Another interesting example happens when the tale is transposed to an iconic media, such as comic or cinema: the author(s) needs to choose which parts will be explicitly represented and which ones will happen through ellipsis or off-screen. In the end it all comes back essentially to the version as understood by Doughty; Cristina Bacchilega points in the same direction as she speaks of rewritings (see Bacchilega, 1997: 50): [R]ewriting need not be simply a stylistic or ideological updating to make the tale more appealing to late […] adult audiences, […] it involves substantive though diverse questioning of both narrative construction and assumptions about gender. Postmodern revision is often two-fold, seeking to expose, make visible, the fairy tale’s complicity with “exhausted” narrative and gender ideologies, and, by working from the fairy tales’ multiple versions, seeking to expose, bring out, what the institutionalization of such tales for children has forgotten or left unexploited. Our focus will be not on what changes are made from one version to another, as much as why and how these changes are done (i.e. the recycling strategies operating in each version), as well as its consequences for a gender studies’ reading of the version. Why does Neil Gaiman uses a metafictional approach to takes us back to the Perrault’s version? Can LRRH lure the wolf into a trap when the tale is transported to a futuristic, dystopian Japan? What happens if we present LRRH as a deranged sociopathic killer and the wolf as a victim? What if LRRH was read as a detective story instead of a cautionary tale? What lies beneath Lady Gaga’s Monster? Why does the singer avoid any explicit reference to LRRH? These questions will be examined and answered through the next sections of this paper. The Sandman (Neil Gaiman, 1990). LRRH as metafiction: revealing the “true nature” of the tale. Neil Gaiman often builds his short stories and novels upon or around a shocking discovery that horrifies the reader. He is also a very efficient connoisseur of the fairy tale structures: if the reader would need proof, they can refer to his poem Instructions (Gaiman, 2010), in which, in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, he gives pieces of advice for characters in fairy tales, such as: “do not touch anything”, “eat nothing”, “trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn” (2010: 3-38), playing around the traditional tropes and events. In our example, however, we will study his perhaps most famous work as the scenarist of the acclaimed series of graphic novels “The Sandman”. The series (published by DC Comics’ Vertigo from 1989 to 1996) is celebrated for the unique blend of myth, fantasy and horror, and tell the story of “Dream”, one of the god-like endless beings, and his adventures. In volume number 2, the story follows Rose Walker, a young girl in search of her lost little brother. She rents an apartment in a block full of queer people (the character named Gilbert is one of them) and her journey takes her to a motel where she asks his new friend, Gilbert, to tell her a tale to calm her down. 10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29866 64-85 69 At this point, the very process of folktale researching underlies the strategy adopted by Neil Gaiman, since the writer will take his model reader by surprise when Gilbert proceeds to recite a version of LRRH in which she eats her mother’s flesh, drinks her blood and is finally devoured as the ending: Fig.1:oSandman LRRH01 10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29866 64-85 70 Fig. 2: Sandman LRRH02 10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29866 64-85 71 The shocking reveal is that LRRH is not a tale suitable for kids, and although the sexual nature of the tale is unequivocally depicted, the metaphor linking the tale to the meta/ frame story is not that Rose is sexually inexperienced as much as the fact that Rose is a naive young girl totally unaware of the mortal danger she is currently in, as she has checked in in a motel hosting an undercover convention of serial killers. The beautiful composition of the page closes the tale with a close up of Rose holding his head and whispering horrified: “Gilbert… that’s horrible!”. “I’m afraid so. There are earlier versions that are even worse”, Gilbert replies. In fact, Gaiman pretty much twists the genesis of the tale: in French oral traditions LRRH usually escapes her doom on her own or is even rescued by other women, as Pilar García-Carcedo studies in her compilation (see García- Carcedo, 2022). This metafiction is a perfect example of the process of legitimation the graphic novel underwent through the last decades of the 20th century: blurring high-brow and lowbrow culture, the graphic novel will appeal to the casual reader (who knew about the canonical Grimm’s version) as well as to the scholar’s interest in the tale (who will be delighted in Gaiman’s divulgation of knowledge). For the figure of LRRH, however, this strategy implies reframing her ideologically from her role of survivor and recasting her into the role of victim. As she dies in the end and is no longer able to escape her fate, the tale is setting the example on a world where women pay for the “crime” of experiencing sexuality in a playful manner, implicitly advising little girls to keep their submissive role in a society led by men, whether in the 17th century where Perrault manipulated the formula or all the way through 1998. The addition of the lumberjack saving the day4 reinforces explicitly the implicit meaning of roles under the patriarchy, as pointed out by Bacchilega (1997: 58-59): both versions are cautionary tales, as: Whether she survives her journey into the outer world or not, the girl is inside when the tale ends -inside the wolf’s belly for Perrault, or her grandmother’s home for the Grimms. Devoured or domesticated, charged with sin or in charge of the feminine hearth, in the library fairy-tale tradition Red Riding Hood is subjected to the laws of one deliberative masculine body. When the wolf punishes the girl’s curiosity, and when the hunter saves her and the grandmother, males determine feminine limits. Despite the fact that Sandman stands out for its openness on gender issues throughout the saga, Red Riding Hood is played here for its sheer shock effect, and, as a result, lacks any powerful denunciation: Rose stands for LRRH and she has been successfully terrorised by Gilbert (which, by the way, is a transcript of G.K. Chesterton). The man, in contrast, stands firmly and plays the role of wise counselor (i.e. the male authority) instilling fear where it should be felt, as determined by him. Coming back to Tosca’s classification, there is a new symbolic layer to be found for the casual reader, as they will reinterpret the tale as a horror story instead of a happy ending. The scholar reading through a gender perspective will also find another representation of patriarchal control, so as Jean-Baptiste Karr famously stated, “the more things change, the more they stay the same” (Karr, 1849). 4 Which is a later invention by the Grimm brothers, as Gilbert points out. 10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29866 64-85 72 Jin-Roh (Hiroyuki Okiura, 1999): inversion of the inversion. Inversion is a trope/variant long known for the tale, often tied to a humorous twist or empowering LRRH, or both, such as in Roald Dahl’s poem Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, in Tex Avery’s short cartoon Red Hot Riding Hood, or even the ancient version of the tale, where LRRH cleverly escapes. Jin-Roh is an anime film (directed by Hiroyuki Okiura, and written by Mamoru Oshii, 1999) that will surprise the spectator with an expected twist followed by an unexpected one. The plot is quite complex, and we may offer just a summarised version and commentary: in a dystopian post World War 2 Japan, Germany has won the war and Japan is ruled by authoritarian political forces, which used the special militarised unit Kerberos Panzer Cop (literally “Dog Armoured Police”) to crush dissidence and rebels. This unit wears a characteristic armour and helmet allowing night vision and suited to fight by night or in dark places such as the sewers. The helmet displays yellow glowing “eyes” for night vision, thus reinforcing the metaphor of the wolves’ evil eyes glowing in the dark5. Fig. 3: Jin-Roh helmets. The story follows Fuse, a young member of the unit, which experiences a traumatic event when, fighting a riot in the sewers, he is confronted by a young girl. We have been previously informed that the rebels use them as couriers for moving bombs, and dab them “Little Red Riding Hoods”: terrorised, the girl begins to pull the plug for the bomb she is carrying, in front of the heavy armored Fuse, which instead of killing her on spot, is paralysed because of the horror of the suicide. Fuse can just mutter “Don’t!” and then “Why?”. Looking for a rationale behind radical, brain-washed actions, and acting guided by compassion and dialogue rather than orders or brutality, we empathise 5 This is a trope cleverly used for instance in the classic, fantasy-horror movie about LRRH The company of wolves in 1984, based mostly on one of the tales included in The bloody chamber by Angela Carter (1979). The terror provoked by the monster is greater, as the form is nearly indistinguishable in the dark, but its presence is undeniable, as shown by the glow in its eyes. 10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29866 64-85 79 is not revealed to us). The second verse overtly and seemingly innocently evokes surprise at the sudden sexual discovery. The nervous laughter introduced between this line and the next (which is repeated on successive occasions between the lines that follow) confirms this atmosphere, somewhere between relaxed, falsely innocent and provocative play of seduction. The last two lines, “Don’t look at me like that” and “You amaze me” further reinforce the idea that flirting is taking place in which the protagonist’s voice is comfortable and enjoys herself. Then takes place the first refrain, which reads: He ate my heart, he a-a-ate my heart (You little monster) He ate my heart, he a-a-ate my heart out (You amaze me) He ate my heart, he a-a-ate my heart He ate my heart, he a-a-ate my heart We must interpret these verses as a prolepsis that will take on its meaning once we have reconstructed the story chronologically. Look at him, look at me That boy is bad, and honestly He’s a wolf in disguise But I can’t stop staring in those evil eyes The narrative proper begins. The man is presented with an external focus: through the dialogue between the protagonist and another interlocutor who could well be her friend or girlfriend, or us as listeners. The dominant semantic field is visual, thus evoking the classic fairy tale in its passage “what big eyes you have, granny”. The first impression of the story’s antagonist is offered by implicit comparison: “Look at him and look at me”; it is deduced from the juxtaposition of characters that our protagonist is good, as opposed to the definition of the boy as “bad” and, more explicitly, “a wolf in disguise”. The presentation of the antagonist closes with the fascination (and therefore irresistible attraction, tempting despite its inappropriateness) exerted by his hypnotic and equally evil eyes. At this point, the listener will take the expression “a wolf in disguise” as a figure of speech, and the song will continue with this wordplay, the double meaning until the literal, brutal reality will take over the rhetorical meaning. I asked my girlfriend if she’d seen you round before She mumbled something while we got down on the floor baby We might’ve fucked not really sure, don’t quite recall But something tells me that I’ve seen him round before These interesting verses that allude to bisexuality and to a previous rape repressed in memory (signs that the protagonist should have taken into account, as in the traditional tale, but opts for dismissing them, causing her downfall). The psychoanalytical approach mentioned previously is explicitly addressed here: the comfort and security was found in the female sexual or romantic world; as the listeners, we cannot but be surprised by the mention of the girlfriend of the lyric self: the protagonist asks her for advice and then 10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29866 64-85 80 proceeds to abandon her safety zones besides another woman in order to dare into the male territory, that is the heterosexual flirting in a disco. He’s a monster m-m-m-monster That boy is a monster m-m-m-monster (x3) The explicit denunciation of the man as a monster comes in this stanza, although it is not clear who assumes the enunciation of the phrases: it certainly cannot be the protagonist’s friend, since this explicit statement contrasts with the latter’s dubious evocation of a casual sexual encounter. The narrator/protagonist is still far from knowing such a revelation, so it may be either a refrain that no character assumes (remediating the chorus of Greek tragedy) or another prolepsis that foreshadows the conclusion of the story, like the stanza “(he) ate my heart” at the beginning and which follows now as well. He ate my heart (I love that girl) He ate my heart (wanna talk to her, she’s hot as hell) (x2) The refrain “he ate my heart” is repeated here, but with an interesting novelty: it is the first time that the “wolf” is given voice. Musically, the lines corresponding to the wolf are not sung by the female vocalist, but by a male. His tone is coated with a metallic filter that contributes to dehumanising the voice of the wolf, depriving it of the shades of feeling that we might perceive in favour of the impersonal image of a machine devoid of human emotions. This is perhaps the only radically novel twist that is presented as a variation on the classical tale: not only is the antagonist animalised, but also objectified: postmodernity has introduced the duality man/machine as a dynamic opposition (as we saw in Jin-Roh), which could not be present, for obvious reasons, in the oral tradition. He licked his lips, said to me Girl you look good enough to eat Put his arms around me Said “Boy now get your paws right off me”. The first three lines insist on the idea of the mouth as sexual devourer: the tongue licking the wolf’s lips evokes appetite, both metaphorically and sexually, and then we are offered the first interaction in the form of explicit dialogue from the boy: “Girl, you look good enough to eat”. The statement is accompanied by the strongly physically invasive gesture of wrapping his arms around her, thus moving from verbal to physical attack and symbolising the trap closing on the prey. As if this were not enough, the last verse confirms that the advance is not desired, but that the girl is expressing her explicit rejection: “I said: boy, get your paws off me”. The term “paws” explicitly confirms for the second time the wolfish identity of the attacker. The latent tension of the tragedy heading towards its climax lies in the fact that the revelation of the imminent threat takes again the form of figurative content. The listener initially receives these references as figurative language, when we would do well to perceive them as non-figurative language in order to identify the rapist (real, not figurative) as the wolf in the story. After a first listening to the song, 10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29866 64-85 81 successive listenings will give the appropriate (non-figurative) value to the expressions that animalise the song’s antagonist. I wanna just dance but he took me home instead Uh oh! There was a monster in my bed We french kissed on a subway train He tore my clothes right off He ate my heart and then he ate my brain Uh oh uh oh (I love that girl) (Wanna talk to her, she’s hot as hell) The resolution of the episode is narrated in this verse abruptly and we instantly understand several unknowns that the song had presented us with up to that point: the first verse finally gives full value to the adverb “instead”: our protagonist only wanted to dance, but “instead” he took her home. Once again, we are presented with the contrast between the innocent plan and the final result, the product of an elaborate and violent plan. This is followed by the interjection “Uh oh”, which expresses astonishment and discomfort at an unpleasant surprise, and “there was a monster in my bed” is repeated, although one might still believe that the expression is intended to be comical, metaphorical or hyperbolic. The following line constitutes an analepsis with respect to the previous one, since it returns to the episode chronologically prior to the arrival at the house and the bed, narrating with a brushstroke the journey by metro to the house, where the couple kiss in the metro: nothing, then, of an unexpected, violent, or overtly sexual nature, but rather evoking romanticism. It is worth noting at this point that it is precisely in the middle of this verse that we could place the dialogue with the interlocutor in absentia with which the song opens in spoken form: “Don’t call me Gaga / I’ve never seen one like that before / Don’t look at me like that / You amaze me”. By removing this dialogue, the transition and contrast between what the protagonist would like to do and what finally ends up happening is even more savage, brutal, and unexpected, with no apparent continuity, only the impact of violence and destruction. This brief narration of the underground kissing episode, an activity more typical of lovesick teenagers than adults, contrasts brutally with the resolution of the episode in the last two lines that follow: “he tore my clothes off, ate my heart and then my brain”. At this point, the evocation of rape is already evident: in contrast to the adolescent innocence of the kisses in the underground, we find the violence of the clothes ripped off by force, which is already without any doubt a first full-fledged sexual assault. The assault culminates in the metaphor “he ate my heart” which the song announces from the beginning, but now adds an additional element: “and then he ate my brain”, which ends the actual narrative (after which only the refrain is repeated). In other words, the victim is completely destroyed, annihilated not only sentimentally, but also intellectually, since the experience of which she has been a victim will undoubtedly condition all future emotional, but also intellectual, interaction with the male gender (possibly indicating here that she will never trust anyone again). It is worth noting here that the last word in the form of dialogue we hear is from the wolf, with his “I want to talk to her, she’s hot as hell”, in an echo of Perrault’s ending of 10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29866 64-85 82 the tale in which the wolf devours LRRH ending the story, with no woodsman to come to the rescue. A voice that we could identify as an omniscient narrator repeats over and over again the refrain that now acts as a moral for the listener: “that boy is a monster”; that is, there are wolves out there and young girls should be warned. The moral of the story thus coincides with its original sense in presenting the young girl purely as the victim and the boy as the aggressor, without any further nuance. In Tosca’s analysis, this constitutes a multimedial remediation, as the dramatic effect is conveyed through words in the lyrics, sound effects10, tone11 and music12. The reader may be surprised by the fact that the song involves also a cathartic experience of denouncing not only rape culture, but also a particular rape experience: Lady Gaga was indeed raped when she was 19 (multiple interviews about the subject may be found in YouTube, although we will quote an article in The Guardian, see Beaumont-Thomas, 2021). The listener may retain both the physical and mental destruction of the victim (as they are the final words in the song), but Lady Gaga kept fighting on and producing art through pain (she was raped by music producers), to rise to stardom not only in pop music but also in the film industry13. The lyric self may finish aligned with Rose in Gaiman’s version, but the real person is more akin to Hayley in Hardy Candy. Conclusion LRRH remains a phenomenal case of study for gender studies: since one of the most prevalent readings of the tale is as a sexual learning experience, this immediately opens up the space for gender studies and examine the gender roles in the adaptations. We have seen LRRH as a pure victim in Perrault and Gaiman, ending the tale with her demise and thus remarking the cautionary tale aspect. We have seen a frustrated attempt of empowerment in Jin-Roh, as she fails to become the wolf and is murdered nonetheless despite her momentary, illusory seduction. We have seen her finally taking control and becoming a cold executioner in Hard Candy, which echoes the oral tradition in which she escapes her fate or even kills the wolf. We have seen her escaping her own fairy tale in order to become a detective (a traditionally male-oriented profession) in a crossing genre experiment. We finally see her dancing in a disco, unaware of the modern wolf but this time denouncing that the fault is not hers, as rape culture is as prevalent today as it has always has, so she should have the chance of choosing to have fun without enduring unwanted pain. These recycling strategies cast her into the light of either a heroine14, or a victim15 but there is always (we think) dignity in her choice. Even when the textual strategy suggests that she should have chosen the way of needles (that is, to not experiment in the sexual 10 Which are very important as they confer the sense of fear through the predator’s metallic voice. 11 Gaga’s voice mimic a dramatic crescendo that reflects the inevitable distress. 12 Ascribing the song to the pop genre has meaning in itself. 13 Lady Gaga famously supports the LGTBI+ cause and is banned in Russia because of this. 14 In case she prevails over the antagonist, be it through cunning speech, moves, or sexual seduction. 15 In case she ultimately meets her demise. 10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29866 64-85 83 playfield),16 and thus conveys a reproving moral, every feminist rewriting of the tale empowers LRRH and reaches a happy ending. This empowerment happens sometimes via force and violence on her part, sometimes via cunning solutions to escape the danger, sometimes via dialogue and peaceful resolutions. For our part we feel the need to add that choosing the way of needles, staying at home or successfully bringing the basket to grandma thanks to avoiding conversation with the wolf would constitute a very poor tale indeed. Maybe even the most boring in the world, as it would be a tale without dangers to overcome: implying this tale would be desirable is to imply that life should be gray and boring. Even if LRRH is unsuccessful in the least feminist versions, at least she is always in for the adventure, come what may, and this is definitely something to be admired nowadays. Bibliography BACCHILEGA, Cristina (1997). Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. BEAUMONT-THOMAS, Ben (2021). Lady Gaga says rape as teenager left her pregnant and caused ‘psychotic break’. The Guardian, 21 may 2021. 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(2013). The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood. PLoS ONE, 8(11), e78871. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078871 TOSCA, Susana (2013). Fairy tale trans-migrations: the case of Little Red Riding Hood. Intersemiose, 4(II). Available online: http://www.neliufpe.com.br/wpcontent/uploads/2014/02/11.pdf ZIPES, Jack (ed.) (1993). The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood. New York: Routledge. 10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29866 64-85 85 Filmography Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz), 1942. Illang: the Wolf Brigade (dir. Kim Ji-woon), 2018. The company of wolves (dir. Neil Jordan), 1984. Freeway (dir. Matthew Bright), 1996. Hard Candy (dir. David Slade), 2005. Hoodwinked! (dir. Cory Edwards), 2005. Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (dir. Hiroyuki Okiura), 1999. Rashomon (dir. Akira Kurosawa), 1950. Red Hot Riding Hood, (dir. Tex Avery), 1943. Red Riding Hood (dir. Catherine Hardwicke), 2011. The Red Spectacles (dir. Mamuro Oshii), 1987. The Sandman (Netflix), 2022. StrayDog: Kerberos Panzer Cops (dir. Mamuro Oshii), 1991. The usual suspects (dir. Brian Singer), 1995. Songs “Li’l Red Riding Hood”, in Li’l Red Riding Hood (Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs, 1966). “Monster” in The Fame Monster (Lady Gaga, 2009). 10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29866 64-85