Little Red Riding Hood and The Wolf - Roald Dahl

 

Little Red Riding Hood and The Wolf   - Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl is considered as one of the greatest storytellers of the 20^th Century. He has written novels, short stories and poems. His children’s books were made into movies. His well known works are ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, ‘The BFG’, and ‘Matilda’. Little Red Riding Hood by Roald  Dahl was published in 1982 in Revolting Rhymes. Dahl’s LRRH is a humorous, contemporary spin on the well known fairy tale. Dahl starts the retelling off by skipping the introduction to the characters and the major details because majority of his audience has most likely heard this story.

The Wolf gets hungry, goes to Grandma’s house. He eats her up in one bite but is not satisfied yet, so he decides to put on Grandma’s clothes and wait for LRRH to arrive. When she comes in, she comments on Wolf’s big ears and eyes. The Wolf responds that they will help hear and see her better. Then she asks about his furry coat. ‘That’s wrong’ the wolf says pointing out that she was supposed to ask her about his teeth. Regardless, he says, he is going to eat her up. Before he has a chance, the small girl pulls a pistol from her knickers and shoots him in the head. The narrator explains that he met Miss Riding Rood a few weeks later in the wood and was impressed by the new ‘lovely furry wolf skin coat’. This is the major turning point in how Dahl creates his own retelling.

Dahl created LRRH as a smart, tough woman to show the progression of the original story to modern day. What Dahl has done here is to manipulate the functions, so that in his version, LHHR’s role is of an active, seeker heroine. Thus, if in Grimm’s tale she was the haunted, in Dahl’s version she is the hunter, an unexpected reversal roles. In the original fairy tale, LRRH had to wait for the huntsman to come and rescue her, but in Revolting Rhymes the little girl stands on her own feet showing she needs no brave young man or a prince to save her from her foe. She becomes the heroine of the piece. Thus we could say Dahl’s LRRH as an attempt to make  the tale politically correct according to the sensibilities of today.