When her baby bites his mother’s finger, the flax chip from the spindle falls out, causing the young lady to awaken. She becomes pregnant and gives birth to a child, all while still asleep. Here, the prince returns to find the young woman lying nude and comatose in her bedroom, and rapes her. The Grimm and Perrault versions didn’t diverge much from that premise, but in Perceforest, things were much creepier. A good fairy partially undoes the spell, so that the princess will remain asleep until she is kissed by her true love, the prince to whom she is betrothed. In the Disney version, a sorceress casts a spell on a young princess that will cause her to die at 16, when she pricks her finger on a spindle. The earliest known version of this narrative is believed to be Perceforest, written anonymously in France between 1330–1344. Sleeping Beauty by Charles Perrault and The Brothers Grimm And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets.
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I say “wolf,” but there are various kinds of wolves. And in case there was any doubt, Perrault states the moral plainly at the end of the story:Ĭhildren, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf. The tale was intended as a warning for young women to avoid sexual predators. The wolf eats the grandmother, impersonates her, then when Little Red Riding Hood arrives, he asks her to climb into the bed before eating her too. An “attractive, well-bred young lady” from a village in the French countryside gets tricked into giving the wolf directions to her grandmother’s house.
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Then there’s Charles Perrault’s earlier version from 1697, which is even more sinister. In the most kid-friendly versions, a woodsman hears Little Red’s screams and makes the wolf spit out the grandmother unharmed-but that’s not exactly what happens in every version.įor example, the Brothers Grimm version sees both Little Red and her grandmother swallowed by the wolf, before a hunter arrives on the scene and cuts the wolf’s belly open with a pair of shears, allowing Little Red and her grandmother to emerge unscathed. The area where some versions differ is in the details of how the granny gets saved. The premise of Little Red Riding Hood has remained basically the same across its many translations and versions: a young girl, dressed in a red hooded cape, goes off to her grandmother’s house but encounters a sly wolf who gobbles up her grandmother and proceeds to impersonate the old woman.