Red Cloaks, hats and Riding Hoods.

Little Red Riding Hood is one of our most well-known fairy tales.    As Zipes notes, ‘…it raises issues about gender identity, sexuality, violence and the civilizing process in a unique and succinct symbolic form that children and adults can understand in different levels’ (1993,  p343).  The tale has been written, rewritten and theorized many times.  Its’ origins have been lost, but it owes elements to many tales.   In Norse Mythology, Thor and Loci use virtually the same questions and answers that our heroine uses to the wolf, and in Celtic tales, the wolf devours the red sun to allow the moon to rise.  The wolf, one of fairy-tales most attractive villains, has signified seducer, rapist, night terrors and the plague (Opie and Opie, 1974).  

The first written version is Charles Perrault’s Tale of ‘Little Red Cap’ published in 1679.  Riding hoods became a popular item of dress not long after, and the name changed.  She can be little red cap, little red hood, little golden hood.  The main character of this tale is nothing without her defining piece of clothing.  She has no other outstanding characteristics.    As the Opie’s point out, in fairy tales ‘there is no evolution of character.  They (the heroines) are referred to by generic or descriptive names…..Fairy tales are more concerned with situation than character.”  (1974, p15).  Todorov argued that all tales start with an equilibrium that is disrupted, and that the tale cannot end until a new equilibrium has been reached. (Branston and Stafford, 1996) This red item of clothing is as disruptive as an artifact can get.  No self-respecting wolf would notice a girl in a brown or green cloak.  Red, the colour of danger, puts our heroine in danger the moment she leaves the civilized safety of the village and enters the forest.

Whilst we have very little information about Red Riding hood, we do know one definite thing about her- we know that she was well loved by the women in her family.  They fashion for her a noteworthy red cloak, or hat, or hood.  Red was an expensive, extravagant colour when Perrault was writing - and he is the writer credited with making her cap red.  Cochineal, the main ingredient for red dye was a costly import from the New World via Spain.  In the 18^th century, fabric and clothing were an investment in both time and money.  Clothing was so valued that it was mentioned in wills, fashions changed slowly and garments were re-modeled until they became thread bear. (Selvedge, 2011)   We know that Little Red Riding hood lived in a village environment, where her scarlet clothing would have marked her out as more prosperous than her neighbors in their homespun natural dyes.  Red was both a costly and exotic colour. (Delamare and Guineau, 2002)

 

A woman wearing red, however young she is, holds older and deeper connotations for us.  The original scarlet woman was the Whore of Babylon, as depicted by William Blake (see fig. 1), written of in the Book of Revelations, chapter 17:4  ‘…arrayed in purple and scarlet colour…. having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:’  (Common Bible, 1952, p237).  Since biblical times Red has been associated with sexuality and sin.  Morally upright women would not wear the colour because of its association with sin and blood.  The less enlightened Little Red Riding Hood, according to Zipes  ‘…..is topped with a red hat, a chaperon, making her into a type of bourgeois girl tainted with sin, since red , like the scarlet letter A, recalls the devil and heresy.’  (1993, p349).  By dressing her in this colour, and by sending her out into the woods to act as a kind of go-between, it is as if the women in her family collude to send the naïve Red Riding Hood to her moral fall. (Bettelheim, 1991)

Fig. 1, William Blake () The Whore of Babylon

 

The colour of Red Riding Hood’s cloak also represents blood, but not the blood of wounds or violence but menstrual blood.   Carter suggests that the Red clothing that she wears  ‘…has the ominous if brilliant look of blood on snow………she has just started her woman’s bleeding, the clock inside her that will strike, henceforward, once a month.’ (1993 p286).   Historically, Little Red Riding Hood is a child moving into the adult world, she is a cautionary tale for young women.  We know from the tale that she is still under the control of the women in her household; she is little more than a child. (See fig. 2).  Bettleheim notes that ‘Not only is the red cap little, but also the girl.  She is too little, not for wearing the cap but for managing what this red cap symbolises, and what her wearing it invites.’ (1991, p173 ).

Word Count 794 

Fig 2, Margaret Ely Webb (1909) Little Red Riding Hood.