The Big, Bad Wolf: New Approaches to an Old Folk Tale

"The Story of the Three Little Pigs" is among the most popular of the English folk tales, exemplified by the numerous individual treatments by various retellers and artists. Lately the retellings of it and of two other wolf tales have taken a new turn, adding layers of humor onto the traditional story through parody by changing the point of view. As Walter Nash has said:

The humorist tries by every means in his power to elicit from the system of language potential significances, co-significances, counter-significances, the play of values, the coincidences of oppositions of points in a network of choices.

(Language 154)

Jon Scieszka and Jane Yolen make such choices in their retellings of three traditional tales, imbuing them with new signficances. The resulting humor will satisfy both adults and children.

The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs (1989) is purportedly written by A. (for Alexander) Wolf "as told to Jon Scieszka" (title page). The first-person account begins with Al, as he prefers to be called, explaining that "it's not my fault wolves eat cute little animals like bunnies and sheep and pigs. . . . If cheeseburgers were cute, folks would probably think you were Big and Bad, too" (n. p.). Then the real story follows.

While Al, who had a bad cold, was making a birthday cake for his granny, he ran out of sugar. Going next door to his neighbor's straw house to borrow some, he receives no answer to his knock (which causes the door to fall in) and call of "'Little Pig, Little Pig, are you in?'". Suddenly he is caught up by a ferocious sneeze that knocks down the house, and there in the middle of the pile is a dead Little Pig whom Al compares to a "big cheeseburger just lying there": "It seemed like a shame to leave a perfectly good ham dinner lying there in the straw. So I ate it up."

The same thing happens at the next house built of sticks except that Mr. Pig answers him with "Go away wolf. You can't come in. I'm shaving the hairs on my chinny chin chin." Again there is an enormous sneeze, and again the house collapses, leaving another dead pig: "Now you know food will spoil if you just leave it out in the open. So I did the only thing there was to do. . . . Think of it as a second helping."

At the third house Al is rebuffed by the third pig, but this time his uncontrollable sneeze results in a still-standing brick house and a nasty comment from Mr. Pig: the insult brings out the beast in the wolf, and when the police arrive, they find him "trying to break down this Pig's door. And the whole time I was huffing and puffing and sneezing and making a real scene." A bad press follows because reporters "jazzed up the story" since the real version was not exciting enough. Both reporters and police are shown in the accompanying paintings as pigs.

Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), states that the satirist "often gives to ordinary life a logical and self-consistent shift of perspective" (234). As Anderson and Apseloff observe in Nonsense Literature for Children (1989), children "can appreciate many of the ploys of satire: size and role reversals, exaggerations, irreverence, and scatology" (72). Scieszka has used role reversals in the point of view of the tale, and language reversals in his slight changes of the traditional wording in places such as '"Little Pig, Little Pig, are you in?'" and "I huffed. And I snuffed" which take on shifts of meaning because of the new approach. His introduction of contemporary language and diction adds to the fun as the much maligned wolf sees that the "whole darn house fell down," and he swears his innocence ("Wolf's honor") in a delightfully tongue-in-cheek fashion. The juxtaposition of the pseudo-old with contemporary colloquial speech and slang should amuse both child and adult. As Donnarae MacCann wrote in her article "Wells of Fancy, 1865-1965...