Reclaiming Her Maternal Pre-Text: Little Red Riding Hood's Mother and Three Young Adult Novels

The revisions to "Little Red Riding Hood" that Jack Zipes includes in the second edition of The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood range from parodies that ridicule the heroine's ignorance, such as James Thurber's "The Girl and the Wolf," to new ways of reading the sexuality of the tale, such as Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves." Several versions reject the dependence of the heroine on the huntsman in favor of narratives where the heroine, either on her own or with the help of her grandmother, defeats the wolf; others tell the story from the point of view of the wolf. But what is striking in Zipes's collection of thirty-eight versions is how few notice or even mention the mother. This narrative fixation on a minimal maternal voice and conventional maternal narrative function is evident whether the tale is intended for child, adolescent, or adult reader. A maternal absence may not surprise those who define "Little Red Riding Hood" as a triangular narrative requiring only heroine, grandmother, and wolf, those who think that neither the mother nor the hunter is essential, yet this absence is peculiar given that the narrative pattern most familiar to contemporary readers is one where the mother does indeed have a role, a gesture, and a speech. When modern revisions, particularly feminist ones, either reinstate that conventional maternal function or ignore the mother altogether, they ironically confirm traditional constructions of mothers as no more than dutiful reinforcers of patriarchal law.

For example, Olga Broumas's poem "Little Red Riding Hood" addresses a mother, but the mother's voice remains caught within the boundaries of the lawgiver: "Stick to the road and forget the flowers, there's / wolves in those bushes, mind / where you got to go, mind / you get there" (Zipes 273). Similarly, Sally Miller Gearhart's "Roja and Leopold" depicts the mother as less obviously a patriarchal representative, but she remains peripheral to the story. Zipes's conclusion reflects this maternal absence when he summarizes the "three major currents" in contemporary and radical Riding Hood tales (59). Either the focus is on Red Riding Hood becoming independent "without help from males," or it is on the wolf's point of view; Zipes lumps together a third pattern that he calls "unusual aesthetic experiments, debunking traditional narrative forms and seeking to free readers and listeners so that they can question the conventional cultural patterns" (59).

It would seem that many modern updaters of "Little Red Riding Hood" find some cultural patterns harder than others to question. In his "Epilogue: Reviewing and Reframing Little Red Riding Hood," Zipes notes how illustrators continue to freeze the mother in one opening illustration, mother with hand raised, finger pointed, cautioning the heroine what to do. But he does not explore why the mother continues to be written and portrayed in this rigid fashion. In his discourse there appear to be women (badly served by a male-dominant culture that stereotypes them), and then there are mothers (apparently all too willing to teach their daughters patriarchal law). Zipes praises early folktale versions in which the heroine saves herself: "No help from granny, hunter, or father!" (23). The idea of the mother saving the heroine is apparently beyond the imaginable, defining by its absence the limits of what the narrative can say.

What other narrative possibilities exist for Red Riding Hood's mother? If we look at three contemporary young adult novels about daughters seeking missing birth mothers, Lois Lowry's Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye (1978), Gillian Cross's Wolf (1990), and Jean Thesman's The Rain Catchers (1991), we may find some answers. These are novels in which the mother speaks and acts in ways other than the cultural script approves; novels in which the daughter goes on a visit not to grandma's house but in search of a mother and a maternal pretext; novels in which authors deconstruct the traditional Red Riding Hood narrative by placing the mother in several narrative roles: Red Riding Hood, hunter, grandmother, even wolf. Such challenges...