Little Red Riding Hood--Before and After the Lawyers

Our most beloved myths and fairy tales are often distorted and violated, especially in movies, but their beauty shines through.

In “Pretty Woman” Julia Roberts is the imprisoned princess and Richard Gere is the prince who rescues her from her tower. (It doesn’t matter that Roberts is a hooker and Gere is a ruthless merger tycoon.)

While fairy tales may be improbable, their wondrous simplicity makes them forever believable and dear to us. Often, also, they contain a kernel of justice. Cinderella prevails over her wicked stepsisters. The emperor is exposed as having no clothes.

Perhaps what makes fairy tales so enduring and endearing is that they remain simple in this ever more complex world.

Frank A. Sundell of Vista sends me a modern parody (author unknown) of “Little Red Riding Hood” in which the story is entangled in today’s legal complications.

Surely everyone knows the story. Little Red Riding Hood is asked by her mother to take a basket of fruit (sometimes cake and wine, sometimes custard) to her ailing grandmother, who lives alone in the woods. Overhearing this plan, a wolf lopes ahead to the grandmother’s cottage. He eats her and gets into her nightgown and cap. When Little Red Riding Hood arrives she notices that her grandmother has very large teeth, and says so. “All the better to eat you with,” the wolf says, or something like that, and leaps out of bed.

Naturally, Little Red Riding Hood screams. She is overheard by a woodcutter who happens to be working nearby. He rushes to her rescue and kills the wolf with his ax. He is hailed as a hero.

(That’s one version. In another the wolf eats both the grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood. A nearby huntsman, hearing the wolf snoring, enters the cottage and finds the grandmother missing. He slits open the wolf and both Little Red Riding Hood and the grandmother emerge alive and intact. In yet another version the wolf eats the grandmother and Riding Hood and that’s the end of it.)

The parody of the first version points out that a prosecutor argued that the wolf had never been advised of his rights. Also, the woodcutter did not warn the wolf before striking the fatal blow.

The American Civil Liberties Union argued that in eating the grandmother the wolf was merely following his instincts; therefore he deserved psychological treatment, not death. An environmentalist pointed out that the wolf is an endangered species, and thus protected from execution.

Sundell adds his own probable complications. In the first place, he says, the mother would be in violation of child labor laws for making her daughter walk through wolf-infested woods to deliver fruit to her grandmother. I doubt that the mother could be accused of violating child labor laws; more likely she would be charged with child endangerment. But that is a small point.

Sundell points out that the wolf could be charged with trespassing for eavesdropping on a private conversation between mother and child. (In other versions the wolf does not overhear the conversation, but intercepts the child in the woods and hears of her errand from her.)

The wolf could be charged with burglary for breaking into the grandmother’s cottage and stealing her nightgown.

(Of course, all the charges against the wolf would be moot, since the wolf is dead.)

Sundell thinks that convicting the wolf of murder, had he been spared, would be difficult, since the evidence would be only circumstantial. I assume that he means there would be no body and no witnesses. Surely the coroner would find the grandmother in the wolf’s stomach, which is still circumstantial evidence, but rather persuasive.

Sundell believes that the wolf might have done more time for child molesting (his threats to Riding Hood) than he would have for murder. It was the woodcutter’s realization that the wolf might do very little time for murder that prompted him to take his life.

To begin with, no ailing grandmother would be living alone in the woods. She would be living in a rest home. Of course the wolf would not have been able to speak the child’s language; but it is the province of fairy tales to ignore such realities.

But I wonder why the wolf ate the grandmother. Surely little Riding Hood would have been a much tastier meal. He could simply have killed the grandmother and shoved her body under the bed.

As for his eating the grandmother and assuming her identity by putting on her nightgown and cap, I doubt that he fooled Riding Hood for more than a moment.

Fairy tales should be left alone. Revisionists have done enough damage already. By contemporary criminal codes, Cinderella was nothing more than a party-crasher.

Might as well let Roberts go back to prostitution and Gere marry a debutante.