The Four Faces Of Little Red Riding Hood

Little Red Riding Hood is one of the most familiar and popular bedtime fairytales in the world. It is a wonder that such a simple fairytale has been handed down for more than three hundred years and appears in more than one hundred versions. Based on the theory of archetypal criticism, this paper compares and analyses the four influential and wide-spread versions of Little Red Riding Hood. In addition to exploring the psychological and environmental factors which drove primitive man to create this type of story, this paper also discusses the core content and conflicts as well as the process and cause of the story's displacement. The common cultural and psychological connotations existing in both the Eastern and Western archetypes are revealed and the moral and scope conveyed by the different authors from different times and cultural backgrounds are examined.The thesis is divided into three chapters. The introduction briefly presents the tale of Little Red Riding Hood in its Chinese, French, German, and English versions, and demonstrates the applicability of archetypal criticism to the story. The first chapter compares and summarizes the types of the Chinese folklore Grandmother Wolf(Tiger), and concludes that it originated from the tale of man-devouring ghosts. After tracing the story back to the primitive myth of sunset, the archetype of the tale and the process of its displacement in Western countries is explored. The second chapter discusses the similar traits of the opposing characters in the four stories and the similar symbolic meanings of the various images,and summarizes the similar plot points and structures in the different versions. With the application of archetypal criticism, the contributing causes of the production and displacement of the tale are analyzed. The third chapter, by contrasting and analyzing the archetypal characters, ending, and metaphorical meaning of the tale in four versions respectively, demonstrates the causes of displacement in relation to the times and the instruction functions the authors conveyed, and discussed the opposition and compromise of the heterosexual relationship in different times. The conclusion summarizes the whole thesis: the Chinese Grandmother Tiger developed mainly following the ideas of karma in Chinese traditional Culture, aiming at setting a wise and brave model for children. The Western Little Red Riding Hood developed mainly according to the taste of the audience and the heterosexual relationship dynamics of the times. Perrault's Little Red Riding Hood was a tale for adults, disseminated through the upper-class salons, which warned young girls to beware of seducers. The Brothers Grimm revised it as a fairytale conforming to the view of Victorian families and a middle-class audience, to teach the children to be obedient. Angela Carter's adaptation challenged the traditional meaning of fairytales and claimed equal rights for women from the feminist angle after illustrating the new heterosexual relationship.However the Little Red Riding Hood story develops, its core has never changed. As an instance of Jung's"racial recollection", Little Red Riding Hood, no matter how differently it is adapted according to the social and cultural pattern, will still be handed down from one generation to the next and remain popular with people all over the world forever.