In years gone by I was made to wear a cape. A cape, a cloak, a cap, a hood. It was the Frenchman, Perrault, who first pinned me down, hemmed me in and clothed me. You see he saw me, out in the countryside, running through the fields with the other children, and he heard about me from the tongues of old women sitting by the fire. He took me from out of their bosom and brought me back to the city. He put me in a copper tub of water and soap suds. He scrubbed and scraped. He removed the grime, the dirt, the filth. He took me out of the tub, dried me, polished me, and there I was all clean, fresh and sparkling. Gone was my home, my history, my community, my context. And then he dressed me, most famously, in a hooded red cloak. The cloak was warm and soft and I didn’t mind at first, but in the end, it engulfed me. It erased my name and I became nothing more than that article of clothing. Before, I was a peasant, a daughter, a sewer, a weaver, grand-daughter. I was a girl, I was growing. I would be a woman. I would become an adult and I would marry and have children, and I would, of my own accord teach my girls to sew, to spin, to weave. I would, with my own words tell them to beware of the temptation of the bzou, to be smart, to be cunning. But instead I was kidnapped and trapped in my hood, always a child, always in the wrong, always a symbol of what not to be. Don’t stray from the path. Don’t take off your red cloak. Don’t stop being who Perrault made you to be. Even Ms Carter[1] clothed me in red, then stripped me naked once again, but claimed to be liberating me. But, Ms Carter, I didn’t want to sleep with the wolf. I wanted to run away. How dare you try and say ‘look what a smart lass she is, controlling the situation, seducing the wolf’ you were in control, not me. You left me with only my body to bargain with, but I'm smarter than that.
See, I never asked for my story to be about sexual deviance or assertion. I never signed the social contract that said I was forever to be a tool for passing on moral codes. I did not consent to being at the centre of four hundred years of story telling and debate. I am just a girl who learnt to sew, who learnt to contend with men and those around me, and learnt to one day take the place of the older women in the community. And I could do it, and would have done it, without the controlling hands of Perrault, the brother Grimm and Ms Carter. But you authors, you set me down on paper, you have pushed me and pulled me, dressed me and undressed me as though I were your play thing, and I object. You’ve all used me as your symbol, your sign, your code, your meme. Always I must represent something. I’m a lesson about temptation and obedience, I’m an example of “a poor child who did not know that it was dangerous to stop and listen to wolves”[2], I became “the literary standard bearer for good Christian upbringing”[3]. I’m a story of empowerment, I’m a fallen woman, I’m a seductress, I’m a metaphor, a trope, a reflection of changing ideas relating to gender equality and sexual power.
Why can’t I just be a young girl, with a mother and a grandmother; a girl with a personality who knew things and felt things, who once upon a time had a name.
[1] Carter, A (1979) ‘The Company of Wolves’, in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Penguin: Hamondsworth
[2] Perrault, C (1999) (1697) ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, trans. Tatar, M in Tatar, M (ed) The Classic Fairy Tales, Norton Critical Editions, Norton:
[3] Zipes, J (ed) (1986) Don’t bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England, Gower Publishing Company limited:
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