Twisted Tales ( Research on Red Riding Hood )

In this show my character is Red Riding Hood. And here's my research on her darker side.

In the 19th century two separate German versions were retold to Jacob Grimm and his younger brother Wilhelm Grimm, known as the Brothers Grimm, the first by Jeanette Hassenpflug (1791–1860) and the second by Marie Hassenpflug (1788–1856). The brothers turned the first version to the main body of the story and the second into a sequel of it. The Brothers further revised the story in later editions and it reached the better-known version in the 1857 edition of their work. It is notably tamer than the older stories which contained darker themes.

The Grimms never even set out to entertain kids. The first edition of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” was scholarly in tone, with many footnotes and no illustrations. Only later, as children became their main audience, did they take out some of the more adult content. Their stories were then further sanitized as they were adapted by Walt Disney and others. There's some of the surprisingly dark themes that appear in the Grimms’ work:

• Premarital sex

• Graphic violence

• Incest

• Child abuse

• Anti-Semitism:

The Grimms gathered over 200 tales for their collection, three of which contained Jewish characters. In “The Jew in the Brambles” the protagonist happily torments a Jew by forcing him to dance in a thicket of thorns. He also insults the Jew, calling him a “dirty dog,” among other things. Later on, a judge doubts that a Jew would ever voluntarily give away money. The Jew in the story turns out to be a thief and is hanged. In “The Good Bargain” a Jewish man is likewise portrayed as a penny-pinching swindler. During the Third Reich, the Nazis adopted the Grimms’ tales for propaganda purposes. They claimed, for instance, that Little Red Riding Hood symbolized the German people suffering at the hands of the Jewish wolf, and that Cinderella’s Aryan purity distinguished her from her mongrel stepsisters.

“From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, do very wrong to listen to strangers. Alas! Who does not know that these wolves are of all such creatures the most dangerous!”

Today we’re more familiar with the Brothers Grimm version of this tale, where a girl and her grandmother are gobbled up by a wolf, but rescued by a huntsman. In Charles Perrault’s original, there is no happy ending. And the wolf represents a sexual predator. In those days, a girl who lost her virginity was said to have “seen the wolf” and Perrault makes his moral explicit at the end.

#Research