The Psycho-Sexual Symbolism of Little Red Riding Hood

Posted on by masercot
Little Red Riding Hood? FAKE NEWS! | by Daniel Berenson | Medium
It’s called “sexual harassment” and it is wrong… so wrong…

The story of Little Red Riding Hood has long been considered an textbook example of rape symbolism, Jungian death archetypes and timber wolf pornography; but, there are also connections to the tenets of Buddhism, the influx of the adolescent dreamscape and the disappearance of labor leader Jimmy Hoffa. It can be shown conclusively that the author was living out a latent oral fixation and not, as was previously hypothesized, crazy as a bedbug.

Charles Perrault published the story of Little Red Riding Hood late in the seventeenth century, possibly while high. The story was part of a collection called Mother Goose Illustrations by Jessie Willcox Smith at HWLC | Chicago Public LibraryTales and was compiled specifically to give grad students something to write about when getting PhDs in Folklore and Legend. The original story can be traced back to tenth century Italy or, even earlier if evidence isn’t a big concern. The story is a simple one: A young girl in a red hoodie is told to bring food to her grandmother who is too frail to feed herself but apparently healthy enough to live deep in the woods half a day’s walk away from her nearest neighbor. She is told NOT to stray from the path. THIS IS IMPORTANT; because, if she’d been told to stray from the path, the story would’ve been about the importance of not listening to one’s parents. The girl meets a talking wolf who learns where the grandmother is because they apparently had addresses in the dark woods of Italy. The wolf eats the grandmother, then tricks Red Riding Hood into getting into the bed and then eats her, as well… leaving crumbs all over the comforter.

A huntsman happens to be passing by and hears the sound of chewing and screaming. He enters the grandmother’s home and sees the wolf who is not only asleep, but Little Red Riding Hood" tea advertising card V | SA/MARK/ADV/1/3/2 ...apparently in a coma; because he manages to cut open the animal and remove the grandmother and Riding Hood AND fill the wolf’s body cavity with stones without waking him. The stones finally do kill the wolf but not at Altamont.

What did Carl Jung have to say about this violent tale? Not much, I’m afraid, although we couldn’t watch him twenty-four hours a day. Each component of the story is it’s own separate symbol. Taken together, these symbols tell us of a person’s psyche, what parts of it are damaged and why it should be ashamed of itself. What would he have said about the fact that she was called, “Red Riding Hood” when she was clearly walking? Would he have told that story again about how, when he was an undergrad, Sigmund Freud made him smoke cigars until he threw up?

There are no easy answers because the easy answers were all in previous dissertations..

22 thoughts on “The Psycho-Sexual Symbolism of Little Red Riding Hood”

  1. One of the things D had to do with his online learning in the spring was to tell the parts of a story – beginning, middle, end. Little Red Riding Hood was THE story but it was told all sorts of ways. I think even one version had LRRH as a dinosaur. It was torturous to get through (for me….and him). Anyway! I couldn’t believe LRRH always told the wolf where her grandmother lived. Here’s this hungry, shady WOLF asking all these questions, and LRRH just blurts all the details. Served her right to be dinner. Moron.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

      1. Good points. I bet the parents didn’t like LRRH. They sent her a half days journey away through a forest with a damn ham and a loaded picnic basket. That practically screams EAT ME.

        Liked by 1 person

    1. There’s kind of a Greek tragedy about it in that the wolf DOES eat the two. The wolf is kind of a Fate that they cannot really escape. No girl with an IQ over sixty would mistake a wolf for her grandmother.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  5. Ok, I taking issue with this cos I did study LRRH in uni. LRRH is actually about a woman LRRH expressing her sexuality. If we ignore the hash of the current version then the original story had LRRH getting into bed with TBBW and it wasn’t for dinner. So There 😛😛😛😛😛

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

      3. Got thought that maybe name riding also had sexual innuendo in it if the wolf/raper would have been the “bicycle” under her if the author of the fairy tale would have had that sick and perverted mind.

        At least it clearly seems that when wolf ate LRRH in the bed that it could absolutely mean that he sexually “devoured”/raped her.

        Liked by 1 person

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Published by masercot