Abstract
Although it masquerades as a teenage girl’s obsession with a brooding and mysterious vampire, lurking beneath the veneer of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight is the ageless dialectic of the helpless female devoured by the predatory male. Whether as Bella she succumbs to the charming Edward Cullen or as Little Red Riding Hood to the rapacious wolf, the result is the same: by corporally consuming her through rape or marriage, the voracious male destroys her.
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Notes
Carl G. Jung, Man and his Symbols (New York: Laurel-Dell, 1969), 56–57.
Whether Little Red Riding Hood has yet entered adolescence is subject to extensive debate, especially among psychoanalytical theorists. For example, in The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales and Myths (New York, 1951), 235–41, Erich Fromm asserts that the red cap is a symbol of menstruation, but historian Robert Darnton in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984) lampoons this theory, stating that Fromm relied on details that “did not exist in the versions known to peasants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (11).
Charles Perrault, “Little Red Riding Hood” in Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 3–6.
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (New York: Megan Tingley Books, 2005), 4 and 10.
J. Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994), 676–77.
H. Sidky, Witchcraft, Lycanthropy, Drugs, and Disease: An Anthropological Study of the European Witch-Hunts, vol 70, American University Series XI (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 216–17.
Paul Delarue, “The Story of Grandmother” in Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 15.
Jack Zipes, The Trials & Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 19.
Dante Alighierei, The Divine Comedy: The Lnferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, trans. Lawrence Grant White (New York: Pantheon, 1948), 1.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, “Little Red Cap [Rotkappchen]” in Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 9.
Joseph L. Henderson, “Ancient Myths and Modern Man” in Man and His Symbols, ed. Carl G. Jung (New York: Laurel-Dell, 1969), 104.
P. Saintyes, Les Contes de Perrault,(Paris: Librarie Critique, 1923), 221.
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (San Diego: Harcourt-Harvest), 1997), 3.
Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, North Carolina University Press, 1984), 109.
Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Putnam, 1994), 19–20.
Catherine Orenstein, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (New York: Basic-Perseus, 2002), 81.
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic, 1984), 13.
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© 2011 Giselle Liza Anatol
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Kramar, M. (2011). The Wolf in the Woods: Representations of “Little Red Riding Hood” in Twilight . In: Anatol, G.L. (eds) Bringing Light to Twilight. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119246_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119246_2
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