Eating Red Riding Hood

When I wrote on Saturday about poetry and its effect, I was interested to read Barbara’s comment that with age, she has come to be regarded as more of a ‘wise woman’ among the men in her science department.

It made me think about the power of ageing, and how we are sometimes afraid of it.

This in turn made me think of the old fable of Little Red Riding Hood, which warns that girls should not go into the wild places of the earth, lest they be tricked and eaten by a wolf. The obvious conclusion? That girls should fear to take their full place in the world.

But the Grandmother in the tale was already living deep in the forest. She must have been brave enough to go there in the first place, as a younger woman.

And what about the wolf? In this fable, the wolf is a cartoon villain, dressed in the Grandmother’s bonnet ready to spring out of bed and eat Red Riding Hood. But animal symbolism often has the wolf as Guardian. What is this wolf guarding?

So here’s another take on the story: the Grandmother represents an archetype of Wisdom, which is guarded from unworthy travellers by the wolf. Red Riding Hood has to risk the wildness of the forest to find her own wisdom. But although she fears the journey, she learns through the beauty around her not to fear her destination. At journey’s end, the wolf symbolically devours Red Riding Hood’s old ignorance and she becomes wise in her turn, taking her place beside the Grandmother.

All this was going through my mind today and in the end I made the collage above to represent a new take on our journey to age and wisdom, through a visual retelling of the old story.

If you can’t read the words, they say “Red Riding Hood learned not to fear Wisdom”.