alexie Capital Punishment 205
In his response to George Will’s “Capital Punishment” piece, Bill Otis explic–
itly takes on Will’s three main points in his case against the death penalty. Otis’s
strategy is interesting, because his article exists solely as an attempt to refute Will’s
key arguments. His tone is at times one of admiration, in that he acknowledges
Will’s strengths as a thinker, but his refutations are pointed and unhesitating, even
going so far as to number his refutations to correspond with Will’s points. Here he
attempts to persuade us through ethos and logos. He later brings up Washington
and Lincoln as models of excellent presidents, presumably in opposition to Will’s
Camus reference, and notes that they supported the death penalty. Readers might
observe that Washington and Lincoln’s position in American cultural history
make these references examples of both ethos and pathos.
In his critique of Will’s first point, Otis argues that “the risk of error is so
small and the reward to justice so large” that capital punishment must surely be
worth it. Will would likely respond that this “reward to justice” is murky at best,
especially when one takes into account the perspectives of the victims’ families
(as he does). If anyone deserves justice, it is the victim(s), but that is often impos-
sible; by extension, it is their families whose opinions might be taken into
account. And what justice itself looks like can be up for debate.
In his second refutation, Otis uses a train analogy to discount Will’s concern
about the potential loss of innocent lives. Otis notes that Will “misses entirely”
conservatives’ desire for balance and strategic trade- offs. Readers might push Otis
on this comparison, insofar as we may resist seeing human lives as subject to
“ trade- offs” or sacrifices of this kind. Readers might also consider the train anal–
ogy further — after all, we can typically choose to ride a train, but we would not
choose to be mistakenly accused of a crime. Put another way, the risk/reward
function in these two scenarios is not necessarily comparable.
The third point with which Otis takes issue is Will’s argument that capital
punishment is not a terrific deterrent. Interestingly, Otis frames Will’s reasoning
as a kind of recommendation for more capital punishment by looking to a
possible assumption underlying his claims. Will does point out that the infre-
quency of the death penalty and the length of time it takes to come to pass factor
into its (in)efficacy as a deterrent. But Will does not claim the answer is more
capital punishment. Will seems more aware than Otis gives him credit for of the
legal structure in place that makes capital punishment difficult to enforce, and
readers would be well served to position these two articles side by side to evaluate
each position.
CharlesJ.Ogletree Jr.’s “Condemned to Die Because He’s Black” offers a
compelling read of an individual death row case. This case is an apt choice
because Ogletree is able to discuss particulars rather than generalities, like some
of our other authors on this subject. His focus on an individual, however, does
not detract from his ability to make larger claims. His comparison of Duane
Buck’s situation to our nation’s history of lynching is particularly persuasive,
although he might have more clearly addressed how the lynching of innocent
black men is not quite the same as capital punishment for a guilty one. Historical
statistics about lynching and current data about incarceration and death penalty
sentencing (logos) would also have been useful for understanding the larger
import of Duane Buck’s case. But Ogletree’s point about the other four cases that
206 Crime and Justice
the state of Texas agreed to review is well taken, as he effectively demonstrates
the lack of reason underlying these convictions and sentencings.
If writing for a more conservative publication, Ogletree could potentially
emphasize the injustice and irrationality underlying Buck’s special case, given
conservatives’ investment in such concerns. He could also highlight earlier in his
piece the broader support for Buck’s retrial across the political spectrum.
Ogletree’s final remarks make a comparison between the difficulty of fixing the
“problem of race in America’s criminal justice system” and the relative ease with
which we could ensure a fair trial for Buck. Readers might see this comparison
as not mutually exclusive, however, and could instead think through the possibil-
ity that a fair trial for Buck would be another step toward fairness in the judicial
system.
ARGUMENTS ABOUT A STORY: “A GOOD MAN IS
HARD TO FIND” (p.1007)
FLANNERY O’CONNOR
A Good Man Is Hard to Find (p.1007)
Flannery O’Connor’s texts mix comedy and tragedy in a manner usually termed
“Southern grotesque.” “Why don’t you ever write about any nice people?” a rela–
tive not unlike the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” once asked
her. Like the ghoulish and ridiculous figures perched on medieval cathedrals,
O’Connor’s characters lurk on the crumbling rooftops of the Christian religion
and in the shifting shadows of the American South of the mid- twentieth century,
both repelling and fascinating us with their odd humanity. Readers who have
grown up in the South laugh, cry, and blush with shame at the perfection of her
characters’ obsessions and their dialogue. We know these people. They are the
mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and cousins we don’t talk about in company. To
say this is not to sentimentalize or forgive them. Students will find many critical
studies of O’Connor’s work, and the author herself has commented on her stories,
often confusing readers more than clarifying the ambiguities of the text. Critics
who disagree with O’Connor’s interpretation of a character or event often remind
us ofD.H.Lawrence’s advice to trust the art rather than the artist. After the writer
is finished, the story has a life of its own, and the author’s opinion is no more
authoritative than any other, according to this view. When O’Connor comments
about the meaning of her work, she speaks as a Roman Catholic theologian rather
than as a writer, some contend. And often, she perversely compounds the mystery,
purposely deflating people who analyze and dissect her stories.
Each reader will have his or her own opinion of “A Good Man Is Hard to
Find” and its ambiguous protagonist. In fact, students sometimes differ over
whom they identify as the protagonist. Usually, we think of the grandmother as
the main character. We see most of the story from her point of view, and she is
the only character whose thoughts we overhear. But a few readers argue that The
Misfit is the protagonist, since the whole story belongs to him, beginning with
the foreshadowing of the opening paragraph and ending with his existential
o’onnor A Good Man Is Hard to Find 207
pronouncement about life in the final sentence. Even minor characters ring true
in a Flannery O’Connor narrative. Students will enjoy the connotations of
names. Bailey, for example, may get his name from “Bill Bailey Won’t You
Please Come Home?” — a song in the same blues/jazz genre as the one that
gives the story its title. (One can begin discussion with a recording of Billie
Holiday singing “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and point out its second line:
“You always get the other kind.”) The rude son who supplants the authority of
the father has the name of the founder of the Methodist Church, John Wesley,
certainly a dig at the Protestant usurpation of Catholic authority. The Misfit
explicates the meaning of his name. Rather than describing his outsider status as
we expect, his name is a philosophical statement about the misfit between sin
and punishment.
The Misfit engages in rationalization about his violence, but he seems to
do this for his own purposes rather than as an excuse for his actions. He attempts
to construct a logical argument with evidence that convinces him that his pun–
ishment is warranted. He is frustrated because, although written documentation
exists — “They had the papers on me” — it does not clarify matters for him, and
he has no memory of his original sin. Therefore, his punishment seems out of
proportion to him — it does not fit. Because of this, he makes sure that he signs
his work, leaving clear evidence of his crimes, so that he will know when the
claims made about him are valid. When the psychiatrist tells him that he was
really killing his father when he committed his crime, The Misfit interprets this
literally instead of symbolically, refuting the doctor’s assertion with evidence.
He provides specific facts as proof, offering the date, the diagnosis of his father’s
final illness, and the precise location of his grave. This is hard evidence, he
maintains, because “you can go there and see for yourself.” Jesus is a logical
conundrum for The Misfit. He attempts a theological decision based on his own
brand of logic: if Jesus raised the dead, then we must give up everything and
follow him; but if Jesus did not raise the dead, then any “meanness” that gives
pleasure is permitted. But The Misfit is frustrated again by the lack of concrete
evidence to guide his decision about Jesus. An essential step in the chain of
logic is missing. Since he has not observed with his own eyes whether Jesus
raised the dead or not, he finds no pleasure in anything. By raising the issue, if
not the dead, Jesus has “thrown everything off balance” and makes reasoning
impossible.
The grandmother, too, encounters problems as she attempts to create per-
suasive arguments. When we first meet her, she is trying to convince her family
to go to Tennessee instead of Florida, using appeals to fear. She further attempts
to manipulate, unsuccessfully employing the non sequitur that going to East
Tennessee will broaden the minds of the children. Later she will persuade the
family to seek out the old mansion by appealing to the self- interest of the chil-
dren and winning them over to her side, but ironically she bases her argument
on an assertion that is false. At the trip’s beginning, she convinces herself that the
cat might turn on the gas in the house and die, an improbable hypothesis, so she
ignores opposition and sneaks the cat into the car, including it on the trip, along
with her other hidden agendas. As they leave town, she collects statistical
data — the mileage and how long it takes to get out of Atlanta. She passes on
information to an unheeding audience, makes aesthetic observations, and
208 Crime and Justice
reveals her racist and class- driven assumptions. The ethos of Red Sammy Butts’s
credentials along the roadside may lead her to draw the hasty conclusion that he
is a good man, though her evaluation of him may simply be an ingrained ten-
dency to use the fallacious false- flattery appeal. The conversation in Red
Sammy’s “filling station and dance hall” is sentimental and filled with cliché.
These people and the grandmother understand the discourse of small talk. The
Misfit, on the other hand, finds such conversation difficult, fumbling around for
comments about the weather, and he uses the grandmother’s attempts at senti-
mental flattery and manipulation to discuss theology and philosophy.
The end of the story raises issues for critics. Some think that the grandmother
mistakes The Misfit for Bailey because he now wears the shirt that she has last
seen him wear. Her disorientation and her obvious distress about Bailey — she
keeps calling his name — lend credence to this interpretation. Others insist that
she feels compassion for The Misfit, recognizing him as vulnerable, and reaches
out to him as a mother. She has noticed his thin shoulder blades, and she hears
the crack in his voice. He seems to her to be on the verge of crying. Some readers
take her statement that he is her child as a cowardly, desperate attempt to per–
suade him not to kill her, the strongest argument saved for the crucial point just
before the conclusion. O’Connor has increased the ambiguity by insisting that
this final scene between The Misfit and the grandmother is a “moment of grace”
that has religious significance. In O’Connor’s stories, as in James Joyce’s, charac–
ters move toward epiphanies, moments of clarity. Just before she calls him her
child, the text says that “the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant.” How we
interpret the ending depends on our interpretation of the grandmother. Students
often feel that her sins do not warrant the punishment she receives, but The Misfit
would say that this squares with his experience as well.
Religious orientation, or the absence of it, will also enter into the reading.
It has been seriously argued that the grandmother confuses The Misfit with
Jesus at one point or that she speaks with the authority of God when she claims
her killer as her child. O’Connor abhorred hypocrisy and arrogance. Just
before the grandmother dies, the falseness and self- centered pride that have
characterized her throughout the journey have, by some interpretations, been
stripped away. If this is true, The Misfit is correct when he implies that it has
taken this crisis to make her a “good woman.” The grandmother goes through
her whole repertoire of persuasive appeals and finds them wanting as she tries
to save her life, but we don’t see her using any of them to save her family, not
even the baby. Her obsessive drive to get her way leads her family to death, and
her impulsive identification of The Misfit seals their fate. As the epigraph to
the story suggests, The Misfit has been the dragon by the side of the road that
this sinful pilgrim must pass on her way to God. How does one deal with a
dragon?
The ending of O’Connor’s story shocks most student readers, especially those
who love their grandmothers. They usually see the other characters as nasty and
the grandmother, whose perspective we have followed throughout the story, as
perhaps foolish but the best of a bad lot. But the shift in tone is what makes the
story so compelling, and it drives home O’Connor’s point that both good men and
good women are hard to find and that those who think they are good are perhaps
o’onnor A Good Man Is Hard to Find 209
the ones in greatest danger of being forever lost. As in most of O’Connor’s fiction,
the comedy sets us up for the shocking truth as the tragedy is revealed. This moves
her writing out of the realm of cute, regional tales of quaint rustics into the world
of theology and questions of eternal life and death. Readers tend to either love the
ambush or resent it.
The irony of the story is wrapped up in competing definitions of the word
good, which has a different meaning for the author than it does for the charac-
ters. Through the simplistic views of the grandmother, O’Connor presents the
shallow, optimistic view of the sentimentalist. It is much harder to be good than
this, O’Connor implies. In fact, her narrative follows Christian theology by
claiming that no human being is capable of being good and that only people
who realize their total depravity are capable of becoming good. Because to God,
O’Connor insists, we are all misfits, creatures who do not fit into the perfection
he requires, the sanctimonious hypocrite and the confused murderer are on an
equal footing and are equally eligible for salvation. An openness to our unre-
deemable lack of goodness is our only hope of redemption. While the grand-
mother’s eyes may become opened to her lack of goodness, The Misfit is left in
confusion about his own redemption. He may have completely cut off any
chance he has of becoming good, since he insists on relying on reason rather
than on self- renunciation and faith. O’Connor does not resolve all the issues of
fact because she feels that this would change God’s rules: giving The Misfit — and
the reader — all of the facts about life after death would make goodness a matter
of logic rather than of faith. The mystery must remain.
Some students feel that none of O’Connor’s characters has any redeeming
qualities. Less severe judges argue that all are products of their past experiences,
shaped by their families and their cultural assumptions. The Misfit seems at
times to contain some intellectual and spiritual depth, certainly when compared
to the mundane Bailey, his dull wife, and their self- absorbed children; O’Connor
herself sees him as the character with the greatest spiritual potential, someone
destined to become a “prophet.” The grandmother, with her childlike qualities,
may be just as selfish as her progeny but also may have the innocence to change,
given a loving environment. Readers may point out, however, that goodness for
the old woman is tied up in social hierarchies that are essentially non- Christian.
She is able to overcome her constant evaluations of others at the end of the story
when she classes The Misfit as an innocent child with whom she is connected
in a human chain. While The Misfit must reject this, as he must reject God at
this point, he recognizes that the grandmother has been redeemed by her
epiphany. While the reader’s degree of knowledge about and agreement with
Christian theology must inevitably color his or her pleasure in reading “A Good
Man Is Hard to Find,” anyone can relate to shifting definitions of goodness and
think about how an attitude of self- righteousness can blind people to their own
shortcomings. Christian readers, in fact, often find the story disturbing, taking it
as a criticism of their faith rather than as an insider’s demand that Christians take
the ideals of their religion with brutal seriousness. As a character in aC.S.Lewis
fantasy replies to a question about the safety of the lion representing Christ, “He’s
not tame, but he is good.” There is nothing tame or easy about O’Connor’s
version of Christianity.
210 Crime and Justice
ARGUMENTS ABOUT THE STORY
flannery o’onnor, From Mystery and Manners (p.1020)
martha stephens, From The Question of Flannery O’Connor (p.1022)
stephen bandy, From “ ‘One of My Babies’: The Misfit and the
Grandmother” (p.1025)
john desmond, From Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit and the Mystery
of Evil (p.1028)
Martha Stephens (p.1022) believes that her interpretation of “A Good Man Is
Hard to Find” is compatible with Flannery O’Connor’s view outlined in the
excerpt from Mystery and Manners included in this cluster. O’Connor empha–
sizes that the unexpected turn that the plot takes is crucial, that every good story
contains “some gesture . . . both totally right and totally unexpected.” This small
bit of the action connects the character and the reader with a “mystery” that is
linked with the “grace” of God. She suggests that her contemporary audiences
have problems understanding the story perhaps because they no longer believe in
the existence of evil or in the need to be saved from it, and we might speculate
that half a century later our readers will have an even larger chasm to leap.
O’Connor contends that because people no longer recognize grace (the unde–
served action of God to redeem human beings who cannot possibly deserve or
earn such favor), it takes extreme violence to make her characters and her readers
see this reality. Stephens seeks to elaborate on O’Connor’s explanations, which
often leave readers as confused as they began. Stephens’s most useful analysis
begins with a quotation fromT.S.Eliot in which he suggests that while choosing
good is best, choosing evil is better than remaining apathetic. Stephens claims
that the deaths of the family members in O’Connor’s story are unimportant in the
final scheme of things since they are people “who have lived without choice or
commitment of any kind, who have in effect not ‘lived’ at all.” Although she
acknowledges the difficulties in O’Connor’s story and the worldview it reflects,
admitting that grace for O’Connor is “rather an expensive process,” she joins
O’Connor in placing the problem squarely in the lap of the bewildered reader:
“O’Connor’s statement about the story, taken as a whole, only further confirms
the fact that the only problem in this tale is really a function of our difficulty with
O’Connor’s formidable doctrine.”
Students often accuse instructors of “overreading” texts, of taking simple
stories and making them say more than could possibly be intended by the author
or logically defended within reasonable parameters. Stephen Bandy suggests that
O’Connor does exactly this as she seeks to explain her interpretation of the story
to puzzled readers. Bandy makes the excellent point that “[t]here is no ‘later on’
in fiction.” When O’Connor imagines that her Misfit will go on to become a
prophet, she therefore makes new rules for the game, and readers have a right to
complain that the story does not suggest any such thing. Creative writers among
the audience will agree that the writer is often surprised by the direction a story
takes and may be in the same position as other readers as they discover symbolic
meanings and recurring motifs. To participate in an active writers’ workshop is
to undergo something like group psychoanalysis. Critics therefore can legiti-
mately question the writer’s explication of her own work, especially when the
o’onnor A Good Man Is Hard to Find 211
explanation enters territory outside the text. Bandy critiques O’Connor’s later
comments about the grandmother as an interpretation that weakens the charac-
ter by making her merely a harmless, sentimental Southern grandmother; she
must be more essentially depraved than a “cranky maiden aunt,” he contends,
for her to equal the evil of The Misfit. He reads her final actions as evil and
cowardly in the extreme, an interpretation that gives The Misfit’s recoil more
credibility. The grandmother sinks to “stratagems of sentimentality” that play on
her status as a mother, and Bandy finds O’Connor’s comments about grace to be
a sort of wishful thinking, her afterthoughts about the text she wrote. (In this
context, another critic has proposed that this reference to motherhood invites
connotations that recall Jesus and Mary, arguing that the grandmother inter-
cedes at this point for The Misfit, a human being now linked with her son.) But
O’Connor and readers who buy the theological interpretation are wrong, Bandy
insists, implying that the author does not understand her own story.
Some critics take issue with the story’s climax, raising issues of definition
about the meaning of grace for secular readers and arguing that epiphany is
possible in the human psyche without any link to religion. However, it is difficult
to understand O’Connor’s story outside of its Christian context. John Desmond
uses the Greek word metanoia to describe what happens when the grandmoth-
er’s mind suddenly becomes clear, explicitly linking this to spiritual conversion,
similar but perhaps more substantive than epiphany. The English words repen-
tance and conversion can translate three Greek words used in the Christian New
Testament (originally written in the Koine Greek of the Roman Empire): epistro-
phe, which refers to physically turning around and going in a different direction;
metameleia, which can express regret, being sorry, changing one’s mind emo-
tionally; and (the word Desmond chooses) metanoia, which means repentance,
a change of heart, turning from one’s sins, conversion. The word metanoia is
used in theology, obviously, but it is also used in rhetoric (to describe a turning,
a change of mind in the midst of a speech, an essay, or other text) and in Jungian
psychology (to describe a process of self- healing and reforming of the psyche that
occurs as the result of a crisis or psychotic break). It is interesting to think of the
grandmother as going through metanoia in the Jungian sense. As The Misfit
points out, she becomes a good woman (perhaps is healed and suddenly re-
formed) through this event, which may be a crisis of self as well as of faith.
Inspired by Simone Weil, who was born a Jew but who wrote primarily from a
Catholic Christian perspective in the midst of the Nazi occupation of France,
Desmond looks at both the grandmother and The Misfit as consciously or sub-
consciously recognizing the gap that exists between good and evil. When that
gap is recognized, change must occur. According to Desmond, following Weil,
the “mystery of love” exposes the good that has been submerged beneath the
selfishness of the grandmother, while The Misfit — lacking hope at this point in
his life — finds “the consciousness of the distance [between good and evil] intol-
212 Crime and Justice
CONTEXTS FOR RESEARCH: INNOCENCE, EVIL, AND
“WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” (p.1032)
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (p.1032)
Owing its inspiration to news accounts, a rock song, and the vivid imagination
of the writer, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol
Oates evokes the ambience of the late 1960s, even as it presents issues still of
keen interest to young adults in the twenty- first century. Today, the adult stalker
may use the Internet to build his superficial solidarity with pubescent (or even
prepubescent) girls and boys, but students will recognize the type. The NBC
reality television show To Catch a Predator and sensationalist “news” programs
that exploit victims du jour make Oates’s story seem familiar and less shocking
to us than its original audiences might have found it.
The story offers an opportunity to examine primary sources for historical and
cultural context. The March4, 1966, Life magazine article in which serial killer
Charles Schmid is tagged the “Pied Piper of Tucson” and Bob Dylan’s 1965 song
“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” invite discussion. Is Arnold Friend a supernatural
incarnation of the devil, as Oates has implied, or is the character based entirely
on Schmid, asA.R.Courtland argues in a 1989 critical essay in Studies in Short
Fiction? Schmid is said to have worn heavy makeup, dyed his hair black to look
like Elvis, painted “beauty marks” on his face, and stuffed tin cans and other
items into his shoes to make himself look taller. As we see Arnold Friend through
Connie’s eyes, such details take on a weirdly comic quality. Although Oates
makes the conversion of fact to fiction look easy, close readers will find that her
narrative pace and progressive revelation of details about the characters add up
to a chilling experience beyond the “true crime story” genre.
Music both inspires “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and
plays a major role in its plot. Popular culture reflects the “commonsense” assump–
tions of a society, and listeners are as affected by it as they are by the advertise–
ments they consciously tune out but subliminally hear. In Oates’s story, popular
music has an almost hypnotic effect and is characterized as “background like
music at a church service,” giving it a quasi- religious connotation. Indeed, music
enables Connie to transcend her less- than- satisfactory home life and occupy a
oates Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? 213
kind of dream world. From the drive- in restaurant to the radio in her room, music
offers Connie a portal into an alternate reality in which she is the center.
Given Connie’s age and relative inexperience, as well as her largely superfi-
cial interactions with others, readers might discuss the extent to which this is
indeed a story about love. Certainly there are multiple loves at the center:
Connie’s love for herself, her love for her family (particularly apparent toward
the end of the story), as well has her love of music and the bits and pieces that
make up her dream world. The story chronicles her explorations with friends
across the boundary from the shopping center to the drive- in restaurant, crossing
figuratively into a more adult realm of sexuality and desire — the desire to be
seen and appreciated, to inhabit a world made up of perpetual midsummer
nights. Thus we see Connie living a kind of romantic dream distinctly separate
from her typical home life. These twin lives are reflected in the pairings Oates
offers between what Connie looked or sounded like when she was out versus
when she was home. She is accused by her mother of living in a daydream, a
claim realized later in the story when Connie has to shake herself awake.
Connie’s dream, however, is interrupted by Arnold Friend’s arrival.
Although seemingly in keeping with Connie’s teenage fantasies of music, cars,
and flirtations with boys who dress just so, Friend is revealed to both Connie and
the readers as an imposter and a predator who ruptures the boundaries between
Connie’s twin lives. He is her fantasy doubled back on itself, a caricature of her
desires taken to a place all too real, and Connie finds herself unable to take the
actions needed to save herself. At first romanticizing the dangerous flirtation
with a stranger, Connie seems trapped in unreality until it freezes her into sub-
mission. The repeated threats to her family remind readers that victims of abuse
often fail to tell or avail themselves of opportunities to escape because of such
fears. She loves her family, after all, and sacrifices herself to save them, blindly
acceding to Friend’s logic.
CONTEXTS FOR RESEARCH
dan moser, The Pied Piper of Tucson: He Cruised in a Golden Car,
Looking for Action (p.1046)
joye arol oates, Smooth Talk: Short Story into Film (p.1058)
meghan daum, Jaycee Dugard and the Feel- Good Imperative (p.1061)
In 1966, Don Moser published “The Pied Piper of Tucson,” an article about
serial killer Charles Schmid that may have inspired or influenced Joyce Carol
Oates’s short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Moser’s
piece, like Oates’s, is particularly interested in the settings and environments
within which the crimes take place. For example, Moser pays attention to the
economic and social situation in Tucson, where there are a number of people
out of work and it’s difficult for teenagers to find even part- time jobs. With little
to do outside school, idle teenagers have particular hangouts where they go to
see and be seen. Moser indirectly indicts the city — including its bars, streets, and
even rural spaces — as a place where trouble can happen because young people
don’t have enough to meaningfully occupy their time. Oates’s main character,
214 Crime and Justice
Connie, is similarly invested in these kinds of social environments, making a
point to sneak off and join crowds at burger joints and so on.
Like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, both Schmid and Oates’s fictional character,
Arnold Friend, prey on youth, luring young folks out from the watchful eyes of
their parents. The two figures are positioned in Moser’s and Oates’s pieces as
having some kind of power over teenage girls, similar to the magic call of the
Pied Piper. Indeed, both are even written about in the context of music. But
although Oates’s Connie is reluctant to follow Friend and does so only under
threat, Moser describes the teenage girls Schmid murdered as somewhat less
wary — one was even dating him. Schmid is framed as a more complex figure
than Friend. Although Schmid was ultimately incarcerated for the murders of a
number of teenage girls and subsequently died in prison, it’s not clear from
Oates’s ending whether Friend will meet a similar fate. In Schmid’s real- life case,
suspicious parents and his accomplices testified against him, but Friend is a
somewhat more mythical character. Oates’s Connie comes across as very much
alone, and innumerable possibilities remain.
In her 1986 essay “Smooth Talk: Story into Film,” Joyce Carol Oates dis-
cusses both Moser’s article and Joyce Chopra’s film, Smooth Talk, which was
based on Oates’s short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
Oates’s essay offers some background on the story, including her influences and
aims in penning the original narrative, and it’s clear that the story carries
multiple levels of abstraction. Although initially intended as an “allegory of the
fatal attractions of death,” the story shifted into one about the fifteen- year- old
Connie, who Oates describes as “shallow, vain, silly, hopeful, doomed” as well
as capable of heroic acts of sacrifice. For Oates, Arnold Friend fades into the
background somewhat, with Connie coming front and center. She also notes
that, despite possible connections between Moser’s article about Charles Schmid
and her story, there is actually no indication that Friend has “seduced and mur-
dered other girls” or is likely to do so to Connie. And yet, readers likely notice
that there is something wrong with Friend. It’s possible that there are more reso-
nances from Oates’s earlier version than she realizes, for one can’t help but think
Connie will not return intact from her coerced departure with him. Friend
comes across as very much a predator. Understanding some of Oates’s thinking
behind the story adds context, but readers might also attend to how Friend’s
characterization perhaps exceeds Oates’s intentions.
Unlike Oates’s short story, the film Smooth Talk has Connie returning alive
(minus her virginity) to dance with her sister to the song “Handyman.” Oates hints
that even as she would not necessarily choose that ending for her story, the film
brings out more ineffable aspects of the conclusion — one of the challenges and
affordances of translating a story’s “contexture” into dialogue and language, Oates
explains. Connie, for example, moves out into the sunlight at the end of the story,
which invokes the kind of “rejuvenation” the author notices in the film’s alternate
ending. Although some readers might favor the lack of certainty in the story’s
original conclusion, Oates clearly finds value in Chopra’s decisions for the movie,
rightfully observing that a direct transfiguration into film is impossible.
Jaycee Dugard was eleven years old when she was kidnapped south of Lake
Tahoe in 1991. She remained missing until 2009 when her kidnapper, a con-
victed sex offender, was caught with two children he had fathered with her and
oates Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? 215
brought before a parole board. When she accompanied him to the hearing, the
mystery of her disappearance was solved. The kidnappers, husband and wife
Philip and Nancy Garrido, had imprisoned and abused Jaycee for almost 18
years. Dugard, like Elizabeth Smart who had undergone a similar ordeal, wrote
a memoir about surviving her experience.
Meghan Daum accuses the media of ignoring key issues to create a sensa-
tional “redemption story” about both Dugard and Smart: “Dugard and Smart
seem to have successfully made the transition to survivor, but to turn them into
generic symbols of hope or, worse, to saddle them with the job of being publicly
loving, forgiving, and grateful despite what they endured minimizes their trauma
and panders to audiences by creating a false sense of closure.” Daum is infuri-
ated at the entertainment imperative of corporate media that prompts it to create
feel-good stories of redemption and recovery out of horrifying events, glossing
over disturbing details about Dugard’s Stockholm-Syndrome-like unwillingness
to escape when she had a chance and the fact that local police over the years
missed dozens of clues about her plight. According to Daum, such tragic stories
need to be “tied up with a bow” and domesticated, suitable for Internet circula-
tion with a moral sound-bite to comfort great aunts. Such domestication distorts
bizarre lemonade-out-of-lemons details such as Dugard’s imprisonment being
“her secret to smooth skin” and the jarring comment Dugard wrote in her jour-
nal during her captivity: “I am so lucky and blessed for all the wonderful things
that I do have.” Daum alludes to the trial of Casey Anthony in the death of her
child and how Anthony’s exoneration subverts the feel-good imperative: “The
survivor was anything but a hero. No lessons were learned.”
With Oates’ story, we can only speculate about the outcome of Connie’s
stalking and her capitulation to Arnold Friend’s malevolent magnetism. Few
readers imagine a happy ending. It is interesting to note that Joyce Chopra’s film
Smooth Talk imagines Connie surviving the ordeal, emerging stronger and wiser,
disdainful of her seducer. It’s much more in the spirit of the feel-good story
Daum critiques than the disturbing scenario Oates orchestrates.
Chapter13
Journeys (p.1065)
FAIRY TALE JOURNEYS: STORIES (p.1066)
CHARLES PERRAuLT
Little Red Riding Hood (p.1066)
Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” begins with a close extended family
of women taking care of each other and showering affection on the little girl of
the youngest generation. But hints of problems are present in the second sen-
tence: the mother is “excessively fond” of the child, and the grandmother is said
to have “doted” on her. The implication for readers in the 1600s, long before the
Romantic period’s idealization of childhood in the early 1800s, would have been
negative. This child is spoiled and perhaps vain and therefore is likely to come
to a bad end.
Coming from the country puts Little Red Riding Hood at a further disadvan-
tage. She is sent into the world to do good works but is little prepared for the
dangers along the way. The women of the story seem to share a loving, compas-
sionate community among themselves. Little Red Riding Hood is in fact on an
errand of mercy. But the women are too trusting. Although there are vague hints
that “some woodcutters” provide protection, the wolf manages to get around this
male authority fairly easily, through deceit. Readers in the twenty- first century
might quickly extrapolate to the dangers for young girls of wandering into chat
rooms on the Internet or hanging out in malls.
The connotations of rape in the grandmother’s house are clear. The wolf
intrudes into the innocent family love among the three generations of women,
first devouring the grandmother out of hunger and teasing and consuming Little
Red Riding Hood, seemingly for dessert. Both women die because they are too
trusting, and some readers might question whether they are truly as innocent as
they appear to be. It is rather shocking when the wolf’s invitation for the girl to
get into bed — presumably with her grandmother — elicits the response of dis-
robing. We can imagine adults enjoying the naughty connotations of the scene
while children giggle at the series of questions as they eagerly await the “All the
better to eat you up with” of the well- told tale. The ignorance of the females in
the story provides a satisfying irony, since we know what will happen and pick up
on the sexual nuances but the characters do not.
In fairy tales, young women are both innocent and pretty, a stereotype of
women in European and American cultural history that portrays women as vul-
nerable and desirable to men. While much has changed about women’s roles in
society in the centuries since Perrault wrote, images of women in magazine
advertisements and television commercials perpetuate this subconscious view of
perrault Little Red Riding Hood 217
women as beautiful objects to be used for men’s sexual pleasure or to raise men’s
status by serving as trophy wives or mistresses. Class discussion can benefit from
viewing video presentations on images produced by Jean Kilbourne and others.
Students also might find Internet images from Frank Cordelle’s “The Century
Project” — a photographic display that challenges the slick, infantile images of
women perpetuated in popular culture. Models and women in advertisements
are usually portrayed as physically perfect, sometimes as anorexic, sometimes
with unrealistic Barbie Doll curves. Like Little Red Riding Hood, actresses in
movies are seldom “homely.” Students in groups can be asked to cast a movie
based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood.
Although the story has much comic potential, the issue is serious: our defini-
tions of men and women are shaped by subliminal messages, and our ability to
interact with each other without playing fairy- tale games is hampered by them.
We might as easily critique the images of men in the tale: one male is a predatory
wolf who feeds his hunger through deceit; other males are protectors who are
supposed to defend the public against the wolf but because they are busy work-
ing do not save the women from death (or a fate worse than death) in this par-
ticular narrative. (And though it may take us a bit off track, environmentally
minded students may question the images of wolves as villains and woodcutters
as heroes!)
Perhaps the mother could have given the naive Little Red Riding Hood and
her sickly grandmother some concrete help, had she been on the scene. But like
the dead mothers in the tales of Snow White and Cinderella, this potentially
strong character is removed from the scene. In fact, she is responsible for throw-
ing the more vulnerable females into danger, and we may question why she
chooses not to accompany her daughter on the walk through the woods and not
to serve as a caregiver to her own mother. In Perrault’s world, perhaps she has
been removed by her position as a (presumably) married woman or by her need
to provide for the family. More telling is the disappearance or nonexistence of
the father. In most traditional fairy tales, the father’s absence or complicity leaves
the child open to danger, often from a stepmother or witch.
We may want to return to the issue of education and raise the question of
Little Red Riding Hood’s age and her preparation for the world outside her
home. On the one hand, if she is a thirteen- year- old surfing the Internet or hang-
ing out at the mall, her parents have some culpability, but the story also becomes
a parent’s nightmare. On the other hand, if she is a college student, the story
might be more relevant to our readers. We all know students who come to col-
lege with little understanding of how to manage their lives without the supervi-
sion of Mom and Dad. Students might suggest the role that parents should play
in preparing adolescents for college and then letting them go, sharing what their
parents have done particularly well and what they wish their parents had done
differently. They can also tell us of friends who seem most like the characters in
the story — perhaps the ones who “gather rosebuds” until early morning when a
paper is due, who fall for the line of every predator who comes along, or who
even play the role of the wolf. The adjectives students choose to describe Little
Red Riding Hood show that they tend either to judge her rather harshly or to see
her as comic, evaluations that seem to be in the spirit of Perrault’s text. Perhaps
she is, as students point out, so stupid that she deserves to die, though Disney fans
218 Journeys
are apt to be surprised at the ending and the wolf’s swift finishing off of the
grandmother. Some students are horrified that the violent tales of Perrault and
the Grimm brothers were so long told to children, but we might recall that chil-
dren love scary stories and often understand the moral, especially when it is
given so explicitly. Perhaps children need to know that unthinking decisions can
lead to death: we don’t want them to run into the street or to help the “nice man”
find his puppy, setting themselves up for harm. The deaths of Perrault’s narrative
seem appropriate because they emphasize the danger.
The “moral” at the end may undercut the story’s impact by bringing it out
of the forest and into the ballroom of upper- class French society of the seven-
teenth century. But it does raise an important point. Children taught to avoid
“strangers” often do not know what a stranger really is. They tend to picture
monsters, like the wolf with his huge arms and frightening teeth, rather than the
more charming predators who court them with subtle compliments and decep-
tions that take advantage of their vulnerabilities. He makes the point for “well
bred young ladies” — perhaps some of our college students, both male and
female — that the dangers of trusting too easily are not confined to such obvious
situations as forests and wolves.
JACOB AND WILHELM GRIMM
Little Red Cap (p.1069)
The Charles Perrault version of “Little Red Riding Hood” seems to be aimed
mostly at “well bred young ladies” susceptible to seduction by male predators at
the French court in the late 1600s. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s tale, adapted
from stories told by German peasant women, imagines a less sophisticated audi-
ence. Modern parents might be reluctant to tell their children stories with this
degree of violence, but the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap” is more childlike than
Perrault’s in terms of sexual innuendo. In both tales, the wolf devours the grand-
mother and the female child, and this gobbling up of women by a fearsome but
clever predator can be equated with rape. Perrault clearly gives his audience a
cautionary tale, laced with a certain amount of adult humor: His characters are
gullible, and their fate comes as a direct result of their trusting natures. Wolves
exist, the narrative implies, and if you are not prepared to deal with them, you
die and the wolves win.
grimm Little Red Cap 219
overly “doted” on, Little Red Cap is loved by everyone and has been given training
and discipline. We hear her mother instructing her on how she should mind her
manners. But like Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood, this girl also lacks knowledge
about how to deal with deception in the world away from home. This omission in
her education makes her vulnerable to the wolf, who — with veiled sexual con–
notations — is attracted to her being a “sweet young thing” and imagines that she
“will taste even better than the old woman.” Even when Little Red Cap goes astray,
she thinks about gathering flowers for her grandmother.
In terms of narrative, the Grimms’ storytellers would find it difficult to allow
such a sympathetic protagonist to die in the way that Perrault’s foolish heroine
does. The audience, especially one composed of children, is delighted when the
good but temporarily wandering child and her grandmother are cut from the
belly of the beast intact, still good but no longer innocent. For this unlikely sce-
nario to succeed, the characters who are saved must be likable — otherwise their
salvation would be less satisfying and even harder to believe. As the story stands,
justice is served because the innocent victims are saved and the perpetrator of
the crime is executed. Furthermore, the experience empowers the women so
that they may save themselves in the future: they are dynamic characters who
change as the cause- and- effect plot of the narrative develops.
Ironically for modern readers, Little Red Cap is drawn from the path of
righteousness because her eyes are opened to the beauty of nature. For audiences
around 1800 — as the Romantic period in art, music, and literature was begin-
ning to flower in Germany and other European countries — the conflict between
traditional moral virtues and the sublime awe of untamed nature would have
been more problematic than it may be for twenty- first- century readers. For the
Grimms’ readers, the idea that the beauties of nature should be sought out and
enjoyed was revolutionary, and for earlier tellers of the folktales such a thought
would have bordered on sin. Wilderness was something to be tamed and brought
under God’s control: woodcutters cleared the tangled growth of sinful nature to
create the parks and gardens of Christian civility and order. Being swept up in
the beauties of nature would have been judged by some listeners to the tale to
be as dangerous spiritually as being swept up in the pleasures of sexuality. As
products of the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century and the
environmental movements of the late twentieth century, today’s readers have a
“commonsense” view of nature as uplifting and find it difficult to understand
how powerful the “commonsense” fear and distaste for untamed nature was for
an earlier audience.
At the same time, people did respond to the beauty of nature, even though
they viewed it as forbidden fruit. Therefore, the symbolism of a young girl’s stray-
ing from the path to “gather rosebuds” relates to her dangerous discovery of
herself as a sexual human being. Although modern audiences may not “blame”
Little Red Cap for either discovery, we need to imagine audiences who would
and examine both their warrants and our own.
We also need to problematize the views of women revealed in the story. The
society that we meet at the beginning of both the Perrault and the Grimm ver-
sions of “Little Red Riding Hood” seems to be centered on the female members
of a family; fathers, brothers, and grandfathers are nowhere to be seen. When the
first male figure enters the picture, he takes the dangerous form of a ravenous
220 Journeys
wolf. In Perrault’s version, this is the only depiction of a male. Although wood-
cutters are mentioned as a deterrent that causes the wolf to be more sly in his
machinations, they do not appear on the scene to miraculously save the women
from the predator. In the Grimm version, the woodcutter saves the women from
death, even after they seem to be ruined. So in “Little Red Cap” some men are
not beasts but heroes who notice when a situation does not seem quite right. The
story could have had the mother come to the rescue, but it doesn’t.
As we have noted already, although the Perrault and the Grimm versions of
“Little Red Riding Hood” share the same plot, subtle differences exist between
the two tales. Perrault’s female characters are more gullible, weaker, and less
likable than the Grimm brothers’ women. The Perrault characters are quickly
killed by the wolf and do not return to life to exact revenge or to learn from their
mistakes. The women in the Grimms’ version become as violent as the wolf
himself and are in no way passive victims of male predators. They become self-
sufficient and work together to keep themselves safe. Nor are men always villains
in the Grimm story: the woodcutter plays his role but does not dominate the
action, and the wolves come across finally as creatures less clever and more
driven by insatiable desires that lead to cruel but appropriate deaths at the hands
of their intended victims.
The Grimms’ version seems to be less about sex than Perrault’s and more
about the serving up of justice. When the wolf invites Perrault’s Little Red Riding
Hood into bed with him, adult readers can nudge each other with salacious
pleasure while the children shiver with delicious goose bumps. The Grimms’
version is more overtly violent at the same time that it is less realistic. Having the
wolf jump out of the bed blunts the sexual symbolism and makes this less a story
of seduction and more a story of an outright attack. But death, like sex, is simi-
larly skirted in the Grimm story. The power of good is foregrounded, and the
power of evil is somewhat denied, making the cautionary effect of the Grimm
tale perhaps less dramatic than that of the Perrault version.
The device of having the women return to life in the Grimm version may
deliver an unrealistically optimistic view of life. If the hunger of the wolf stands
for the compulsion to rape, then the easy recovery of the women may imply that
one can bounce back from an attack and be made stronger than before. By con-
trast, the Perrault version implies that evil wins and perhaps even applauds the
arter The Company of Wolves 221
fact, while pretending to give advice to young ladies. Although some may argue
that the use of violence by the women in the Grimm version undercuts any posi-
tive message the story holds and that the deus ex machina of the woodcutter is
unrealistic, the overall theme offers more room for action and problem solving
and thus may offer more useful tools for learning than the simple cautionary tale
of Perrault.
ANGELA CARTER
The Company of Wolves (p.1072)
Traditional folktales about Little Red Riding Hood warn young women not to
stray from the path of conventional morality and obedience. The feminist retell–
ing by Angela Carter, “The Company of Wolves,” first published in 1977, com–
plicates the story’s message by turning it upside down. Carter’s Little Red Riding
Hood embraces the wolf and the wolf nature within herself as she seizes her
own sexuality.
In the movie version of Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” the story begins
with Rosaleen, the Little Red Riding Hood character, dreaming of the death of
her conventional, judgmental sister, Alice, who is attacked by wolves as she
runs in fear through the forest. Should some people stay on the path, since not
everyone possesses a moral compass or the ability to deal with ambiguity? Is it
okay to become a predator oneself and to devour others? Carter’s Little Red
Riding Hood attacks the wolf and tames him, and the argument can be made
that she thus falls into a dangerous fantasy that kills many marriages. She seems
unconcerned about her grandmother’s death, an attitude that may trouble some
readers. However, if we see all of the characters of Carter’s narrative as part of
the young woman’s own psyche — which the dream premise of Carter’s screen–
play version of the story invites the audience to do — we might argue that the
voice of the “old wives’ tales” that hamper women’s freedom and sexuality
needs to be silenced.
Much in our interpretations of the Little Red Riding Hood stories depends
on the age of the audience. No ethical person would deny that children should
be kept safe. Yet we have seen with the revelations in recent years of molestations
of children by priests and other trusted authority figures that recognizing preda-
tors is not an easy matter and that what seems like a safe path of obedience and
morality may be as dangerous as the “bad neighborhood” represented by the
forest. In both the world of the folktale and the world of today, however, young
people reach a point when they must strike out on their own and enter into adult
relationships. Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” warns girls about the dangers
of seduction, and the Grimm version ends with women banding together to
protect themselves against predators; neither one, however, seems to admit that
girls grow up and enter into sexual relationships, whether through their own
desires or through society’s overt or subtle admonitions to marry and produce
children. The stories may mean to discourage the former and protect women for
the latter. But for most women, heterosexual relationships happen eventually,
and the Little Red Riding Hood narratives provide little guidance for moving
beyond the fear of sexuality to a mature relationship with a man who is neither
222 Journeys
all wolf nor all woodcutter, neither destroyer nor protector. Perhaps Carter, by
setting some of her transformations of humans into wolves at weddings, implies
that marriage itself can become a dark and dangerous wood for the naive, both
for women taught to fear men and for men who fear domestication, men “too
shy to piss into a pot.”
Carter’s narrative gives us several episodes about wolves before bringing us
to the story that most closely resembles the Little Red Riding Hood of the folk-
tales. In her screenplay, Carter has these stories told in the girl’s dream by her
grandmother. These, therefore, are the cautionary tales meant to teach the bud-
ding young woman to stay on the path of morality and to be on guard against
predators. But from the beginning, although the narrator tells us that the wolf is
“carnivore incarnate” and beyond reason and redemption, she also hints that the
wolf simply follows his nature and responds to his hunger. When hunters cut off
the paws of the trapped animal, the reader is more likely to feel empathy for the
creature than to side with the brutal humans of the story. When we think of
paws, we think of our pets, and the connotations of the word raise issues about
distinctions between wild animals and the ones we feel at home with.
When the wolf turns into a human being, the narrator drives home her point
that predators are not always easy to recognize and that wolves are not always
what they seem to be. When the voice of the storyteller tells us that we “could
count the starveling ribs through their pelts,” the reader’s compassion is further
aroused. Creatures that are starving are dangerous, of course, but they are also
victims. We need to ask whether this compassion we feel for an animal (or a
human being) that is hungry for food — the natural drive of the carnivorous
predator — corresponds to the sexual symbolism. The fear of rape and the awak-
ening desire of teenage girls become mixed in thrilling fantasies.
But the issue should be raised: Does stalking with rape in mind really equate
to stalking because one is starving for food? The symbolism requires that one
view the issue from the point of view of a victim. This is the very position that
Carter’s text challenges. The story of the missing bridegroom complicates mat-
ters further. The narrator again encourages us to feel sad for the wolf, and we see
the man compelled to leave his bride for the forest as a more sympathetic figure
than the uncomprehending woman who is so quick to remarry. While some
students will remind us that she does the “sensible” thing by taking another
husband, others will argue that she should have followed the voice of her mate
into the forest rather than simply waiting under the covers, even if this meant
death. Her first husband seems to think so. The matter- of- fact narration contin-
ues as we are told that both men abuse the woman for what they see as unfaith-
fulness. Readers may find irony in this episode or may be angry that the writer
does not condemn it. This is how things usually are between men and women,
the story seems to say in its medieval voice. But the anecdote about the woman
with two husbands prepares the audience to accept the different woman who
later takes the far- from- sensible action of embracing her wolf lover, contrasting
the passive victim with the eager participant who demands equality.
The narrative is composed of several episodes, tied together by observations
about wolves that are told in the present tense and evoke a sense of timeless-
ness. This technique does not explain all of the tense shifts in the narrative,
however; in fact, Carter changes tenses at least eighteen times in the course of
arter The Company of Wolves 223
the story, sometimes for just one line. She begins the story in the present tense,
describing the qualities of wolves. This conveys a sense that her statements
express universal truths. But we cannot be sure who the speaker is. Perhaps it is
the grandmother, a possibly unreliable narrator. A hint of this occurs when she
breaks into past tense for half a sentence, telling us that “there was a woman once
bitten in her own kitchen as she was straining the macaroni.” The trivial detail
of the example undercuts its value as evidence, giving the narration the flavor of
the cautionary folktales we have already seen in this cluster. This is directly fol-
lowed by the imperative sentence that provides the thesis for the grandmother-
like narrator’s argument: “Fear and flee the wolf; for worst of all, the wolf may be
more than he seems.” The first anecdote follows, in the past tense, and we find
a wolf first described as an individual. This is closely followed by a one- paragraph
story telling of a witch transforming a wedding party into wolves, also presented
in the past tense.
These anecdotes, along with the more complex story of the missing bride–
groom, seem to be offered as evidence. Their past- tense delivery implies that
these events indeed happened and are facts that could be verified. The bride–
groom story is interrupted, however, by a beautifully evocative paragraph in the
present tense that expresses the inherent despair of wolves. The missing bride–
groom anecdote is followed by the storyteller’s voice giving information in
thepresent tense again, starting in paragraph 20 with the suspiciously unreli–
able “They say.” Instructors might want to take the opportunity here to discuss
the credibility (and the lack of attribution) of sources in the narrator’s argu–
ment. In the movie version of Carter’s story, the devil’s ointment that is men–
tioned in passing in the story is delivered to an innocent young man by the
prince of darkness, whose chauffeur is Little Red Riding Hood in a blond wig.
Here, however, we are given a series of short proofs that wolves are sometimes
actually men, and the reader is given the useful information to avoid naked
men spotted in the woods.
The shift in tenses therefore affects the narrative pace as well as the point of
view, serving to stop us with this short declarative sentence set apart in its own
paragraph in the midst of seemingly timeless description. The story moves into
past tense until the wolf arrives at the grandmother’s door. It then moves into
present tense as we experience the violence through the old woman’s eyes. The
sexual connotations are made explicit here, and after we see the wolf’s huge
genitals, the story shifts suddenly to past, then present, and then past tense again
as the wolf attacks the grandmother. The form again enhances the content as
panic is implied by the narrative action. Shifts in tense continue as the story
comes to its climax, both in plot and in the actual events of the story. Most of the
reverse seduction is told in the present tense, but the changes in tense — and
therefore in perspective — occur closer together at the story’s end.
After the young woman seizes her own wild nature, refusing to listen to “the
old bones under the bed” — the old wives’ tales that urge women to stay on the
path far away from their own sexual pleasures — the narrative moves from past
tense to present tense for one line and then for the first time to future tense. This
sentence implies that the girl and the transformed wolf indeed have a future and
that her overturning of the story’s expectations will lead to a mutual taming
mixed with a mutual wildness. The result is peaceful as we are told in the past
224 Journeys
tense that the blizzard did die down as predicted. The story ends with an image
in the present tense and a happy ending as the girl “sleeps in granny’s bed,
between the paws of the tender wolf.”
This Little Red Riding Hood differs in many ways from the naive girls of the
earlier tales, and we are told explicitly that she deliberately delays her arrival at
her grandmother’s house so that she will lose the bet and be forced to kiss the
wolf. Although she may not know exactly what will happen, she knows by instinct
that to become a woman she must step past the grandmother’s admonitions
against female sexuality. There is a fine line in Carter’s story that students should
discuss. Does Carter mean for us to believe that young girls wish to be seduced
and that the rapist can be tamed by turning his seduction around on him? Or
does she mean that women are capable of making their own decisions about sex?
Where does the line exist between actions that are bold and powerful and actions
that are dangerous or exploitative? Where is the line between rape and the sort of
sexual fantasy that women enjoy reading about in romance novels?