Written Task 2 (HL)

Question: How has the text borrowed from other texts and with what effects?

Text: ‘Little Red Cap’ by Carol Ann Duffy (studied in part 4, Critical Study)

Focus: How has Little Red Riding Hood by the Grimm Brothers and the poet’s relationship with Adrian Henri been intertextually reimagined by the poem ‘Little Red Cap’? What are the effects?

Outline

Introduction: The most popular edition of the fairytale, Little Red Riding Hood, was written by the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm in 1812. In 1999, a poem titled ‘Little Red Cap’ was published in Carol Ann Duffy’s collection The World’s Wife. It makes allusions to Little Red Riding Hood and the poet, Duffy’s relationship with Adrian Henri. As an ardent feminist, however, Duffy transforms the female protagonist of her poem from a marginalised character to an empowered and independent one. This written task is an analysis of Duffy’s intertextual reimagination

Key Ideas

Coming of Age: Both protagonists in Little Red Riding Hood and ‘Little Red Cap’ come of age to become young women, and they embark on treacherous paths symbolised by their encounters with ‘The Bad Wolf’. They are, however, stimulated by their curiosity, naivety, and recklessness typical of adolescents. In ‘Little Red Cap’, the protagonist’s path towards adulthood includes the loss of her virginity when she meets the wolf, a character who represents Adrian Henri and who symbolises patriarchy.

Defamiliarization and Female Emancipation: Female emancipation is a recurring theme throughout Duffy’s poetry collection The World’s Wife. In ‘Little Red Cap’, Duffy defamiliarizes the reader by characterising the protagonist as an empowered and independent character instead of a marginalized one. Additionally, she reconstructs Little Red Riding Hood from the female perspective in ‘Little Red Cap’, providing the protagonist with a first-person narration. Furthermore, the free verse structure of the poem implies that the protagonist aims to challenge patriarchal social conventions to emancipate herself from the wolf.  

Power: Both the character, Little Red Riding Hood and the poet, Carol Ann Duffy, in her relationship with Adrian Henri were, a feminist may argue, marginalised, oppressed, and alienated by an androcentrically constructed society. However, Duffy’s character in ‘Little Red Cap’ transcends patriarchy by assuming the persona of an empowered and independent woman. This female protagonist also assumes engages in unusual seductive exchanges with the wolf rather than being threatened with kidnapping. The wolf’s dominant role in Little Red Riding Hood is reversed by Duffy to accentuate the empowered stance assumed by the protagonist of ‘Little Red Cap’.

Written Task 2

Borrowing from the Grimm Brothers’ Little Red Riding Hood, Duffy intertextually reimagines a popular fairy tale in her free verse poem ‘Little Red Cap’. The poem was published in 1999, following the end of Duffy’s relationship with Adrian Henri, and during the third wave of feminism. Characterised as a marginalised and vulnerable protagonist in Little Red Riding Hood, Duffy reconstructs Little Red Cap into an empowered and independent woman who challenges patriarchy as she comes of age. Unlike Little Red Riding Hood, Duffy empowers Little Red Cap with a first-person narrative voice, effectively emancipating her from a world that is constructed and focalised through patriarchy.

It is through the shift from third person narration to first person dramatic monologue that Little Red Cap is given a voice for expression. The impact on the reader, who is otherwise familiar with the third-person (presumably male) omniscience of Little Red Riding Hood, is one of defamiliarization. It is just this narrative transition that allows Little Red Cap to contend, through a female perspective, the injustices of patriarchy.

The poem’s opening, ‘at childhood’s end’ signals Little Red Cap’s coming of age. She remains noticeably vulnerable, having just turned ‘sweet sixteen’, and enticed by a naïve teenage desire to escape the monotony of ‘playing fields, the factory, allotments’. Overwhelmed by fierce passion and hedonism, Little Red Cap begins her pursuit of mature infatuation as she ‘first clapped eyes’ on the wolf’ to ‘make quite sure he spotted me’. The transformation is remarkable: In the fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood is kidnapped by the male wolf. By contrast, Little Red Cap actively initiates a relationship with a considerably older wolf (Henri was 39, Duffy was 16 when they met). Later, it is connoted that Little Red Cap loses her virginity to the wolf, going ‘deep into the woods…to a dark tangled thorny place’. It is suggested that Red Cap eschews the innocence of Little Red Riding Hood, independently pursuing a life of uncertainty and sought-ought sexual gratification.

Later, Little Red Cap develops her relationship with the wolf, as she ‘clung till dawn to his thrashing fur’ and listens to his ‘love poem’. The reader is again defamiliarized; the aggressive wolf of the fairy tale becomes an affectionate and sensitive ‘poet’. This suggests that women have the autonomy to initiate a loving relationship and weaken a man rather than become his possession (Little Red Riding Hood being, in effect, incarcerated in the fairy tale). In Duffy’s reconstructed story, the female protagonist inverts Little Red Riding Hood’s powerlessness to become dominant, and the manipulating force in the male-female relationship.

Nevertheless, the wolf does represent men in patriarchal society. When a white dove ‘flew straight from my hand to his open mouth’, the reader infers the ‘devouring’ of Little Red Cap’s purity and virginity. And, as a young woman serving her wolf ‘breakfast in bed’, Little Red Cap assumes a sacrificial role, obligated to obey the wolf’s demands. The ambiguity of ‘breakfast in bed’, suggesting ideas of sex and consumption, may suggest the sexual violation of the young protagonist forced to conform to the male wolf’s gluttonous sexual desire. What is suggested is that women in patriarchy are sexually and domestically subservient to men.

‘Little Red Cap’, like other poems in the collection, avoids regular line length, stanza length, and a consistent rhyme scheme. This absence of conformity reflects the iconoclastic nature of Little Red Cap who will not adopt expected female behaviours. Indeed, in a vividly portrayed reversal of roles, Little Red Cap takes an axe to the wolf, ‘scrotum to throat’, completing her challenge to patriarchal dominance. In contrast to the fairy tale, Little Red Cap is physically empowered; she does not require a male woodcutter to emancipate her. It is appropriate that Little Red Cap should silence the wolf and simultaneously cut apart his sexual organ, expressed in the lexical choices of ‘throat’ and ‘scrotum’.

In the same way that fairy tales function ideologically – the feminist may argue as patriarchal texts – Duffy’s reimagining has a political purpose; it works to a feminist agenda. The lines ‘it took ten years… buried corpse’ parallels the 12 years Duffy spent with Henri before separating. Duffy, in an interview with The Telegraph claimed that their relationship was ‘all sex and never faithful’. This suggests that it took Duffy more than a decade to understand that she had become a victim of patriarchy and its social expectations of women. Killing, silencing, and emasculating the wolf corresponds (quite dramatically!) with Duffy leaving Henri. This is paralleled in the poem. When Red Cap goes ‘out of the forest…all alone’, she asserts her independence once and for all. At this point, she genuinely comes of age, emancipated, and having come to the realisation that women do not need to be reliant on men.

In conclusion, Duffy intertextually reimagines Little Red Riding Hood as ‘Little Red Cap’ to reveal that, in both society and in literature there are females who are marginalised, silenced, and oppressed by patriarchy. And, her poem challenges literature that is written by men, or literature that adopts a male perspective of what is ‘normal’. By writing in free verse and dramatic monologue instead of a third person narration, Duffy gives women a voice to express womens’ historical struggle against patriarchy through the female perspective. She empowers Little Red Cap – a representation of all women – to assert her independence by emancipating herself, through her own strength, from the predatory wolf. Moreover, this is not just the rewriting of a ‘history’ as a ‘herstory’. Duffy is funny, clever, irreverent, and ironic. Word play is the cornerstone of her poetry. The male parallel, Little Red Riding Hood, is didactic and mundane by comparison.  

Word count: 950

Bibliography:

Cavendish, Richard. ‘The Publication of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.’ History Today. History Today Ltd, 12 Dec. 2012. Web. 9 Sept. 2015.

Duffy, Carol Ann. ‘Little Red Cap’ The World’s Wife: Poems. London: Picador, 1999. N. pag. Print.

Grimm, Jacob, and Grimm, Wilhelm. ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ Grimm 26. Kinder Und Hausmarchen, 3 Mar. 2015. Web. 08 Sept. 2015.

Preston, John. ‘Carol Ann Duffy Interview.’ The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group Limited, 11 May 2010. Web. 15 Sept. 2015.