Little Red Riding Hood & the Hospital

[truepenny]

[first published on Storytellers Unplugged, May 7, 2010]

Today, as part of the ongoing saga of Sarah vs. her uterus, I went to the University of Wisconsin Hospitals for an ultrasound. They’ve been remodeling the hospital, and they’ve done it over in the same style I’ve seen for a lot of airports recently, or a seriously upscale shopping mall. The floors are hardwood or stone, with inlays; there’s a natural stone fountain; they’ve named the corridors things like “Main Street” and “Atrium Way.” Aside from the people in scrubs wandering around, it hardly looks like a hospital at all. It was all very beautiful and gracious, and the fact that it made me uneasy probably says more about my innate perversity than anything else.

On the other hand, and in my defense, like all hospitals, it was bewildering. I could feel myself teetering on the edge of getting lost the whole time. And that constant, almost subliminal, anxiety made the hospital unheimlich–one of Freud’s more useful terms, which generally gets translated as “uncanny,” but which literally means “un-home-like.”

Sitting in the waiting room, waiting for my hockey-puck pager to go off, I thought, semi-idly, Visiting grandma in the hospital would be a great way to update Little Red Riding Hood. And then I started thinking about all the ways to map a hospital onto a fairy tale forest, the quintessence of the unheimlich. And then I started thinking about variations on the theme of Little Red Riding Hood.

I love fairy tale retellings, frequently more than I love the original fairy tales themselves, and there are a number of ways in which a fairy tale retelling is a great way to practice storytelling. First, the plots are simple. Mozart wrote a theme and variations on the melody which English-speakers know as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and the goofy, elaborate things he does with it are achievable partly because the original is so simple. You can’t mess around very much with an original that is itself complicated or intricate before you make it unrecognizable. Second, your audience knows the story. Like Mozart with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” or like Jimi Hendrix doing a Bob Dylan cover, no matter how crazy you get with it, your audience will be able to recognize the original melody line. They’ll be able to follow, and enjoy, what you’re doing. Third, by their nature, fairy tales come pre-loaded with symbolism and magical thinking, so they’ll stand up to whatever weight you want to put on them. (This is also another advantage of simplicity.) Moreover, the characters and events of fairy tales are always general, rather than specific. Little Red Riding Hood and her sisters (Snow White, Cinderella, Donkeyskin) are named for external characteristics. They aren’t Amelia or Charlotte or Susannah; they’re identified by a piece of clothing, or the color of their skin, or the fact that they’re always dirty. And their antagonists are The Witch, The Wolf, The King, The (Step)Mother. The simple act of giving these characters identities, of naming Little Red Riding Hood Susannah, already makes the story different, opens the door for you to bring your own meanings to it as you tell it.

And fairy tales, because they’re simple, because they’re familiar, because they’re symbolic and therefore focus on external action, offer almost limitless scope for shifting perspectives and points of view. Snow White looks very different from the Queen’s point of view. Rumpelstiltskin has every reason to be angry. Who can blame the ogre for hiding his heart? And what, really, is the truth of the struggle between Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother and the wolf?

With the girl, the grandmother, and the hospital/forest laid out, the big question becomes the wolf. I did some brainstorming this afternoon, and I came up with these nine variations:

1. The most obvious is the wolf as serial killer. An orderly or a doctor who tempts L.R.R.H. off the path and into a convenient supply room. She gets away, gets hopelessly lost in the hospital corridors, finally reaches her grandmother’s room, and–in a classic horror movie move which echoes, of course, the original fairy tale–finds the wolf there waiting for her over her grandmother’s corpse.

2. The wolf is a werewolf, whom L.R.R.H. helps to escape from the Evil Doctors who have been experimenting on him. This one is clearly the urban fantasy/paranormal romance variation.

3. The wolf is L. R. R. H.’s irresponsible selfishness, probably conveniently externalized in a group of friends who want her to do something fun with them instead of visiting her grandmother. She’s tempted off the path, has a great time, and (the kicker), gets to her grandmother’s room just as the old lady flatlines. (This would be the After-School Special variation.)

4.The wolf is a hallucination, and over the course of the story we learn that L. R. R. H. is schizophrenic. She‘s not the one doing the visiting.

5. The wolf is a real wolf. This is the magical realism variation, in which the matter-of-factly unexplained wolf symbolizes L. R. R. H.’s chance to rebel against the societal expectations embodied in her grandmother.

6. The wolf is a doctor who takes L. R. R. H. aside and tells her the truth: her grandmother is dying. This is a story about the transition from childhood/innocence to adulthood and hard choices. The doctor/wolf symbolizes the disease “eating” her grandmother.

7.The wolf is a child patient from oncology. Here, the scary wolf, rather than being a monster, turns out to be a victim. (This, I suspect, is the children’s book variation.)

8. The wolf is a secret the hospital is hiding, as the wolf in the original fairy tale hides in the forest. The nature of the secret would, of course, depend on the kind of story you want to tell (mystery, thriller, science fiction, horror, etc.).

9. The wolf is hunger, rebellion, and rage (borrowing Matthew Arnold’s description of Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre). This is the horror version in which L. R. R. H. and the wolf are actually the same character–maybe a werewolf, if you need a label to stick on her, or a Fury.

They’re all recognizably Little Red Riding Hood, but each of them is a different story, doing different work. That’s the best thing about fairy tale retellings: although they’re old stories, deeply familiar, it’s easy to make them young again, to make them do new work.

Comments

Un-home-like and early Little Red

[leoboiko2.livejournal.com]

While etymologically unheimlich is un-home-like, it should be noted that contemporary heimlich had shifted meaning to "secret". Freud managed to do a nice little bit of rhetorical sleigh-of-hand with that historical datum:

• home-like = familiar = safe and/or private.

• un-home-like = almost familiar but not quite; eerie; uncanny = that which should be kept secret but now… isn't.

re: retelling 3: I like the old versions of Little Red where the wolf tricks her into cannibalism, which makes her a bad girl or even a "slut" (lacking a narrator, random animals inform us of this point), and therefore she agrees to strip, to burn her clothing (= no way back now), and to lie naked in grandma's bed with the murderous crossdressing stranger, while making comments on his anatomy. finally, she escapes by claiming she must defecate (wolf: "do it in bed" Red: "hell no"). there's something viscerally horrifying in all this grotesquerie: it's worse than seduction, worse than being abused: she's non-consensually manipulated into corruption. (and yet she escapes safely, by her own means; the usual fairy-tale treatment of good-and-evil is unclear here; apparently it's rare for good protagonists to associate with the taboo of cannibalism, but she does, and yet she ends the story both unpunished and unrewarded.)

it's my somewhat mystical belief that this underlying erotic-grotesque, uncanny tension somehow survived the Perrault/Grimm censorship; it's something integral to the story, and it arises again unconsciously in modern retellings, even if the reteller has never heard the older strata of the tale.

[finnyb.livejournal.com]

I am highly intrigued by the Little Red Riding Hood is schizophrenic version.  I find myself wanting to read and/or write it.  Or write and read it.

[marycatelli]

eh, depends on the fairy tale for recognizability. If you did the Twelve Dancing Princess or The Boy Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was or Bearskin -- not so much

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

I laughed out loud at variation #2, because I'm sure I've read that one. :-)