The Story of Grandmother
Written by Paul Delarue
Illustrated by Joanna Stawowy
We all know “Little Red Riding Hood” — the story about a girl, who is wandering
about the forest to get to her grandmother’s house and is being followed by a bad
wolf. The wolf eats granny and tries to eat little red riding hood as well, but in the end
of the story, is killed by a hunter. There is a happy ending — granny and little red riding hood are alive and well, the wolf is killed. But before “little red riding hood” was planned
to be a story for children, there were some darker versions of this tale.
Before Charles Perrault and Grimm Brothers there was a lot of oral variants of Little Red Riding Hood story. It was known well in XIV-century France, there were several variations of this tale in Italy (e.g.La finta nonna), in Bulgaria it is know by the name of Piroska.
In those old versions wolf wasn’t always a wolf — sometimes it was a werewolf
or ogr (Italy). He often doesn’t devour the grandmother in one piece — he kills her, spills her blood into the bottle and puts her flesh in the cupboard. There is also a cannibalistic motive — when the girl arrives, she eats and drinks the flesh and blood of her granny
(but she’s unaware of this fact). The sexual overtone is also quite common — wolf
(or other creature) tells the girl to undress herself and lie beside him in the bed.
The girl asks him what to do with her clothes and he commands her to put them
into the fire because “she won’t be needing them anymore”. Also the ending is different from the modern versions: sometimes the girl is devour by the wolf and sometimes
she asks the wolf if she can go outside to pee. He let her go, but before that, he atteches a rope to her ankle. The girl escapes, but no one helps her — she’s free only due
to her cleverness.
The book is totally black on the outside and totally red on the inside. It suppose to connote a jaws of the wolf: cover is made from scrim, so the surface is a bit harsh (as the fur
of the wolf) and the paper is smooth and slick (so is the interior of the mouth).
The small format and black cover refers to a form of prayer-book — the story is very brutal, so juxtaposing it with a almost religious form is a big contrast and, as I think,
this contrast has a point — in one hand we have an innocent girl, a child and on the other hand we have a werewolf, the bzou, who is far away from innocence.
Most of the time the girl is unaware of the horror that is taking place next to her.
She is something pure in this story and her innocence is what th werewolf wants
to profane. But she escapes so the innocence is saved.
I paid a lot of attention to a text itself. The words of this story are strong and expressive, so I decided to emphasize its meaning even more by making the letters big and intrusive. They are agressive and expansive as a wolf himself — on the contraty to illustrations which are delicate as the girl in this story.
Thank you for visiting!
original text source: http://boj.pntic.mec.es/~jmarto1/01tradicion-oral/delarue.html
