Who's afraid of The Big Bad Wolf?
Master thesis

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Date
2015-05-13Metadata
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- Student papers (HF-IKS) [927]
Abstract
Fairy tales are an influential aspect within our culture. We grow up hearing and reading these stories in different mediums throughout our lives, which is why these narratives are easily identifiable. This thesis aims to connect three different versions of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, namely Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood, the Brothers Grimm’s Little Red Cap and Paul Delarue’s documentation and publishing of The Story of Grandmother. These narratives will act as a framework to compare two contemporary novels, namely Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which display many of the same recognisable elements as in Little Red Riding Hood. I have chosen these texts because they represent varying aspects of extreme forms of patriarchy and consequently its inherent hierarchal ideology.
These texts move from the 17th century and up to our current time. Little Red Riding Hood has been well known throughout this time, which makes the different version interesting to compare to the novels in order to study if the inherent patriarchal ideology of the Western world has remained static from when Little Red Riding Hood first appeared in print, in 1697, up until now, and also how a possible extreme version of patriarchy might look in the future.
Through the lens of how literature presents both sex and gender within a patriarchal structure we will discuss how the characters are confined to both their biological and socially assigned roles. Hence, this thesis aims to highlight the restrictions and regulations patriarchy places on all human beings and, consequently, condition the way we perceive others and ourselves.
Description
Master's thesis in Literacy studies