Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale

Western Folklore, Fall 2003 by Levy, Elinor

Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale. By Catherine Orenstein. (New York: Basic Books, 2002. Pp. xiii 289, illustrations, notes, bibliography, sources, acknowledgements, index. $25.00 cloth)

When I picked up this book, I was excited by the prospect of a Cinderella casebook-style treatment of "Little Red Riding Hood"-my mistake for judging a book by a glance at its cover. Catherine Orenstein's Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked is nothing more than a compilation of other people's work about that grandma-loving gal. Orenstein does not pretend that the work of others (Bruno Bettleheim, say, or Vladimir Propp) is her own, but she offers nothing original. She has given us instead a wide-ranging and creditable report of "Little Red Riding Hood" scholarship, from The Types of the Folk Tale to Victor Turner, through many genres and disciplines. She shows she knows how to do research, but this book is a retro form of Googling-one flips through paper pages rather than virtual pages.

For a general audience, this is not a bad thing, but scholars will surely see Uncloaked as an extended Cliff's Notes. If you are looking for a quick encyclopedic reference to "Little Red Riding Hood," read Orenstein's book. If you want original analysis, read her bibliography.

ELINOR LEVY

Northwest Jersey Folklife Project

Phillipsburg, New Jersey