The Colours of Our Memories - Michel Pastoureau 2012
Little Red Ridinghood
Myths and Symbols
My interest in animals goes a long way back, to well before the thesis (La bestiaire héraldique au Moyen Age) that I produced on them while attending the École des Chartes (the School of Paleography and Archival Studies). My fascination developed when I was very young and was encouraged by the books that I was given at that time, the heroes of which were animals. Those books probably prompted my later research work into animal symbolism. They may also have been at the root of my attraction to colours. At a time when colour images were not as common as they are today, children’s books constituted an inexhaustible reservoir of colours. And it was not just a matter of the illustrations in those books, for their titles themselves in many cases included a colour-term, as if the syntagma of ’the name of an animal plus a colour-term’ was a way of attracting the attention of a child (or its parents) and making a sale: The Blue Rabbit, The Orange Cow, The Yellow Duck, Little Brown Bear, The Nice Green Dragon. In the presence of titles such as these, heraldry was surely not far off.
In the tales and fables themselves though, even if their titles did sometimes include a colour-term, references to colours were more rare. One had to read widely in order to gather a few together. For that very reason, the impact made by colour references is considerable and, like the stories themselves, these make up a heritage passed down from ancient times. It is concentrated primarily around the age-old triad of black—white—red, the three colours which, for centuries, if not millennia, have played the strongest of symbolic roles. The most obvious example is probably Little Red Ridinghood.
In this famous tale, the essential question concerns the colour: why red? Why a red ridinghood? It is, however, a question that few researchers have addressed. Yet this is a much-studied story, about which more or less everything seems to be known, in particular the fact that it originated long ago in Western medieval oral culture. In the Liège region, it was already documented around AD 1000, under the title The Little Red Dress. But, as is so often the case, the problem of the colour remains obscure. Why red? A number of obviously symbolic answers spring to mind: red prefigures the cruelty of the wolf, the murder of the grandmother and the blood that will flow. It is rather a cursory explanation, even if the wolf is assumed to be the Devil. Conversely, the idea that this red garment is a small magic cloak, a kind of Tarnkappe that will protect the little girl from the wolf’s cruelty, is not false, but it too is inadequate. Adopting a somewhat anachronistic position, one might venture a more psychoanalytical interpretation: that red is the colour of sexuality — the little girl, on the brink of puberty, would very much like to find herself in bed with the wolf. It is a modern reading that has tempted a number of interpreters, in particular Bruno Bettelheim in his well-known work, The Psychoanalysis of Fairy Tales. Basing his remarks on three medieval versions of the story, transmitted orally, rather than on the sanitized versions of Perrault and the Grimm brothers, Bettelheim stresses the savage and sexual dimension of the story: the wolf invites the little girl to share a meal of the flesh of the grandmother whom he has just killed, and even to drink her blood; he then entices her into bed and has a different kind of carnal interchange with her — or, if it is not the wolf that violates the girl, the hunter does so, once he has dispatched the wolf. According to Bettelheim, the red symbolizes that twofold dimension of anthropophagy and sexuality. But did red really have a sexual connotation in medieval symbolism? I cannot be certain. Besides, as a historian, I am well aware that psychoanalysis is a tool of our own time, devised for our own time and not to be transferred, just as it is, into the past, especially the distant past.
Historical explanations may seem more solidly based, but they too leave us wanting more. Dressing young children in red was a long-established custom, especially in peasant circles; and that may be the simple origin for the little girl’s red clothing. But it may be that, to pay her grandmother a visit, she dressed in her finest clothes — that is to say, as was often the case for the feminine sex in the Middle Ages, a red garment. Alternatively, this red may be explained by the particular day on which this tragic story unfolded: Whitsun, one of the greatest festivals in the Christian year. On this day the Holy Spirit was celebrated and, both inside the church and outside it, everything was decked out in red, the liturgical and symbolic colour of the Holy Spirit. The most ancient version of the story, dating from the year 1000, does not declare that it all took place on the day of Whitsun but, instead, that Whitsun was the little girl’s birthday, which would account for red being her own special colour.
From a scholarly point of view, this last explanation certainly seems the correct one, but it has to be said that it is somewhat disappointing. All we have left are explanations of a semiological nature, based on the structure of the story and the threefold distribution of the colours involved. For red should be envisaged not on its own but as it relates to other colours that are either mentioned or suggested: the little girl clad in red takes a pot of white butter to her grandmother, who is dressed in black (her replacement in the bed by the wolf does not in any way alter the colour of the recipient of the gift). For ancient cultures, these were the three ’polar’ colours, the ones around which most stories and fables that refer to colour are woven. For example, in the fable of the crow and the fox, a black crow drops a white cheese, which is then seized by a red fox; and in Snow-White, a black witch offers a poisoned red apple to a white girl. The distribution of the colours varies but they always operate around the same three chromatic and symbolic poles: white, red and black. Perhaps it is not possible to progress any further in our analysis.