UNIT 2: "The Little Girl and the Wolf"- James Thurber

I stumbled across this burst of fresh air on page 16, while thumbing through the various versions of Little Red Riding Hood. James Thurber is responsible for this marvelous deviation from the thematic prevalence of helpless naïveté and gullibility that plagues the benevolent, preadolescent protagonist in this tale type. Let me start by saying that, yes, Tatar made it very clear that feminism prides itself as being among the various, prominent perspectives of “fairy tale renovation”. However, I was thoroughly surprised to have the book’s first introduction of feminist undertones mellifluously threaded throughout a fairy tale come from a male. I was duly taken aback to see that this feministic perspective was shared by others. And you guessed it, they too happen to be men, namely Roald Dahl and Chiang Mi. I came to find upon further investigation that the two gentlemen that accompany Sir Thurber are chronologically situated significantly later than, say, Charles Perrault of 17th century France but did not span too vastly between one another (specifically: Thurber’s rendition was published in 1939, followed relatively closely by Mi in 1979 and Dahl in 1982). This was no surprise, considering that the age-old confusion between humans with vaginas and mindless, domestic automatons to this day exists as incessant and monotonously redundant yet arduous as before Thurber’s time. After reading the different takes on this feministic approach, I have decided that I relish Thurber’s two paragraphs concerning The Little Girl much more than I do Mi’s Goldflower or Dahl’s Little Red Riding Hood. Trust me, I am in no way shape or form biased because his tale screams All-American. I simply appreciate the brusque brevity with which he both maintains a sense of empowerment and comedic relief in a tale type stereotyped by vulnerability and misfortune. Dated by his one-liner’s reference to the impossible resemblance between Calvin Coolidge (the president at the time) and the Metro-Goldwyn lion (a popular, cinematic emblem of the time), he almost insults society’s “intelligence” by implying how moronically feebleminded one would have to be in order to confuse her grandmother with a primitive canine, even incognito in a night cap. He humors us with this dilemma and awes us by wasting no time in taking the most obviously logical quick fix. Kill the damned thing! This decision should not even be considered unanticipated from a girl while it is expected from knight in shining armor. Nevertheless, the most impressive component of this fairy tale, which by definition is dominated by implicitness, is Thurber’s refusal to leave anything to one’s imagination or interpretation. He declares the moral of this story to be that, “It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be”(Tatar, 17). What a classic. In the wise words of my generation’s social manual and today’s prized, cinematographic relic from 2004, Mean Girls, “You go, Glen Coco!”, or in the case of “The Little Girl and the Wolf”, “You go, Lil’ Girl!”