In Off With Their Heads! Harvard academic and fairy tale scholar Maria Tatar writes that before Little Red Riding Hood was a cautionary narrative about not veering from the narrow forest path, it was a ?ribald story with a heroine who spends a good part of the narrative undressing while provocatively asking the wolf what to do with her bodice, her petticoat and her stockings.? It was, in other words, the sort of story told by half-soused adults well after the kids were snug in bed. In time, as collectors sanitized the original folk tales, lascivious parts were erased (as with an early version of Rapunzel, in which the prince?s daily tower visits result in Rapunzel expressing surprise that her clothes are so tight). But the violence remained and was even exaggerated, Tatar writes, to emphasize moral lessons. The Grimms introduced birds to peck out the eyes of Cinderella?s evil stepsisters, the better to illustrate just how bad they?d been.
Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=056669eb68d3966e10415a419cfcc0f9
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