Explorations of Childhood in a Modern Age: A Review of Three Books that Engage with Fairy-Tale Literature

Explorations of Childhood in a Modern Age:A Review of Three Books that Engage with Fairy-Tale Literature Katherine Whitehurst (bio) Greenhill, Pauline, and Sidney Eve Matrix. Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity. Utah: Utah State UP, 2010. 232 pp. $25.53 pb. ISBN 978-0-87421-781-0. Print. Weston, Robert Paul . Dust City. Toronto: Penguin, 2010. 224 pp. $21.00 hc, $9.99 pb. ISBN 978-0-67006-396-3, 978-0-14317-331-1. Print. Yum, Hyewon . There Are No Scary Wolves. New York: Farrar, 2010. 40 pp. $16.99 hc. ISBN 978-0-374-38060-1. Print. The books I agreed to review for Jeunesse engage fairy tales, revise them, and in the case of Pauline Greenhill's and Sidney Eve Matrix's Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity, evaluate film adaptations of fairy-tale texts critically. While each of these books is intended for a specific audience, its engagement with fairy tales enables an exploration of how children and young adults form their moral and social identities. Taken together, these three texts deal with an array of issues, including childhood, gender, race, culture, drugs, identity, and consumerism. Hyewon Yum's There Are No Scary Wolves adapts the "Little Red Riding Hood" tale to explore stranger danger. Although it uses images to create a mise-en-scène that develops the textual content of the narrative further, the warning it conveys is relatively conventional and reflects a twenty- and twenty-first-century fear of strangers. The book is focused on the idea that strangers pose a potential threat to children that can only be alleviated by the presence of a responsible adult figure, in this case the boy's mother. It is geared toward parents who are concerned [End Page 190] for their children's safety and toward young children ignorant of the dangers that might lurk within their own communities. Despite the conventional warning of the text, the story deviates from the traditional female Riding Hood in its depiction of a young male Riding Hood. The reversal of the protagonist's gender, as well as her age (Yum's protagonist has not yet reached puberty), recasts a tale that often explores the vulnerability of girls approaching puberty to one that considers the vulnerability of a little boy. Yum's narrative is particularly interesting in the way that the gender of Riding Hood and the public setting of the story—a modern city replaces the forest and a Chinese restaurant replaces Grandmother's house—allows for the erasure of the sexual undertones commonly attributed to the tale. Upon reading Yum's tale, I cannot help wondering whether or not the gender reversal within the narrative removes "Perrault's writing [of] en-gendered violence[, which] treat[s] the girl in the tale as a sadomasochistic object" (Zipes, Trials 8). Although one could argue that it is in fact the change in setting that alters the relationship between Riding Hood and the sexual threat she has previously faced, the use of a male character in this text forces us to consider the role gender plays in the tale. I will not seek to answer the questions Yum's version of "Little Red Riding Hood" raises here, but I do hope to outline the more obvious outcomes of Riding Hood's changed gender. For example, the deviations in the text from typical gender representations within the tale influence the symbolic nature of Riding Hood's cape. While the cape remains red, the image does not possess the same sexual connotations present in previous versions. As Jack Zipes notes in his consideration of Perrault's depiction of the red cape, "Exactly why Perrault added the red hood is not clear. However, we know that red was generally associated at the time with sin, sensuality, and the devil. As a present from a doting grandmother, it refers directly to the child's 'spoiled nature'" (Trials 26). Alternatively, Yum uses the red cape to mirror the image of a super hero. As such, the cape highlights the boy's imagination, innocence, and youth, as well as his belief in his own empowerment—a courage that stems from the boy's limited appreciation...

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