Red Riding Hood (2011): The Heroine’s Journey Into the Forest – Athena Bellas

Figure 1: Red Riding Hood as powerful hunter, armed with a weapon in Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood

In the closing scenes of Catherine Hardwicke’s recent teen film Red Riding Hood (2011), heroine Valerie, armed with a dagger, journeys into the forest to hunt and kill the big bad wolf. After slaying the beast in a bloody battle, Valerie does not return home to be chastised by the traditional well-known moral of the tale: ‘do not stray from the path’.[1] No such moral exists at the end of this particular ‘Red Riding Hood’ retelling. Instead, Valerie rejects her family home and takes up residence in the forest with another wolf, her lover Peter, and the film closes on the blissful contentment of their (paranormal) romance. This article charts how, in this contemporary teen film, the trope of the female adolescent’s voyage into the forest represents an empowering entry into personal freedom, power, and self-definition. At the same time, the film displays the contemporary teen media landscape’s obsession with fairy tale and paranormal romance, with its emphasis on the pleasures of heterosexual romance between the desiring heroine and her ‘dark lover.’ The journey into the forest in contemporary teen films and television is significant to chart, because it is through the journey into this space, and the magical transformations that she undergoes there, that provides the heroine with a unique opportunity to shift into a position of power and liberty.

Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood emerges in a current teen screen media landscape obsessed with this aspect of the fairy tale and the paranormal romance. Interestingly, many of these texts, including blockbuster films like Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke 2008), The Hunger Games (Gary Ross 2012), and Snow White and the Huntsman (Rupert Sanders 2012), as well as television series like The Vampire Diaries (Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson 2009-) and The Secret Circle (Andrew Miller 2011-2012), situate their heroine’s journey centrally within a forest space. As she journeys into the forest, the heroine undergoes an often supernatural transformation into a beast or beast-like creature such as a werewolf or vampire. During this metamorphosis, the heroine develops physical strength and prowess, bravery and fearlessness. The journey into the forest is the catalyst for the heroine’s beastly transformation, and her evolution into an empowered position in the world. In these teen screen texts, the enchanted forest space has become an imaginative horizon on which to explore and celebrate female mobility, agency and even aggression.

But at the same time, the heroines of these texts also encounter and fall in love with a magical male creature in the forest – werewolves, vampires, warlocks, and ghosts are particularly popular. In television series The Vampire Diaries, for example, heroine Elena becomes a vampire and as she discovers her extraordinary physical strength and her lust for blood, she also enjoys a romantic relationship with vampire boyfriend Stefan (as well as potential lover Damon). Similarly, in Hardwicke’s film previous to Red Riding Hood, the wildly successful teen blockbuster Twilight (2008), grounds the paranormal romance between vampire Edward Cullen and human Bella Swan in the lush geography of the woods.

In this way, these texts enact postfeminist rewritings of the fairy tale – retaining a focus on the pleasures of romance but also incorporating new elements like the female-as-hunter and the celebration of her agency, aggression and power. The representation of strength, freedom and mobility, coupled with an emphasis on the heterosexual romantic union, is particularly inflected by the postfeminist sensibility that surrounds much of contemporary teen screen media today. The postfeminist signifies a ‘move away from easy categorisations and binaries, including the dualistic patterns of (male) power and (female) oppression on which much feminist thought and politics are built.’[2] Rather than representing the heroine’s empowerment and agency in conflict with the romance narrative of the ‘dangerous lover’, the postfeminist text often unites these elements, allowing both to exist in a non-binaristic way, and not having to give up one element for the other.[3] In Red Riding Hood, for example, the story emphasises the importance and power of independent female mobility through the figure of Valerie as a powerful lone hunter journeying into the forest to slay the beast. But at the same time, it also emphasises the theme of escape through romance with the prioritisation of the heterosexual relationship. So this postfeminist fairy tale film wants, and has it, both ways; it navigates both paths through the fairy tale forest at the same time. On the one hand, it champions Valerie as an independent hunter but on the other hand it also promotes an image of fulfilment through love and a heterosexual romantic coupling. This film promotes an image of mobility across spaces but also across identities, for Valerie is both violent hunter and romantic lover in the forest. She is not locked into either identity, but rather is able to occupy both.

Fairy tale scholar Cristina Bacchilega writes that in contemporary retellings of the ‘Red Riding Hood’ tale, ‘straying from the path is necessary’.[4] Red Riding Hood constructs this necessary straying across the filmic landscape to celebrate the errant journey of heroine Valerie. Rebelling against the strictures of her daily life, Valerie escapes into the forest and is rewarded with knowledge, agency, power and the fulfilment of her desire. The film utilises the geography of the fairy tale forest to tell a story of female mobility and agency. Hardwicke’s film rewrites and revalues Red Riding Hood’s wayward journey in the forest – straying from the path is represented as not only necessary, but also positive, satisfying, and empowering for the heroine. This journey leads her to traverse broad new horizons of independence and transformation.

Figure 2: Snow White battles against fearsome creatures in ‘The Dark Forest’ in Snow White and the Huntsman. Like many heroines of contemporary fairy tale teen films, this Snow White discovers strength, power and bravery within herself in the forest space.

The moral of the tale, ‘don’t stray from the path’ dissipates in many contemporary revisions in favour of errant travel, and indeed, it is nowhere to be seen in Hardwicke’s retelling of the tale. No longer a didactic emblem[5], the path through the forest is presented as a positive opportunity for the heroine’s independent travel, which allows for a rebellion against the strictures imposed upon her as well as a transformation into a mobile, empowered position in the world.

Red Riding Hood: Pursuing An Errant Path

In both the Perrault and Grimm versions of ‘Red Riding Hood’, the heroines’ straying from the path has negative consequences – in the former she is killed, and in the latter she is devoured and only narrowly escapes death when the huntsman rescues her from the belly of the beast. Bacchilega reads these gruesome endings as punishments for heroines who have acted up and disobeyed orders[6], writing that ‘[t]he girl has learned her lesson: obey your mother and don’t give in to errant desires’.[7] In her extensive study of the evolution of the ‘Red Riding Hood’ tale in popular culture, Red Riding Hood Uncloaked (2002), Catherine Orenstein similarly points out that these endings functioned as ‘warnings’ for young girls to not disobey authority.[8] The admonishing warning ‘do not stray from the path,’ coupled with the heroine’s death at the end of the story highlight the negativity in which this forest voyage has been shrouded. However, in postfeminist cinematic retellings like Hardwicke’s, the heroine is not punished for her errant travel into the forest; her journey is not represented as a shocking transgression that must be corrected. Rather, the journey comes to represent the heroine’s agency and empowerment and the film celebrates this by allowing her to defeat the wolf, and rewarding her with the pleasures of an alternative path outside of her everyday life.

Marilyn C. Wesley points out that often ‘women’s travel serves as a trope of female agency.’[9] To undertake a journey, beyond the limits of what is familiar and set, is to expand into spaces of ‘alternative possibility.’[10] Contemporary retellings of the ‘Red Riding Hood’ tale, including those seen in the teen film genre, have revised the tale to tell stories of female mobility and agency. In contemporary teen films like Red Riding Hood, Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett 2000), Ella Enchanted (Tommy O’Haver 2004) and Snow White and the Huntsman the fairy tale forest is invoked as the grounds for female travel where ‘alternative possibilities’ of identity, experience and desire can come into play. In these films, the heroine journeys from the limiting boundaries of her home and into the forest where she not only finds escape from these limits, but also undergoes empowering and powerful personal transformations.

The wide-open spaces of the forest in these teen films are liminal zones for adolescent transformations. Anthropologist Victor Turner writes that the liminal, the ambiguous territory of ‘betwixt-and-between’, provides a ‘time of enchantment when anything might, even should, happen.’[11] This ‘time of enchantment’ provides room for play, experimentation with multiple identities, and purposefully breaking rules.[12] Adrian Martin has applied Turner’s observation of liminality to teen cinema. He writes that ‘teen stories are about…the liminal experience: that intense, suspended moment between yesterday and tomorrow, between childhood and adulthood, between being a nobody and being a somebody, when everything is in question, and anything is possible.’[13] Catherine Driscoll similarly remarks that this is a utopian space for teen film, providing a ‘fantasy of freedom.’[14] This utopian sense of expanded possibilities and freedom in the teen fairy tale film is particularly embodied in the space of the forest, where magical transformations can occur (for example, Ginger’s transformation into a wolf in Ginger Snaps), magical powers can be accessed (for example, the teen witches who perform spells in the forest in The Craft [Andrew Fleming 1996] and in The Secret Circle) and encounters with paranormal or magical creatures take place.

This encounter with the magical and the supernatural in the fairy tale forest announces this space as one of potential to go beyond the structures and strictures of daily life, displaying the fairy tale’s ability to provide ‘open spaces for dreaming alternatives…announcing what might be.’[15] What is particularly interesting about these contemporary cinematic rewritings of ‘Red Riding Hood’ is how the heroines’ straying from the path is positively valued, and her encounter with the wolf or other magical being is empowering rather than victimising. Indeed, as Catherine Orenstein notes, the heroine is now often reclaimed ‘from the belly of the beast and put in the place, and even in the fur, of the wolf.’[16] Orenstein goes on to assert that this contemporary shift in the dynamics of the tale ‘has turned out to be one of the most fertile and surprisingly recurrent themes [in contemporary fairy tale revisions]: the power of the wolf’s pelt to transform the heroine.’[17] These teen films mobilise ‘witch and werewolf identities to symbolise forbidden emotions such as power, lust, and rage.’[18] Sue Short notes ‘what is remarkable about The Craft and Ginger Snaps’, and indeed, I would add Red Riding Hood, is that ‘the female outsiders willingly embrace these castigated images [of wolf and witch] as an alternative to existing norms, adopting them as a measure of dissatisfaction and refusal.’[19] This subversion of expectation and movement into another territory altogether is what precipitates change and transformation, magic and enchantment, pleasure and power, for Valerie in Red Riding Hood.

The scenes set in the town are shot in often claustrophobic close-ups, and lit low-key to shroud figures in darkness. These tightly framed, darkened shots of the town, along with multiple scenes set in prison cells and tiny attics create a lack of space and freedom to move. Valerie is literally cramped in in the town, her movements and gestures restricted and made small by a lack of space. Set in vaguely medieval times – though the date is never specified – Valerie lives in a culture ruled by the severe strictures dictated by fathers and lawmen. She has been betrothed to a man she does not desire to marry, and has no choice in the matter. She is forbidden from speaking her mind, making plans for her own life, or even venturing out of the town and into the forest. Fred Botting writes that in the female Gothic, the heroine must often flee her home and enter the forest in order to escape from a ‘cruel and tyrannical familial order’.[20] Into the forest she goes, where her ‘desire wanders, off course, flying to “wild zones” where femininity encounters the possibility of becoming something other: the ruins and forests that are uncharted places of darkness and danger are also loci free from the restraints of law.’[21] However, Botting also points out that the heroine’s journey is often circumvented at the end of the novel when she is brought out of the forest, and she is re-domesticated.[22]

However, in Red Riding Hood, no such re-domestication occurs. Valerie violates all of these bans and decides to travel a forbidden path into the forest as a permanent escape, as a refusal of these expectations. She does not return home but rather permanently situates herself on the forbidden path. Traveling this forbidden path is a subversive move for Red Riding Hood. Her resistance to the limitations imposed upon her begins when she sets out on her journey into the woods, unsatisfied by the terms that limit her life set by her parents. The further into the forest that Valerie travels, the more expansive and panoramic her views and paths become. In contrast to the cramped, suffocated spatiality of the town, in the wide-open space of the forest, her strides are long, fluid, and assured. She shakes off these restrictions and is released into wide-ranging spaces open to errant traversals and multiple unbounded routes.

It is here that she finds a measure of freedom that she does not want to relinquish. In Red Riding Hood, the forest expands beyond the limits of the town Valerie lives in. When Valerie enters the forest, going beyond the barriers of the town, she is able to express anger, power, and desire – emotions ordinarily considered taboo for young women to express.[23] Mapping herself into this geography through errant travel, Valerie expresses anger and violence, and claims her power when she kills the wolf.

She declares in her voice-over narration that ‘I could no longer live there [in the town]. I felt more freedom in the shadows of the forest. To live apart carries its own dangers, but of those I am less afraid.’ While Valerie does not literally become a wolf as in other recent teen films like Ginger Snaps, she does nevertheless adopt a wolf-like identity. Valerie not only discovers that she has the potential to become a wolf – she is descended from ancestors who were wolves and thus has wolf blood coursing through her veins – and one bite from another wolf would activate her own becoming-wolf process. While this is not a process she chooses to undergo, she does decide to reside in the ‘shadows of the forest’ with the wolves whose language she is able to speak as a result of her lupine lineage, and she chooses this outside space as her residence. But rather than being punished with death, as in Perrault’s and the Grimm’s popular versions of the tale, Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood is actually rewarded. Having undertaken this subversive secret journey away from the familiar strictures of daily life, Valerie attains a space of her own and a lover of her choosing.

Figure 2: Snow White battles against fearsome creatures in ‘The Dark Forest’ in Snow White and the Huntsman. Like many heroines of contemporary fairy tale teen films, this Snow White discovers strength, power and bravery within herself in the forest space.

Deborah Lutz observes that this decision to reside on the outside with a ‘dangerous lover’ constitutes an overwhelmingly dominant trajectory for contemporary romances.[24] Recent teen-girl films inflect their fairy tale forests with this overtone of romance, particularly of the Gothic variety, and Red Riding Hood, along with other popular films like Snow White and the Huntsman and Twilight, displays this inflection. Landscape unleashes romantic pleasures as the heroines of teen cinema navigate the tender geographies of the forest. The liminal movement from civilisation to forest is announced as an amorous, tender passage. Mapping herself into this geography, the heroine permanently situates herself on the edge, refusing to return to the orderly and the civilised. This decision to permanently occupy this outside-space registers dissatisfaction with what the civilised has to offer. Turning to the wilderness, the girl finds that it unfolds as the fabric of her desire. Remarkably, this is not a fleeting interval to be pursued before returning to the regimented world; it constitutes a real escape from it.

In these films, the girl’s passage through the wilderness is driven by a quest for knowledge. Valerie undertakes a journey into the forest in order to discover who the wolf is. Bound up with this knowledge quest is Valerie’s path towards romantic love with her gentle wolf-lover Peter.[25] Escape through love is, as Deborah Lutz points out, the dominant trope of many contemporary romances,[26] and films like Red Riding Hood follow suit. Escaping the regimented world by entering the fairy-tale forest with a beast-lover, a romantic map of tender exploration unfolds before the heroine. Some contemporary teen films like Red Riding Hood and Twilight, as well as popular teen television series like The Vampire Diaries celebrate the male wolf or beast as a romantic, gentle figure who brings out the latent wildness of the heroine. The teen girl journeys into the forest to hunt down and encounter magical creatures like vampires and werewolves; she then chooses them as lovers. Her desire is at the forefront of the rite-of-passage journey, and it becomes the very texture of the fairy-tale forest space.

Indeed, Marina Warner comments that postmodern rewritings of the fairy tale are overwhelmingly dominated by the idea that ‘Beauty stands in need of the Beast’ and that ‘He no longer stands outside her, the threat of male sexuality in bodily form…but he holds up a mirror to the force of nature within her, which she is invited to accept and allow to grow.’[27] In these rewritings, the beast is not a deadly, dreaded danger to the innocent heroine; rather, his gentle beastliness is attractive to the heroine and she pursues him as a romantic partner. Cristina Bacchilega comments that this romantic reconfiguration of the physical dynamic between wolf and girl is particularly potent: ‘By acting out her [sexual] desires the girl offers herself as flesh, not meat. The “carnivorous” nature of their encounter is transformed’ into a tender embrace.[28] This transit has become a mode of transformation, both for the hero and heroine. In this postfeminist retelling of ‘Red Riding Hood’, the heroine journeys into the forest and is transformed: she is given the space to act out violence and anger, but also desire and romance. In undertaking this journey, Valerie’s agency is activated and her desire mobilised.

The Fairy Tale’s Mobile Map: Errant Views, Expansive Vistas

In Red Riding Hood, the heroine’s physical mobility and liberty is echoed by the camera as it moves across the filmic landscape, and as the viewer’s eyes also move across this screened space, the mobility of the film’s cartography is revealed. It is significant that the teen viewer is so strongly aligned with the heroine’s mobility in this way, for this mode of filmic travel acts as an invitation to explore imaginative horizons and locations in which female liberty and agency is prioritised. This invitation to errant visual travel aligns the viewer with the active, empowered heroine and her mobile perspective.

The film’s and viewer’s movements across this landscape can be considered via Giuliana Bruno’s ‘moving theory of site.’ As the camera navigates its way through cinematic space, it becomes ‘a vehicle of travel.’ When ‘the movie camera becomes a moving camera’ it can literally become ‘a means of transport’ for the viewer.[29] Bruno is particularly discussing the mobile camera in urban spaces and scenes, but her moving theory of site is useful in this instance of fairy tale forest geography too. From the very beginning of Red Riding Hood, during the opening credits, the forest is announced as a map designed for errant travel, motion, and wide-ranging journeying. This opening scene provides the viewer with a moving map of the fairy tale forest space that will be navigated throughout the rest of the film: we are given an elaborately extensive visual itinerary of rushing rivers, jagged precipices, emerald green thrushes of trees, and soft snow-covered expanses. Each point on the map is lingered on and recorded in turn, creating a detailed itinerary of the fairy tale forest’s landmarks. In this way, the viewer is presented with a cinematic map of this space right from the outset of the film, situating attention in this geography and creating a map that we are invited to traverse throughout the rest of the film.

Figure 4: Venturing far from the limits of the town, Valerie finds beautifully expansive landscapes to traverse and vistas to behold

In panoramic aerial views, the camera pans and glides across these expansive locations throughout the film. This continuous, fluid, gliding motion of the camera across this topography highlights the mobility of this map. The viewer offered many multiple views of different points on the map to visually discover: rivers and rocks, trees and sky, snow and mountains. In being offered so many multiple places and vistas to visually contemplate, the viewer is invited to move their attention from location to location, perspective to perspective, across sweeping panoramas, encouraging us to encounter this map through transitory motion. As the viewer visually explores these vistas, the camera is always in motion, panning and moving across this geography to create a moving map of the fairy tale forest. This motion of the camera across the forest allows the viewer to explore and visually roam about this filmic map, visiting many points on its itinerary and exploring them from many angles, distances and perspectives.

This wide-ranging, roaming camera across open spaces presents an invitation for wandering, exploring, voyaging on an unbound map, echoing Valerie’s own freewheeling traversal of this open space. Viewers are invited to travel across this dynamic panorama of the forest in a similar way to Valerie, and it becomes a visually traversable geography. Aligned with Valerie’s point of view in this way allows the teen viewer to explore and consider the heroine’s unique position of liberty, mobility and agency. Conley asserts that the landscape in film ‘propels narrative but also, dividing our attention, prompts reverie and causes our eyes to look both inward, at our own geographies, and outward, to rove about the frame and to engage, however we wish, the space of the film.’[30] The wide shots of landscape, and the constantly moving camera across these stunning vistas, promotes a viewing of the film that is mobile. Conley writes that this mobility of vision can be thought of as ‘applied distraction’ and ‘free attention’, ‘being errant but available to fix upon and discern different mental and physical sites.’[31] The mobility of vision across this cinematic geography of the fairy tale forest can be considered an inherently errant process: it invites vision to roam across moving panoramas freely, and to explore the map in an unruly way. This errant roaming provides an invitation for the viewer to explore expansive imaginative horizons on which female mobility and agency are prioritised.

The forest emerges as a geography through which to explore female power and liberty in this film. As the heroine journeys into this space, as she travels deeper into the forest, her supernatural powers are gradually revealed to her and then exercised and enjoyed. The errant journey into the forest signifies a journey into power and freedom for the heroine undergoing a beastly becoming or a beast-like becoming. This geography provides an itinerary of the heroine’s transformations, and the viewer is invited to travel that itinerary of her evolution.

Figure 5: Aerial views of the forest geography in Red Riding Hood provide the viewer with a mobile map of the enchanted forest space during the opening credits

The cartographic encounter with the fairy tale forest, both for the heroine and the viewer, is an unruly one in Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood. For Red Riding Hood, this unruliness is expressed through the forest journey. She ventures into the forest as a measure of her dissatisfaction with what everyday life has to offer, and refusing the terms it sets, she escapes into the wild. In the forest, she is able to access and express anger, violence and desire – actions and emotions ordinarily deemed taboo for the young girl to express. But rather than being punished for expressing these taboo emotions, and violating the restrictions that forbid her going into the forest, Hardwicke’s fairy tale rewards its heroine with a romantic union. Choosing a wolf as a romantic partner, and deciding to live in the wolf-inhabited woods, Valerie finds herself in a wide-open space that she can navigate as she pleases. Hardwicke’s cinematographic representation of the forest invites the viewer, too, to navigate this space in a similarly errant fashion. The viewer is presented with a map of expansive vistas and panoramas with a mobile camera, a detailed, sprawling, moving geography of the enchanted fairy tale forest. Given such mobile, extensive views, the audience is given the opportunity to visually explore and roam about this map, enacting an errant visual voyage across the image which allows for an imaginative exploration of a space defined by female mobility, agency, and liberty. The film celebrates such unruly travel, as not only a necessary act for Valerie to undertake to discover and kill the big bad wolf; it is also represented as a pleasurable journey, for she finds an independent space to inhabit and chooses the wolf lover that she wants. She has strayed from the path, and having found both agency and romance on the fringe of the forest, this Red Riding Hood stakes her claim on it as her own.

References

Bacchilega, Cristina, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997

Botting, Fred, ‘The Flight of the Heroine’. Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture. Eds. Genz, Stephanie and Brabon, Benjamin A, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007

Bruno, Giuliana, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. New York: Verso, 2002

Conley, Tom, Cartographic Cinema. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Driscoll, Catherine, Teen Film: A Critical Introduction. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2011

Genz, Stephanie, Postfemininities in Popular Culture, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009

Lutz, Deborah, The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006

Lutz, Deborah, ‘The Haunted Space of the Mind: The Revival of the Gothic Romance in the Twenty-First Century’. Empowerment Versus Oppression: Twenty-First Century Views of Popular Romance Novels. Ed. Goade, Sally, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007

Martin, Adrian, Phantasms: The Dreams and Desires at the Heart of our Popular Culture. Victoria: McPhee Gribble, 1994

Orenstein, Catherine, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale. New York: Basic Books, 2002

Short, Sue, Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006

Sweeney, Kathleen, Maiden USA: Girl Icons Come of Age. New York: Peter Lang, 2008

Turner, Victor, Process, Performance and Pilgrimage: A Study in Comparative Symbology. New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1979

Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers. London: Vintage, 1994

Wesley, Marilyn C, Secret Journeys: The Trope of Women’s Travel in American Literature, New York: State University of New York Press, 1999

Filmography

The Craft. Dir. Andrew Fleming. 1996

Ella Enchanted. Dir. Tommy O’Haver. 2004

Ginger Snaps. Dir. John Fawcett. 2000

The Hunger Games. Dir. Gary Ross. 2012

Red Riding Hood. Dir. Catherine Hardwicke. 2011

The Secret Circle. Exec Producer Andrew Miller. 2011-2012

Snow White and the Huntsman. Dir. Rupert Sanders. 2012

Twilight. Dir. Catherine Hardwicke. 2008

The Vampire Diaries. Exec. Producers Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson. 2009-

Notes