Riding the Red Essay examples -- Literary Analysis, Nalo Hopkinson

â€Å"I've told her and I've told her: daughter, you have to teach that child the facts of life before it's too late† (Hopkinson 1). These are the first three lines of Nalo Hopkinson's short story â€Å"Riding the Red†, a modern adaptation of Charles Perrault's â€Å"Little Red Riding Hood†. In his fairy tale Perrault prevents girls from men's nature. In Hopkinson's adaptation, the goal remains the same: through the grandmother biographic narration, the author elaborates a slightly revisited plot without altering the moral: young girls should beware of men; especially when they seem innocent. This modern fairy tale contains diverse characters but none of them are as important as the grandmother. In fact, through her narration the reader gets the basic information concerning the familial context. The story revolves around a grandmother, a mother and a granddaughter, which thus sets the point of view of the story, the grandmother is the narrator therefore the reader gets her perception. Besides the domestic context, the lack of other contextual clues, such as the time or the location of the story, gives room to her story and her final purpose: teaching and, at the same time, protecting her grand-daughter from risks represented by men here symbolized by a wolf. The way this unnamed grandmother reveals her life exemplifies two properties of fairy tale as mentioned by Marina Warner in â€Å"The Old Wives' Tale†: â€Å"Fairy tales exchange knowledge [using morals] between an older [most of the time feminine] voice of experience and a younger audience† (314). As s uggested in the text, fairy tales are a way to teach insights of life through simple stories directed to, most of the time, younger generations. Most of the time because fairy tales' moral work on dif... ...nt approach as â€Å"fairy tale was property and could be taken by its owner and read by its owner at his or her leisure for escape, consolation, or inspiration.† (Zipes 1999, 338). Hopkinson uses the narrator to spread a moral similar to Perrault's three hundreds year ago. Girls, especially when young and inexperienced, need to be careful when encountering nice and charming men due to its risk to ends in a completely undesirable situation. This is when the grandmother intervenes, she tries to complete her granddaughter's education by notifying her on that special affair and which will provides her advices to avoid the same experience. Indeed, fairy tale has an educational mission in addition of its entertainment. Hopkinson provides a moral to the reader through a modern and revisited tale, maybe more adapted to nowadays reader but without weakening its quintessence.