Research Information System
Folklor/Edebiyat, vol.31, no.122, pp.567-592, 2025 (ESCI)
Fairy tales arose from the desire to explain the world and convey moral lessons, and were used to encourage members of a culture to follow certain paths, to conform to social roles, and to uphold the norm. This is most often seen in growing-up stories written to provide wisdom and guidance to the younger generation. The fixation of cultural female identity in a particular rhetorical position in these ‘young girl’ tales, based on the dominance of patriarchal societies, has been subject to criticism in the 20th century. One of these, is the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood. This tale has long been recognised as a parable of rape in which Little Red Riding Hood is held responsible for her own sacrifice. The reading of Little Red Riding Hood as a ‘voluntary victim’ dates back to Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, the literary versions of the tale. Since the 1970s, many feminist writers have embraced the retelling of Little Red Riding Hood and attempted to rescue it from patriarchal cultural messages that deny the importance of the female quest. Thus, literary and cinematic discourse on Little Red Riding Hood has rewritten her fate. David Slade’s 2005 film Hard Candy introduced the character of Hayley as the ultimate avenger of all the red riding hoods sacrificed for centuries. Although critics and scholars immediately recognise the visual references between Little Red Riding Hood and Hard Candy, they have neglected to look beyond this. In this article, drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Hard Candy, which reverses the patriarchal narrative of the classic fairy tale, is read as a feminist rewriting; it is argued that fairy tales are also linked to the culture that produces, rewrites or adapts them, reflecting the particular set of values and norms of a given period and culture. It has been determined that the film conveys new messages to break the accepted orthodoxies about paedophilia and subverts the subject positions in the narrative structure of the classic fairy tale for the rewriting of female identity. As a result of this study, which reads the ideological contexts of fairy tales as manifestations of the collective unconscious, it has been determined that the endless repetition of Little Red Riding Hood, which does not stop writing itself with new narratives, is equivalent to what is called the return of the repressed by becoming a social symptom.