Who’s Afraid of the Deep Dark Woods: Challenging traditional fictional representations of woods and the wild

Fairy tales have long positioned the wilderness as a scene of unimagined horror. Enduring tales like ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ revolve around human-wildlife encounters in the woods where the wolf is anthropomorphised and portrayed as a bad man in animal clothing. The manipulation of real entities into that which can be ‘understood’ by humans is a falsity and presents an undeniable threat to the survival of the natural world. So deep is the unreasoning, automatic fear released by the figurative wolf it will take ‘generations of informed biological reality’ to subvert it (Hollindale, 1999: 98). By which time there will only be unwooded ‘wilds’ without wolves. However, this particular tale can also be interpreted as a story of multispecies entanglement. In examining how modern adaptations of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ use various strategies to foreground different species’ voices and worldviews embedded in the tale, fairy-tale enchantment can serve as a means of critical anthropomorphism, inviting both children and adults to imagine the needs, pleasures and pains of more-than-human species without erasing their differences, and to reconfigure human-more-than-human relations in the real world.