Figure 8.1 The Girl in Red (Innocenti & Frisch, 2012).
Fractured fairy tales, graphic knowledge, and teachers’ concerns
In this chapter, I provide a feminist visual analysis of the representation of girlhood in Roberto Innocenti and Aaron Frisch’s picturebook The Girl in Red, a contemporary retelling of the “Little Red Riding Hood” tale. Throughout the illustrations, Innocenti includes violent and sexualized images that challenge mainstream ideas about picturebooks as innocent texts for young children. I argue that the use of girls and women as objects of violation is part of a larger cultural pedagogy about gender, sexuality, and violence. This analysis of image and text is complemented by responses from student teachers, who discuss the book and their concerns for using it in the classroom. I conclude that The Girl in Red offers a forum for thinking about how graphic knowledge about gender and sexuality operates, and a challenge to confront unsettling truths about how children and adults come to know about sexuality and violence.
Concerns about challenging picturebooks mark adult tolerances for, anxieties about, and investments in certain representations of childhood. Discussions about appropriateness, especially in the context of schooling, occur when writers and illustrators challenge what and when the child should know about sex and violence. These debates often ignore the varied material experiences of children, and usually attempt to collapse all childhoods into a coherent and idyllic vision of innocence.
However, it comes as no surprise to those familiar with children’s texts that sexuality and violence are the norm rather than the exception. Literary fairy tales, for instance, are replete with implicit and explicit scenes of sexuality and violence that contemporary picturebook writers and illustrators must navigate for contemporary audiences through the lens of their own conceptions of childhood.
Not originally intended for young readers, literary fairy tales were considered children’s fare by the beginning of the twentieth century. In Off with Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood, Maria Tatar (1992: 30) writes: “Using intimidation, cautionary tales persuade children to obey the laws set down by parental authority, celebrating docility and conformity while discouraging curiosity and willfulness.” Parents and caregivers hoped the brutality of the tales would control children’s behaviours. These cautionary tales sought to warn children of real dangers, but also sought to deter the young from deviating from norms. In the common cautionary tale, disobedient children, usually curious or stubborn ones, receive a severe physical punishment. Stories written to control children’s behaviour through these graphic depictions most likely produced competing interpretations. Child listeners may have revelled in the gory details of the characters’ afflictions, and as Tatar points out, the brutality of these oral fairy tales might not have necessarily frightened children.
Maurice Sendak described fairy tales as a way to tell stories through metaphor so as not to upset anyone. In a 1976 interview for Rolling Stone magazine (reprinted Cott, 2012) Sendak stated:
It’s something we’ve always known about fairy tales—they talk about incest, the Oedipus complex, about psychotic mothers, like those of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, who throw their children out. They tell things about life which children know instinctively, and the pleasure and relief lie in finding these things expressed in language that children can live with. You can’t eradicate these feelings—they exist and they’re a great source of creative inspiration.
Cott (2012: unpaginated)
As Sendak points out, fairy tales are marked by uncomfortable truths about childhood that are often cloaked in more or less child friendly ways—depending on author and audience. Most fairy tale picturebooks published and circulated within North America are sanitized versions of earlier grittier narratives in which children were routinely the subjects of abuse, abandonment, and other harm.
Tatar (1992: 5) argues that folktales had to lose their bawdy, subversive edge to be included in the official canon of children’s literature, which has “always been more interested in producing docile minds than playful bodies.” These literary tales were also edited to emphasize certain ideologies about gender. For instance, as the brothers Grimm revised their collection for a wider and younger audience, incestuous fathers were written out of tales while abusive stepmothers took centre stage, curious girls like Bluebeard’s wife or Little Red Riding Hood were punished while inquisitive or disobedient boys were rewarded for their pluck (Bottigheimer, 1987; Tatar, 1992; Zipes, 1993). Contemporary fairy tale picturebooks continue to privilege variants by Perrault and the brothers Grimm rather than other authors and in the process reaffirm normative ideas about heterosexual femininity and masculinity. Folklorist Christina Bacchilega argues that the fairy tale shares a “complicity with ‘exhausted’ narrative and gender ideologies” (1997: 50). As fairy tale scholars have pointed out (Bacchilega, 1997; Jones & Schacker, 2012; Warner, 1994; Zipes, 2012) there is also a long history of women fairy tale authors and illustrators into which contemporary picturebook creators such as Sarah Moon, Babette Cole, Ana Juan and others fit as they continue the work of subverting “exhausted” ideologies about gender. Regardless, the bulk of fairy tale picturebooks available to young readers, especially in schools, reify normative lessons about gender and sexuality.
Thus, contemporary picturebook creators face a number of interesting challenges when they decide to explicitly reference violent and sexual material in their texts. Charlotte Huck and Anita Lobel’s controversial Princess Furball, a retelling of the Grimms’ “All-Kinds of Fur” a version of Cinderella, in which a feisty heroine escapes her home after her father proposes marriage (and therefore incest) serves as a good example here. Charlotte Huck (1995) has written on the ways her concepts of childhood influenced how she told the tale and what knowledge she relayed to her audience. In Huck and Lobel’s (1989) retelling of the tale, the father promises his daughter’s hand to an ogre in exchange for fifty wagons of silver. Of her decision to replace the incestuous father with an ogre Huck (1995: 80) writes:
The decisions I faced in retelling were challenging. First of all I had to decide whether to include the incest or not. With the rise of incest in our society, one could argue that it should not be eliminated from the story. While I do believe that somewhere in the sexual education of a child, he or she should learn about incest, I do not think such information should be derived from a fairy tale! Since I had found the versions that eliminated it in the retelling, I decided not to include it.
While Huck’s verbal text replaces the incestuous father with an ogre, Lobel’s visual image explicitly references the incestuous father. Lobel does so by making the image of the ogre in a portrait match the exact image of the father. Lobel makes the incestuous themes in other less reproduced variants of the tale visible and in turn shifts the kinds of graphic knowledge available to adult and child readers.
Similarly, picturebook creators working with the “Little Red Riding Hood” tale, such as Sarah Moon (2002), Beni Montresor (1991), Marjane Leray (2013) and numerous others (see Zipes, 1993 and Beckett, 2014 for additional variants) make decisions about how and what children should learn through a picturebook. These author-illustrators have relied on a different set of metaphors that challenge familiar lessons about gender within the tale, namely a larger “cultural pedagogy tied to discourses about femininity that privilege obedience and sexual innocence” (Marshall, 2004: 264). Take, for instance, Sarah Moon’s (2002) black-and-white photograph (in her picturebook version of Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood), of empty and tussled bed sheets to symbolize sexual assault and violence. To this collection of fairy tale picturebooks that make explicit the violent and sexual material in the oral tales, American author Aaron Frisch and Italian illustrator, animator, and advertising artist, Roberto Innocenti (2012), contribute The Girl in Red. Author and illustrator make explicit the ways in which the commercialized landscape of contemporary capitalism harms and genders children (Figure 8.1).
Roberto Innocenti is a self-taught artist with a long career in children’s literature that includes illustrating a series of informational books on airplanes and trains in the late 1970s (Reit, 1978). He is perhaps best known for his controversial Holocaust picturebook Rose Blanche (Innocenti, 1985). He has also illustrated other classic fairy tales, such as the 1983 Cinderella based on Charles Perrault’s variant.
For the purposes of this chapter, I define The Girl in Red as a “fusion text.” Janet Evans defines such texts as “the evolving multifaceted and multimodal close relation of comics and graphic novels and their characteristics show a merging of features from comics and graphic novels with those from picturebooks” (2013: 239). Innocenti fuses the picturebook format with conventions of comics as he visualizes the story through a series of different sized panels. His detailed illustrations are replete with display lettering, graffiti and other symbols, gutters between panels as well as large white spaces that slow down time and invite the reader to linger at certain points in the book.
The challenge of this picturebook lies in Innocenti’s decision to include images and references to sexuality and violence. Readers familiar only with the Grimms’ variant in which a huntsman saves an innocent young girl, will find Frisch and Innocenti’s reference to other variants in which predatory men/wolves eat and metaphorically violate Little Red surprising. Indeed, as Sandra Beckett (2014: 5) rightly points out: “Charles Perrault penned the first literary version of the tale to warn girls and women against predatory males. Today ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ can be seen as the archetypal tale of child abuse and rape.” The Girl in Red explicitly addresses sexual violation through its visual references to hyper-sexualized women and girls.
The Girl in Red begins in a bleak post-apocalyptic classroom or a day care facility before the title page. The first panel reads: “Draw close, children, and I will weave you a tale.” The next, “Toys can be fun. But a good story is magic. And there is no better time for one than when rain is tapping at your window” (Innocenti, 2012: unpaginated). The colour gray dominates the initial image of a group of children gathered around a large brown table.
About the use of colour in picturebooks, Perry Nodelman (1988: 61) writes: “Gray, the color we attach to characterless people, often suggests bleakness, lack of intensity, a cool detachment.” In The Girl in Red Innocenti uses gray to depict a cheerless atmosphere as children sit around a big brown table and are dressed in a range of muted colours that feature representations of corporate logos. Books, wooden toys, spinning tops, horns that symbolize childhood innocence are juxtaposed with children’s toys that signal violence, such as a toy soldier with a machete (Figure 8.2). A deflated Punch-like character hangs out of the puppet theatre and the violence associated with this character, known for beating his wife and child, parallels the violence of the narrative.
Clad in glasses and a blue headscarf, an old woman sits on a table knitting a yellow and orange scarf. A glowing light emanates from her skirt. This is a twenty-first century Mother Goose, who is coolly detached from the children that surround her. The first narration box reads: “Draw close, children, and I will weave you a tale.” The big brown table at which the children sit implies security. However, chaos reigns underneath as a train track goes only half way around the table. A scantily clad doll lies on the tracks—in direct line of the oncoming train. Commercially produced toys as well as the violence of children’s play define the visual representation of childhood, suggesting that innocence and childhood are, at best, precariously fused together.
This instability is further emphasized as the reader turns to a page that reads: “Know this, though children: stories are like the skies. They can change, bring surprises, catch you without a coat. Look up all you want, but you never really know what’s coming” (Innocenti, 2012: unpaginated). The story to be told—a fairy tale—transcends time and location, and the gap between the story frame and the beginning of Sophia’s adventure allows the reader to adjust that time, to delay or return to the contained space of childhood, however bleak.
In The Girl in Red the heroine is a prepubescent girl named Sophia, who lives in a high-rise building with her single mother and her little sister. Dressed in red, Sophia leaves the house to take biscuits, honey, and oranges to her sick nana on the other side of the forest. Her mother tells her to “Stay on the main trail all the way.” The text assures the reader that while the walk will be a long one; “Sophia is a good girl.”
Innocenti replaces the fairy tale forest with a contemporary cityscape. An anonymous reviewer for Publishers Weekly suggests that The Girl in Red reflects, “the bleak commercial dystopia of Blade Runner” (Publishers Weekly, 2012: unpaginated). Indeed, the landscape that surrounds Sophia is packed full of global corporate advertisements, people, cars, and inanimate objects, such as garbage, that crowd the city streets as well as the mall through which Sophia will travel.
As Sophia begins her journey, street signs point in the direction of “Il Bosco” or “The Wood”—a shopping mall. One half of one page includes a small gray narration box that takes up the top quarter of the panel. The rest of the page is white space and invites the reader to slow down, and to look closely to find Sophia in the chaotic and commodified landscape. As she travels, Sophia is often lost to the viewer in the vast and busy landscape creating a “Where’s Waldo” kind of effect. A full colour panel takes up the remaining one and a half pages. The street sign for Il Bosco points to the right while a green arrow directs drivers (and the reader) to the left. Two circular road signs with a white line through them signifying “wrong way,” alert the reader that Sophia chose the wrong path and missed the signs that tell her which way to go.
This dystopian cityscape and the advertisements that surround her foreshadow a violent encounter with the hunter/wolf. Specifically, images of sharp teeth appear on the front of cars; in the mouth of a male driver; in the form of a dog’s predatory growl; and as the doorway to a boutique, suggesting sexual appetite and danger. These visual cues also underscore Sophia’s naïveté and her inability to interpret the landscape and signs of danger that surrounds her.
Innocenti’s images capture what Brian McNair (2002), Feona Attwood (2009) and others define as an expanding “pornosphere” or “striptease culture” (McNair, 2002: 81) that infiltrates public life. Innocenti uses this visual language of contemporary advertising and its reliance on soft-core heteroporn in the streetscape through which Sophia travels. For instance, on one page a woman gazes directly at the viewer, her mouth and nose cut off by a black lace fan; a woman’s mouth, with glossy red lipstick speaks into a phone; behind some scaffolding a circular blue street sign with a white arrow points at a woman’s bottom in tight jeans wearing thong underwear. The Girl in Red, however, is more “porno chic” (McNair, 2002) than actual porn as no one engages in any sex acts, unlike more explicit versions as noted by Orenstein (2002).
Sophia heads to The Wood, a mall. In neon lights the words lingerie and toys appear on the façade of the building to further emphasize the slippage between adult and child. The fairy tale picturebook format, a genre generally associated with childhood, is consistently ruptured by images of hyper-sexualized girl dolls and by representations of adult women who appear in images of advertisements as fragmented body parts, including lips, legs, breasts, and buttocks. Feminist media scholar, Rosalind Gill (2007: 80) writes that these fragmented representations, “deny women’s humanity, to present them not as whole people but as fetishized, dismembered ‘bits’.” In the context of The Girl in Red, the images of the dismembered parts of women’s bodies foreshadow the wolf’s desire to devour Sophia into bits and pieces.
Unlike more risqué versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” (see Beckett, 2014; Orenstein, 2002; Zipes, 1993), Sophia remains fully dressed in this picturebook variant. However, in the visual images Innocenti consistently invites the reader to imagine Sophia as a sexualized object as he makes visual links between Sophia and the adult women that surround her. Sophia wears a red coat, black leggings and pink shoes. The colour red is often associated with visual codes of pornography. As Leena-Maija Rossi (2007: 134) argues, “The red background of the images constituted, together with the black underwear, a color combination which media imageries have taught us to associate with environments of sexual consumption: brothels and striptease-joints, or more mundane but ‘naughty’ bedroom scenes.” Numerous references to these media imageries appear throughout the book and link adult women to the child Sophia. For example, in the mall the woman, dressed in red and wearing a black garter, advertises a lottery, and in the visual economy of the streetscape, Sophia’s red jacket serves as a sign that she is available for consumption.
Innocenti borrows a familiar visual tactic used in advertising in which adult women are made childlike and girls made to look like sexualized adults. Women are infantilized through childlike poses and young girls made more mature through sexualized images across the seemingly disparate visual cultures of advertising and children’s picturebooks. Here the images that children and adults see every day on the street, on subways, in magazines and newspapers, and on television seem incongruous and controversial in a children’s picturebook.
Sophia loses her way when she stops to window shop at her favourite place, the “window of wonders.” Through the glass, Sophia window shops and looks longingly at a set of gendered toys, such as ballerinas, sexy dolls, guns, and hyper-masculine action figures. The text reads, “Sophia stops and gets to dreaming. Before her are monsters, princesses, dark fates, and happily-every-afters. Images of the past and of the future” (Innocenti, 2012: unpaginated). Sophia’s desire for commodities derails her; and, after she stops to act on her own longing, she gets lost. Sophia takes a wrong exit out of The Wood and finds herself trapped in an alley surrounded by a gang of adolescent men on motorbikes. Horizontal lines hold Sophia in as the bricks press against her back, and barbed wire prevents an escape over the wall. “A smiling hunter” saves her (Figure 8.3) (Plate 27); the text reads, “What big teeth he has. Dark and strong and perfect in his timing. Sophia tells him of her grandmother and her little home. Of the biscuits and honey” (Innocenti, 2012: unpaginated).
The hunter offers Sophia a ride on his motorcycle. He only takes her part of the way, and the reader supposes that he is heading to Nana’s house. Sophia makes a solitary and final approach to Nana’s trailer on the outskirts of the forest. A cloudy sky and a stack of old tyres frame the background. The next panel references the opening classroom scene as gray colours predominate again and lightning punctuates the sky as the hunter/wolf enters Nana’s house. The reader sees the hunter’s motorbike and his coat as he slips into the trailer. Sophia arrives, her back on the viewer and calls out to her nana; we cannot see her reaction. The viewer—adult and child—can only imagine her confusion, fear, and possible desire (Figure 8.4).
We don’t see Sophia’s sexual violation and/or her murder as it happens in the gutter between panels and the reader must draw on a larger repertoire of graphic knowledge about girls’ bodies, public spaces, and sexual vulnerability, to imagine it (Marshall & Gilmore, 2015). The next two pages show the mother waiting for Sophia and the hunter now fully transformed into a wolf leaving the trailer.
The Girl in Red honours the multiple versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” and readers will find two different endings. The first uses Charles Perrault’s (1697) variant in which the wolf gobbles up grandmother and Little Red. The second ending retells the familiar variant by the brothers Grimm in which a woodsman saves Little Red and her grandmother. Innocenti envisions a “choose-your-own” adventure ending, complete with reporters, spotlights, and helicopters.
The Girl in Red received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and Hornbook, and predominately positive reviews in Kirkus Reviews and School Library Journal. Vicky Smith (2012: 279) writing for KirkusReviews suggests that, “Children, and perhaps even teens, might find this tale much to their liking; some, however, might find its darkness a little too unmitigated, despite the closing sign that says ‘Happy End.’” In School Library Journal, Wendy Lukehart (2013:106) writes that, “By removing the filter of folklore and pulling the archetypal dangers into the present without a sense of safety anywhere, author and illustrator have created a profoundly unsettling narrative.” Critics differ on the age of the audience for the book and their recommendations. For instance,Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly suggest age 8 and up while School Library Journal advocates for age 13 and up. Given that adults, such as these reviewers, rather than children, define appropriate content in schools, it is interesting to consider the ways in which teachers respond to the book as a way to begin to understand the mechanisms through which the myth of childhood, as a protracted and protected state of innocence, becomes reaffirmed.
Teachers are one of the primary markets and audiences for children’s literature, and educators are on the front line of advocating for the use of children’s literature in the classroom. Numerous education scholars have documented teachers’ self-censorship in relation to using controversial texts in the classroom (Freedman & Johnson, 2001; Noll, 1994; Voelker, 2013; Wollman-Bonilla, 1998). As these authors point out, the stakes of selecting and teaching challenging picturebooks are high as educators confront the possibility of controversy within and outside of the classroom (Voelker, 2013).
Given this, it is no surprise that less controversial or challenging fairy tale picturebooks are regularly included as part of the North American language arts curriculum. These sanitized variants are not neutral. The use of any children’s literature in the classroom underscores a particular politics, whether intentional or not, and it is important for educators to critically examine the stories they share (or are mandated to teach) in schools.
Curious about how and when educators decide to use a challenging picturebook in the classroom, I decided to introduce The Girl in Red to my pre-service teacher education course on children’s literature and critical literacies. This class met eight hours a week for six weeks. The thirty-one students (all female with the exception of one male student) enrolled in the course were in the last semester of a teacher education program and had completed a classroom practice in order to teach children aged 5 to 12. To encourage pre-service teachers to think critically about language arts instruction, the course had an explicit critical literacy orientation and students were asked to consider children’s literature and literacy through this lens (Christensen, 2009; Comber, 2001; Janks, 2014; Leland, Lewison & Harste, 2013; Lewison, Leland & Harste, 2010; Luke & Freebody, 1997; Marshall & Sensoy, 2011; Vasquez, 2005, 2010).
For a module on children’s literature and censorship in classrooms, the class read chapter nine, “Challenging the Challengers” in Teaching Children’s Literature: It’s Critical! (Leland et al., 2013). When the class met for this session, I read The Girl in Red to the whole group and projected the images on a large screen so that the students could offer critical responses to the text. Of particular interest to the class were the scenes where Sophia travels through the vast, pornified landscape of The Wood. Students commented on the hyper-sexualization of girls and women as well as the class dynamics in the images. We addressed critical literacy questions, such as “who is missing?”
Given that thirty of the thirty-one students in the room were women, it seemed important to analyse the visual representations of femininity in the text, and so I also added a theoretical perspective drawn from feminist media studies to ask additional questions. As a whole group we did a feminist visual analysis of The Girlin Red to discuss the graphic knowledge about gender, especially girlhood, embedded in the text and images. Sample questions included:
This allowed for feminist analyses, such as the representation of young girls as women and women as young girls; the narrative of young girls as being at risk in public spaces; and female bodies as objects or commodities of consumption.
After discussing the book, I asked students to respond to the following prompt, “I would or would not teach this book in my classroom because …”.
I read their responses several times for themes and contradictions. All thirty-one students said that they would not share the book in a primary setting (ages 5 to 8), three wrote that they thought the book might be used with 9 and 10-year-olds, and, twenty-four suggested 11 to 12-year-olds as the audience for the book because this age group would best understand the mature issues in The Girl in Red. The following student example captures this theme:
I believe that children should engage in critical thinking when reading a book, but this book is not suitable and appropriate for discussions with young children. The hidden messages require a more mature audience in order to have a meaningful discussion.
Four students unequivocally stated that they would not use the book in any classroom. Not surprisingly, these students were concerned about sharing the sexualized and violent material in the book in a public school setting. One student wrote:
I would not show this book to a class. I do not think children need to see those dark images. Children should not have to be forced to read or look at it. They could get it on their own if they wanted to but they do not need me to show it to them. I was personally disturbed by the images being so dark and having so many creepy images that I would not want to see it again or show it to a class.
What is striking here is not so much the student’s contention that she didn’t want to expose children to these images, but that she herself was traumatized by the content of the book. Her tolerance for such material as an adult reader limits her ability to see The Girl in Redas a possible text to use in the classroom. However, her response also serves as a reminder to teacher educators to consider how challenging picturebooks books might trigger intense emotional responses and/or memories in adults. Another student stated:
I want to teach primary grades and could not see this book being read to children due to the images that are used. They could be scary for children aged 5-7 and may be a little confused with the alternate ending. I am also aware of the advertising, sexualizing women and ideas given from the images. I wouldn’t want young children picking up on that.
This prospective teacher assumes that the child is unsullied by popular culture and must be protected as long as possible from images of sexuality. At the same time, the child is highly susceptible to the sexualized images in the book. Another student reiterates the concern about children being exposed to sexualized material:
I would not use this book in elementary school or maybe I would use certain pages of it but I don’t think some of the images are appropriate such as the prostitutes on the last page.
It is important to note that there are no prostitutes on the last page of the book; rather, female news reporters in tight clothes. Definitions of what is appropriate or inappropriate are intimately tied to the student’s own discomfort with Innocenti’s images, as the idea of childhood, as she conceives it, clashes with the realities of violence and sexuality. Innocenti and Frisch use a familiar fairy tale to make the point that these hyper-sexualized images are now the norm, that children grow up with these images all around them. As the illustrations in The Girl in Red make clear, children come to know about violence and sexuality outside of the school and outside of textual encounters.
At least two students admitted to a fear of using controversial books in the classroom. One student wrote:
I would not use this because it has a lot of different issues that are not appropriate for children and it sexualizes young girls... As a new teacher I think it might be more difficult for me to use this in a classroom because I don’t yet have experience with teaching controversial topics.
And another:
As a new teacher, I don’t feel secure enough in my qualifications and my position in school districts to bring this book in at present but it is something I would work towards and perhaps with other pieces of literature first.
These two future teachers speak honestly about the dangers of using challenging books in the classroom. Like the heroine of “Little Red Riding Hood” it is safer for teachers to stick to the path of mandated curriculum.
I had envisioned using The Girl in Red in our class session as just one of many activities in the class. However, I was surprised to find that it served as a pivotal moment for some of the students in their ideas about using a critical approach to teaching language arts through children’s literature.
At the end of the six-week course in which countless children’s picturebooks were read and introduced, I asked students to write a brief one to two-page summary about any aspect of the class. Nine students returned to Innocenti’s book as a salient moment in the course. One student wrote:
Thinking back to the book that was a modern day version of Little Red Riding Hood. I originally said I would not bring that book into my classroom as I felt it was not appropriate for the classroom. It seemed to portray some negative images throughout and didn’t seem good for a school setting... I think it had more to offer than I first thought and could be taken a number of directions within the classroom. This was one of the turns in my thinking about language arts. Not being afraid to take risks is something that I want to be comfortable doing.
Another student pointed out that although she was aware that sensitive social issues, even those that students’ experience, have a place in the classroom, she was still hesitant to bring a text like The Girl in Red into the classroom. She wrote:
In my practicum, I was hesitant to address sensitive social issues when picture books brought them up in class even though I knew they were present in children’s lives. Our class discussion on Innocenti’s Girl In Red, was a powerful moment for me as it demonstrated just how prevalent these issues are in children’s lives as they are exposed to them through books, television, music, toys, and social interactions.
A different student reflected:
The read-aloud of “The Girl in Red” was an interesting way to have us discuss as a class reasons for bringing in controversial literature to the classroom. At first I was so certain I would never introduce a book like that to my class but after the discussion I reflected on some of the reasoning that other students had and I began to think about where there is a place for controversial literature in classes.
Others remained fearful of using the book in the classroom. One student wrote:
Although I would like to one day read controversial books like this in my classroom, I still have questions around how to discuss this book with concerned parents, and at what grade level would this book be appropriate to read for.
Finally, at least one student actively took up the critical literacy perspective and found the book to be an important “counter narrative.” She wrote in her reflection:
We were introduced to the book The Girl in Red. This story was inspiring to me in its ability to provide a completely different perspective to the traditional “Little Red Riding Hood.” As a result, as an educator I saw this book as an incredible counter narrative that allowed the reader to critically analyze deeper issues.
This student was on her way to using controversial children’s literature in the classroom and by the end of the term had bought copies of several provocative picturebooks for her classroom collection, including The Girl in Red (Innocenti, 2012), 10,000 Dresses (Ewart, 2008), This Land is My Land (Littlechild, 1997), and Duck, Death and the Tulip (Erlbruch, 2011).
In summary, The Girl in Red proved to be an important text to use with aspiring teachers to surface their assumptions about childhood. Controversial and challenging picturebooks like this one confound simple categorizations of child or adult audience. This picturebook challenged the viewers in my course because it breached their assumptions about children’s picturebooks as sites of innocence, and children as in need of adult protection.
It is adults that wish to protect children through proxies, such as the wolf. How children might respond to The Girl in Red will depend on their own tolerances, memories, and experiences. Similarly, we know from research on response that children will bring varied responses and commentaries to the book.1As scholars, such as Bragg and Buckingham (2009) point out, children are not likely to be fixated on or harmed by the suggestive images in the book. For me, the more essential issue here is access to the book and the ideas about the child that drive whether or not an adult shares this book with children. These responses suggest we ask critical questions about the assumptions teachers make about children, such as “How do educators define ‘the child’ and childhood?”
To add another layer to this analysis, even as The Girl in Red attempts to raise awareness about the sexualization and commercialization of childhood, the story is ultimately a traditional retelling “tied to a didactic tradition that seeks to school young readers into appropriate masculine and feminine behaviours” (Marshall, 2004: 269). The visual/verbal representation of Sophia draws on a long tradition of presenting young girls as naïve victims (Walkerdine, 1997). As Jack Zipes (1993: 10) suggests, “Whether sexed or sanitized object, Red Riding Hood is compelled to assume responsibility for the ‘predatory acts’ of her creators themselves and the assortment of wolves created in illustrations and narratives that are only too willing to eat her.” In this case, The Girl in Red offers provocative visual/verbal retelling and at the same time carries with it normative ideas about gender and sexuality. Readers, too, often resist our attempts to use picturebooks to intervene in discussions about social issues and/or our efforts to make texts “critical.” As researchers have demonstrated (Davies, 1989; Marshall, 2009; Trousdale & McMillan, 2003) adults and children alike often revise a text’s message to fit their own ideas about the world.
The Girl in Red challenges adult conceptions about childhood through its use of sexualized imagery and violent scenes only to reassert the figure of an innocent female victim. This innocent and unknowing child—like Sophia herself—mirrors the imaginary child at the centre of the school curriculum in ways that seek to protect rather than empower, to discipline girls’ desires rather than support them. The Girl in Red offers a forum for thinking about how graphic knowledge about gender and sexuality operates, and a challenge to confront unsettling truths about how children and adults come to know about sexuality and violence.
1 My own informal reading of The Girl in Red with a few 7- to 8-year-olds supports this contention. The children I read with noted that some of the images were “inappropriate” and this response could well reflect a performance of the kind of reading that the child thought was expected when reading such material with an adult. However, the children found other aspects of the illustrations much more intriguing. For instance, one child found it funny that Santa Claus was visually portrayed as a thief. On the full-page spread of The Wood, a man dressed as Santa Claus slinks through the mall, wearing dark sunglasses and clutching a bag. In short, younger children have no problem with Santa Claus wearing sunglasses and carrying a bag.
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