I also chose to look at Roald Dahl’s poem “Little Red Riding Hood and The Wolf.” However, I believe that the audience Dahl intended for this poem is an adult. It is clearly a satire of the original tale of Little Red Riding Hood and much different from the Grimm’s version or other typical nursery tale forms of the story. He intended for this poem to be a joke although they did end up being published in the 1980s in a book called Revolting Rhymes. The fact that it was originally made as a joke further explains its intention to amuse adults rather than children. An adult reading this poem and observing Little Red Riding Hood take a gun out of her pants and then shooting the wolf while proceeding to wear his fur as a coat would most likely laugh. However a child might be horrified at such a story.
I think that Dahl most likely made this poem to amuse his friends who perhaps often read sugar-coated versions of fairy tales to their children. By the 1980’s most fairy tales were pretty tame and aimed at teaching children a lesson without subjecting them to large amounts of violence. It is doubtful that a story made for children at this period of time would include Little Red Riding Hood pulling out a pistol.
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I think it is possible that Dahl intended the audience to be both adults and children. You bring up a good point about adults laughing at Red pulling a gun out of her pants and then turning the wolf into a coat. But remember, this was published in the 1980s. The children at the time are the end of Generation X/The MTV generation, who experience neither emotional highs nor lows and are much more desensitized to violence than preceding generations. I think it would be easy to argue that Dahl wrote this for humor and not to teach children a lesson, so he might have been less concerned with its ending being "appropriate" for children.
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ReplyDeleteJust because Dahl's version contains violence (ie: LRRH pulling a gun out of her pants to kill the wolf), does not necessarily mean that they are not meant for children. As young adults who come from a generation highly geared towards digital games, particularly video games, we know that it is not uncommon that these games contain violence. In fact, a large percentage of video games are highly violent, intending for characters to kill one another. Dahl's poem could just have been a predecessor to the violence that is now apart of childrens, adolescents, and teenagers lives .
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