I think Rob and Miranda have done a good job of defending the idea of reworking, but to come to the defence of Carter, in the first instance if her “abuse” is consensual then it’s not really abuse, it’s consensual sexual relations, which I think everyone is (or should be) fine with. The counter-argument is of course that LRRH is normally presented as being a child, or underage, but in the case of both Carter’s versions that more strictly adhere to the traditional story, she’s presented as virginal but adult. There’s increasingly a dichotomy between Red Riding Hood and her Little sister.

“Wolf Alice” does deal with a younger girl, but it’s a very complex story that’s only very loosely based on Red Riding Hood (or Alice Through The Looking Glass, for that matter) at all. Nevertheless, I feel that Carter does deal with the issues sensitively and appropriately, and uses the vampire/werewolf dichotomy quite well to create a vision of two kinds of sexuality.

There’s no getting around the fact that there’s a lot of sex in Carter’s versions. But as I tried to say in my last paragraph, without being built around the notion of “adult” versions of traditional fairy stories, these aren’t stories for kids. That’s not because of the sex but rather because of the complexity, which requires a level of maturity to properly appreciate, in my opinion. It’s great that it’s a book still being taught to A Level students, as they’re the sort who will have both the maturity to appreciate the layered meanings and linguistic subtlety, and the youth to appreciate the message.

Yes, I think the whole point about fairy tales is that they can take a whole lot of spinning and respinning, interpreting and reinterpreting. I’d not actually considered the mother-maiden-crone motif! I like that.

It is not entirely fair, I think, to cast RRH as either a character who has things happen to her or as a survivor of abuse.
In the earliest surviving versions of the tale there was no woodsman, she escaped by her own cunning, using trickery to get past the big bad wolf and back on the path of life. These, and related variants make it not a cautionary tale of “don’t go into the dark; bestial masculinity will have you,” and more a tale of adolesence. The mother sends the maiden into the woods of uncertainty to meet the crone. On the way she confronts sexuality and overcomes it by escaping the wolf. Arguably the earliest forms of the LRRH tale are coming of age stories.

Long story short: if there’s anything I dislike more that woodcutters rescuing LRRH, it’s anything that implies her abuse was consensual.