‘Red Riding Hood’

European folk tale about a little girl who takes cakes to her sick grandmother's remote cottage. A wolf eats the grandmother and impersonates her, intending to eat Red Riding Hood as well. In Charles Perrault's version of 1697, the story concludes with the wolf devouring the child, but the Grimm brothers' Little Red Cap is rescued. The primitive themes in this tale have been well explored by psychoanalytic theory, as in US child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment (1976).