The story of Little Red Riding Hood is easy to arouse the sympathy of the reader. The first thing that needs to be said about the background of the story that is easily overlooked: Little Red Riding Hood goes to visit her grandmother alone, why does she go alone and where are her parents? When you think about it, you will find a surprising fact, that is, her parents may no longer be alive, or abandoned her, otherwise we can not understand how they can allow a child to risk doing such a thing alone.

In addition is the size difference between Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, the wolf is a very aggressive animal, as a small child with almost no ability to resist.

In such a premise, the wolf does not take a direct attack on Little Red Riding Hood – this is the cruelest part of the story: it maximizes its own interests through deception, and also destroys the only good things in the story (Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother and the affection between them). The reader can only feel powerless anger from the beginning to the end.

When reading The Tale of the Tiger Woman, the reader will experience the feelings of sympathy, empathy, repulsion, and confusion. The repulsion will affect the reader due to the girl realizing that her brother was killed and eaten by the tiger woman when the tiger woman gave her a snack “but in fact it was a human finger, cold and clammy” (CFT 27) and when the girl noticed that what “she thought was a rope was a long intestine” (CBT 27). The reader feels sympathy/empathy for the girl due to the situation she is in as well as the fact that her brother has just died. The feeling of confusion will come from the fact that when the girl gets in a tree to try and escape the tiger woman and instead of the tiger woman going up the tree herself, the tiger woman leaves to get other tigers to do it for her which allows the girl to escape. The question in many readers’ minds might be like that of my own; “If the tiger woman is actually a tiger, why did she not go up the tree herself?”

When picking apart Perrault’s Little Red Ridding Hood, I mostly feel a sense of pity, rather than sympathy or empathy, surrounding his main character. The LRRH here is just so one dimensional, so paper thin, that her lack of depth makes it easy to blow away any sort of complex emotional connection with her. She is defined by appearance; she is named after clothes she didn’t pick out and her short build (which is very rude), and is “the prettiest you can imagine”. She is the walking stereotype of pretty and stupid, as all of her actions makes me think oh you “poor child” (CFT 16). 

The wolf is a little more complex, only because he is defined not by appearance but rather action. He is given the appearance “big” which conveys a dominating figure and tone, but also is rounded out through instinct, haven “eaten nothing in the last three days”, and is clever (though I would argue that he doesn’t need to try that hard) (CFT 17). He could be seen as the main character, as he is certainly has more of a presence than the girl, and perhaps not even as the villain, if you play the wild predator instinct card.