Do you know "Little Red Riding Hood"?
Well, ultimately, maybe not!
Originally, it was an initiatory story transmitted by women, quite different from the version written down in the 17th century by Charles Perrault.
In the original story, a young woman is encouraged to leave home by her mother, symbolically, because she has grown into an adult and can live her own life.
When she arrives at her grandmother's, the wolf has devoured her.
She goes into bed not realizing that the old lady is actually the wolf in disguise and doesn't realize the danger until too late.
She then claims an urgent need.
The wolf agrees to let her go out to relieve herself, but ties her up so she can't run away.
The young woman takes the opportunity to free herself and escape.
This story was intended to warn young women and encourage them to find solutions on their own in the face of male predation.
We are far from the tale reinvented by Charles Perrault, which describes a naïve and disobedient child, well punished for having strayed from the right path.
As for the Brothers Grimm, who take up this text again later, they add the character of the hunter-liberator who finally saves the grandmother and the child by opening the belly of the wolf.
Les Précieuses, one of the first feminist movements
Jennifer Tamas sifts through other classic texts and deciphers them, recounting the context of the writing, the era, the underlying message and the intention of the authors who signed them.
She also returns to the Precious, a literary and intellectual movement of the seventeenth century, far from the "ridiculous" described by Molière.
At a time when women were objects of economic and/or political transaction through marriage, men and women of letters, intellectuals or members of the aristocracy set up the rules of gallantry, intended protect women from male violence.
It is in fact one of the very first feminist movements, light years away from the meaning it has today.
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