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).