The
Little Girl and the Wolf
 The
short story “The Little Girl and the Wolf” by James Thurber is an altered and
shortened version of the original story "Little Red Riding Hood".
On her way to her grandmother’s house a little girl, carrying some food, comes past a
wolf who has been waiting for someone young to cross his way. As the wolf asks the way to
the grandmother’s house, the girl tells him; but when she enters the house, she is
surprised by the wolf lying in the grandmother’s bed, wearing her nightgown. Finally
she takes a pistol and shoots the wolf dead. The moral of the story is: “It is not so
easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.”
This piece of work is a fable, since one of the characters is an animal that is being able
to speak and think as humans do. Another hint to this is the significantly short text and
the moral at the very end, which expresses the message. The text seems quite neutral and
meaningless at first glance, but reading between the lines brings up the presented
problem.
The first aspect to look at is the two characters; they stand for certain groups in
society. The wolf is someone cunning. He totally exploits the naivety of the little girl
by asking where the grandmother’s house is. His questions are very direct; he can
only get away with this, because he knows the girl will not notice his intention. So one
can tell that the wolf represents someone in society, no matter whether a party or a
single person, who knows about the weakness of others and tries to fool them with
deceitful actions.
The little girl, on the other hand, firstly seems the naive one, because she talks to the
wolf who is a stranger to her, and even tells him what she is doing with her basket and
where she is going. This proves the young age of the girl, since older people
wouldn’t behave like her.
In the second paragraph, though, she immediately notices that something is wrong with the
person in her grandma’s bed. The fact that she carries a gun in her basket is
consistent with my original assumption that the she is very young. But maybe Thurber let
an automatic appear in this story to put emphasis on the fact that the girl is able to
defend herself. She seems to have changed, from a little girl to a confident person. I
think she represents people in society who don’t let others fool them and cheat on
them. At the beginning of the story she might not have noticed the wolf’s aim, and so
the wolf was sure his plan would work. But the girl is clever enough to recognise him in
the end and take revenge or rather just defend herself. This can also be transferred to
humans in general. There are some people who fall into the trap of others, and there are
some who do not because they know how to combat it. According to James Thurber, there are
more “little girls” today who know the tricks of deceitful persons and are able
to protect themselves from them. He basically says that society has become more suspicious
and that it’s not that easy any more to fool somebody.
I personally quite like the story, because the message of it is true in my opinion. Some
time ago it was much easier to get away with treating other people badly than it is now.
Even though the fable is very short, one can actually interpret quite a lot. Thurber is a
good writer and he gets through to the reader. His easy language makes it appealing to
read and it is interesting thinking about the different possible meanings of his words. (M.M.
11c, June 2009)
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