Little Red Riding Hood And Beauty And The Beast In The Handmaid's Tale

1058 Words5 Pages
Fairy tales have been told for centuries and have been used to portray the conflict of sexual politics over time. Little Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast are both examples of fairy tales with this focus. Making use of this conflict in The Handmaid 's Tale, Margaret Atwood has used certain elements of fairy tale genre to have the opposite effect of the stereotypical ‘happy ever after’ as the novel plays in a dystopian world. More specifically, the author has borrowed elements of fairy tales to develop the theme of shifting power in The Handmaid’s Tale. In the novel the author uses the elements of good and evil from fairy tales to have an opposite effect in the novel. In Little Red Riding Hood the reader can see that the girl plays the good character as she wants to help her sick grandmother. The wolf is seen as the evil character as he wants to destroy the girl and the grandmother. Little Red Riding Hood gains power over the wolf with help of the hunter, due to that she defeats the wolf alone “Red Riding Hood, however, quickly fetched great stones with which they filled the wolf 's belly, … , but the stones were so heavy that he collapsed at once, and fell dead”. This is a similar case for Beauty and the Beast. Beauty embodies the good and the Beast the evil as she helps the Beast to become a better person. She does this by using her power of kindness and tells the Beast that he should not see him as a horrible person "there are many that deserve that name more