Where Are You Going Where Have You Been Short Story Theme

The story Where Are You Going Where Have You Been has similar elements to fairy tales. However critic Christina Gills says that the reader is “ forced to consider the distinctions between fairy tale and seduction narrative” (Gillis Gale). There are differences between a fairy tale and this short story. Differences include that the girl gets the prince and the villain gets either killed or locked up, and they live happily ever after. In real life this doesn't happen, the so called villain can get away and come after it's victim again. When Connie meets Arnold Friend she is not joined by “Prince Charming but with the Prince of Darkness” ( Korb Gale). This demonstrates how the story is unlike a fairy tale because instead of meeting a nice prince, she instead meets with the Prince of

In this fairy tale the main character dies and the story has the theme of betrayal. This fairy tale, is Little Red Cap. In this tale the wolf “ put[s] on [the grandmother’s] clothes, dressed himself in her cap, laid himself in bed and drew the curtains”(Grimm cs.cmu.edu). Little Red Cap goes to the house, and into her grandmother's room and “[t]here lay her grandmother with her cap pulled far over her face, and looking very strange”, but little did she know that it was not her grandmother (Grimm cs.cmu.edu). By doing this the wolf gains her trust by dressing up as someone that she trusts very much. The wolf betrays this trust by “swallow[ing] up red-cap” (Grimm cs.cmu.edu). Doing this betrays red cap’s faith in him since he dressed up as someone she trusted, and ends up eating her. Arnold Friend does something similar to Connie. He pretends to be her age and when Connie finally saw “ that he wasn't a kid, [and] he was much older” she realized that he had betrayed her by saying that he was her age because he knew that she would trust him. This is like what the wolf did to Red