ABSTRACT
Why is it that in discussing transvestism in literature and culture we seem to have run into Red Riding Hood and the wolf at every turn? In Richard Wright’s “Man of All Work,” for example, we saw that the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” was explicitly invoked by the innocent Lily Fairchild as she plies the cross-dressed “maid” Carl Owens with the tale’s traditional catechism: “your arms are so big”; “and there’s so much hair on them”; “your voice is heavy, like a man’s”; “your face is rough,” and so on. “Mama, does Lucy know about Little Red Riding Hood,” Lily asks her mother, and Carl (dressed as “Lucy”) answers, truthfully, “Miss Lily, I know all about her.” Djuna Barnes, describing the moment when Nora Flood finds Doctor O’Connor in his nightgown, wig, and rouge, evokes the tale of Red Riding Hood as a subtext-on-the-surface for this scene of discovery: “Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed.”
