Reimagining Little Red Riding Hood: an interview with Beth O’ Brien
Talented and charming, poet Beth O’Brien is the founder and editor of Disabled Tales, a website dedicated to analysing the way disability is represented in folkloric literature. Wolf Siren, her dazzling debut novel for Middle Grade readers, is empowered by her own voice, her affinity with nature and her reimagining of an iconic fairy tale. Tanja Jennings spoke to Beth for Books for Keeps.
Born visually impaired, Beth O’Brien grew up learning about how other people see through the art of reading. Her favourite books, which she often revisits, are L.M Montgomery’s tales about red headed orphan Anne who used her imagination to revisualise her surroundings, so that Barry’s Pond became The Lake of Shining Waters,
‘I feel a special connection with Anne. I love the joy she finds in the natural world transforming it into a magical fairy tale-esque landscape through the power of language.’
When she came up with the idea of a new version of Little Red Riding Hood, a module in intertextuality focusing on fairy tales as part of her MA in Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham, writing about navigating shapes and colours in her poetry collections Catching Sight and Light Perception, a treasured copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant and the emotive and evocative poetry of Emily Dickinson and Mary Oliver, contributed to her vivid reimagining of Red’s journey through the wood.
Beth also lays debt to Amelia Carruthers’ Little Red Riding Hood – And Other Girls Who Got Lost in the Woods: Origins of Fairy Tales from Around the World as a useful chronological source inspiring her feminist portrait of Red.
With an intriguing opening that leaves the reader wanting more, Wolf Siren is a poignant, symbolic, tender, thought provoking and beautifully observed piece of eco fiction incorporating fairy tale elements. Using traditional characters like woodcutters, huntsmen and herbalists, Beth’s version delights in role reversals and posits the idea, ‘what if the villagers had taken their fear of not straying into the dangerous woods too far and the men felt challenged by the women’s ability to be safe from wolves?’
O’Brien equates the treatment of the female villagers to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, philosophising that the skill of women to do what men cannot places them at the bottom of the hierarchy when they should be at the top. Her village is based on ‘the patriarchal structure of a hunting town where the fall of tradition and the rise of female power are not met positively’, typified by the controlling behaviour of the mayor.
No longer the vulnerable Little Red Riding Hood evoked in some versions, Beth’s Red is magical and rebellious, determined to solve a mysterious disappearance, support her family and challenge the misogyny of her village. As Red becomes older, she experiences a rite of passage which O’Brien links to the symbolism of the moon, wolves and shape shifters. In discussing the transformative power of the menstrual cycle, Beth felt it was important to address the good and the bad, talking about not just the moods associated with it but the pain that can occur, making the ‘distinction that the main debilitating element is the shame associated with it’ when it is a key natural life moment. Girls as young as 10 can experience it so she felt it was relevant to represent it through her protagonists.
Secondary characters in the novel are also well crafted. Nature is reflected in their names which Beth meticulously chose. Aerona derives from the Welsh word for berries and also signifies earth’s gift which is perfect for Red’s artistic sister. Her brother Luki is from the Latin for light while her friend Delana translates as ‘where older trees can grow’.
Amidst themes of deforestation, loss and regrowth, Red’s journey beyond the Wolf Siren Tower has an atmospheric quality of magical realism as she enters the forest. It causes the reader to question whether Red is inventing the wolves that become her companions. Beth explains that this represents her own visual experiences, ‘My voice and my vision very much informed Red. The initial uncertainty about whether those wolves are real was quite deliberate. Sometimes I think I’m seeing things and I’m not hallucinating. So much of what I see is guesswork or filling in the blanks of what I think should or shouldn’t be there. Sometimes I’ll be walking along and I’ll think there is someone walking towards me but it’s actually a tree or a bin. I’ve seen a static blob of colour and I’ve tried to think what could that possibly be and I don’t always get it right. It’s about that sort of uncertainty of what you think you see versus what’s there. That uncertainty is part of my everyday life. It can be quite funny and quite surreal at times.’
What Beth enjoyed most during writing was guiding Red. She explains, ‘I really had fun inventing a magic system that supported Red because in fairy tales specifically disability is often something to be magically cured or erased and then overcome as a reward. I thought if I’m in charge of this magic it can literally be what I want it to be. On the face of it as a visually impaired person the woods are not the easiest place to be traversing but the trees help Red locate where she is. They guide her, sometimes giving her a helping branch.’
With a successful two-day symposium entitled Disability in Fairy Tales: Keeping the magic- confronting the stigma behind her and ongoing PHD studies researching the (mis)representation of disability in contemporary self-described feminist fairy tale retellings there is much more to come from this pioneering author. Beth’s future projects will include a fresh look at Welsh legend Ceridwen’s Cauldron told from the twins’ perspective as potioneers, featuring a cast of mischievous magical creatures, and a new way of seeing Rapunzel, including Easter Eggs from other fairy tales such as Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans.
For now, Beth would like her debut novel to be not just a mirror but also a window,
‘As much as I hope that kids with visual impairments or partial sightedness can feel themselves in Wolf Siren, I hope it’s equally an interesting thing to read for sighted people to sort of experience a different way of seeing.’
Tanja Jennings is a judge of the Cilip Carnegie Medals, a dedicated school librarian, children’s book reviewer and creative book blogger from Northern Ireland.
Wolf Siren is published by HarperCollins Children’s Books, 978-0008642013, £7.99 pbk.
Find out more about Beth O’Brien and her poetry on her website.
