Thurber's "The Little Girl and the Wolf"

My favorite of all of these versions of Little Red Riding Hood was definitely James Thurber's The Little Girl and the Wolf". I laughed out loud at reading the ending to this very short rendition of the classic tale and immediately looked up more of Thurber's work. I discovered that this was actually a part of a compilation of satirical fables that he had put out in 1940, which led me to think about the audience of this time. The readers of this story had most certainly heard the original tale of Little Red Riding Hood, as it had been in circulation for a few hundred years. I could tell that Thurber was aware of this because the whole story really is about the shock value in the punchline and the moral. Thurber spends very little time with the actual descriptions of the characters and the story, instead giving a brief summary of the events leading up to the twist at the end. Another thing that I noticed was his use of the image of the Metro Goldwyn Mayer Lion as a joke, indicating that the people who read this story were also those who frequented the cinemas. 1940 was the year before the US entered into World War Two, and the stresses of Europe's war was definitely reaching the American public. Americans, like the Europeans at this time, turned to the cinema for a brief escape from reality and the stresses of their everyday lives. Like the movies, Thurber's version of this fairy tale serves to give that same audience a brief release from their daily stresses by surprising them with an unexpected and whimsical twist on something that had been heard for so long. The violent ending to this story also suggests that the main audience for this story was adults, furthering the idea that they would appreciate this twist, having by this point in their lives heard the tale so many times.