Faculty Talk with Prof. Stacy Lettman Today! “Grandmother’s Blood Ties: Female Vampirism and Gender Subversion in Nalo Hopkinson’s Caribbean Reimagining of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in ‘Riding the Red.’”
In “Riding the Red,” the Jamaican-born speculative fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson revises the classic fairytale “Little Red Riding Hood,” not only to the challenge the fairy tale genre’s patriarchal norms about femininity and women’s proper place, but also to enact a resistance to Eurocentric ideas about Black women’s hypersexuality, as constructed during slavery. Rendering the traditional fairy tale under a speculative lens, Hopkinson integrates Caribbean folklore into her version of the “Little Red Riding Hood Tale” by representing the grandmother implicitly as the skin-shedding female vampire called by various names signifying an old hag—loogaroo, soucouyant, and ole higue. Once a Little Red Riding Hood herself, and now a mature woman who sheds the weight of repressed sexuality by stripping off her socially-constructed skin—the accepted feminine virtues from the Victorian era’s cult of domesticity to become again a “toothsome” woman with sexual aliveness. The Caribbean woman vampire’s transformative act of skin-shedding signifies the rejection of gender norms fostered by the patriarchal and religious values that have oppressed Caribbean women since colonial times. In the sense of Caribbean folkloric belief that “skin gives skin folk their human shape,” Hopkinson announces the constructedness of gendered and racial identities and their material impact in line with what Judith Butler argues in Gender Trouble.
“Riding the Red” can be considered as a writerly text in the vein that Roland Barthes defines it in S/Z. As I argue, the speculative elements of a text such as Hopkinson’s is enhanced by the reader’s active participation in destabilizing meaning to reveal what Butler calls the “phantasmatic” aspects of gender, its constructedness as a fantasy, despite its power to subjectivize and produce meanings through language that enables it. In Hopkinson’s writerly text, the Lacanian mirror—a proxy for the colonial mirror from a Fanonian standpoint—can reveal the illusory premise of Caribbean women’s prescribed gender identity—and the possibility that each generation of Little Red Riding Hood who reaches mature womanhood can contest the patriarchal system by shedding her skin and adopting the female vampiric spirit of the soucouyant.
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image credit: brown paper bag by clikr, licensed under CC0 / public domain declaration