Contextual stuff

The title 'Little Red Cap' is taken from the Grimm brothers' version of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. Duffy subverts the fairy tale with its focus on the vulnerability of women by having Little Red Cap kill the wolf.

Themes

Adolescence, emerging sexuality, nature, patriarchy, creativity.

Language/imagery

The poem begins 'At childhood's end' foregrounding the state of adolescence. Within the first stanza Duffy describes the scenery using the simile 'like mistresses'; here even the landscape is associated with the emerging sexuality of the adolescent girl. The penultimate line of this stanza is monosyllabic and employs second person and an end stop after 'edge of the woods' to create a sense of the tension building up within the speaker. The following line, a single end-stopped declarative in first person clearly describes a momentous, even portentous experience, with the end-focus on 'wolf' leading us to believe that it is the wolf who is the dynamic agent in the poem.

Duffy anthropomorphises the wolf, turning him into a symbol of male poets, or perhaps patriarchy in general. The 'red wine' that stains his jaw may indicate that he is a glutton or, if red is taken to symbolise blood, that he is dangerous to her. The tripling of intertextual references neatly links the poem back to the original fairy tale that readers would be familiar with but the speaker's admission that 'I made quite sure he spotted me' shows that she is not only unintimidated, she is taking control of the situation.

The enjambement across the second and third stanzas reflects the build-up of events as 'my first' refers directly to the 'drink' of the second stanza but also foreshadows the loss of virginity in the fourth stanza.

The end focus on 'Poetry' reveals her calling and the natural images that follow 'deep into the woods' and 'dark tangled thorny place' are familiar literary tropes that may signal either the creative unconscious or the cave of sexuality. In her efforts to reach these places Little Red Cap must follow the wolf ('I crawled in his wake') suggesting that she can only attain sexual or creative fulfilment through him. What she leaves behind are symbols of her loss of innocence 'scraps of red' as her blazer, an indication of her school girl status, becomes snagged on the natural environment. Combined together these images seem to indicate the scene of a rape and the speaker recognises that they will be viewed as 'murder clues'. This is ambiguous; whose murder? There is a literary tradition of linking sex and death; the Elizabethans called an orgasm 'le petit mort' or 'little death' and Duffy could be doing the same or she could be foreshadowing the wolf's demise.

The internal rhyme of 'got there, wolf's lair, better beware' is reminiscent of playground chants, designed to instil caution and fear in children. However Little Red Cap now takes her lessons from the wolf; he is both teacher and lover. The descriptions of the sex are animalistic 'thrashing fur' but the rhetorical question implies that the wolf is the embodiment of all girls' fantasies. After copulation, Little Red Cap goes in search of a 'white dove', symbol of peace and femininity. By feeding the wolf, Little Red Cap becomes the hunter and while the wolf's gobbling of the dove 'One bite, dead' seems threatening his response 'How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,' with its internal rhyme makes him sound ridiculous, childish even. Little Red Cap is growing in power now and it is significant that at 'the back of the lair' she finds books; this is what she came for after all, perhaps the wolf was a stage she had to go through to get the knowledge and poetry that she sought.

The end stop at the end of the fifth stanza and the conjunction 'But' at the start of the sixth in indicate an abrupt change in tone; over the ten years in the wild, Little Red Cap becomes bored and jaded. The adjective 'greying' before wolf indicates not only that he is ageing but that he is becoming less vibrant, less alive to her. The repetition of 'same' and the parallelism of 'year in, year out' reflect the monotony of her life and the end focus on 'axe' her solution.

The repetition of 'axe' and the internal rhymes of 'wept', 'leapt' and 'slept' indicate the exhilaration she feels at wielding such a phallic object; cutting open the wolf is a cathartic process for her, reconnecting her with her matriarchal inheritance symbolised by the 'virgin white of my grandmother's bones', which links Duffy's interpretation to the original tale. Little Red Cap's treatment of the wolf is unfeeling and the language blunt and contemptuous: 'I stitched him up.' Her re-emergence from the forest 'with my flowers, singing, all alone' shows that she has reclaimed the symbols of feminine beauty and rediscovered her voice while the end focus on 'alone' celebrates her independence now that the wolf is destroyed.

Structure

The poem is comprised of seven sestets. The regular structure perhaps indicates the measured quality of Little Red Cap's reminiscences as she looks back upon the events with a mature calmness that reflects her experience.