SUMMARY
This story deals with the naivety of a young woman and
the lechery of a dirty old man who makes profit of her inexperience.
The protagonist, who has no name and so thus her innocence
is highlighted, is a just graduated governess who travels from a British town
to Munich to work as a tutor for a German family. She has never been abroad
and, because of her ingenuousness, we can suppose she has neither been out nor
away very often, and, as in the story there isn’t any mention of her family, we
can think she has to be an orphan or an illegitimate daughter who has been
raised in an institution and then sent to a boarding school, a case that wasn’t
unusual in Great Britain in the 19th century and at the beginning of
the 20th century.
The lady from the Governess Bureau who has found her a
position in Augsburg, near Munich, gives her a lot of cautions to survive from all the
dangers she is going to encounter during her trip. Perhaps this is the reason
why the girl is afraid of everything and everybody. She is so afraid that she tends
to behave clumsily to people she suspects they want to swindle or take
advantage of her; but then, these people who have to serve her are even ruder.
On the ferry which crosses the English Channel, she
accommodates in the cabin for women only and there she feels safe and happy.
But when she arrives in France and has to take the train, the porter, or the
station master, treats the poor girl very coarsely, and, when she doesn’t want
to give him the tip, or pay the price he asks for, he takes his revenge leading
a man to her carriage for Ladies Only and even stripping off the restrictive
sign that would have protected her from male company.
However, the man in her carriage is old, extremely old, she believes; but he seems a very polite and respectable gentleman from Germany; we even know he has been a civil servant, and eventually our governess imagines that a man like him could have been her grandfather.
The little governess destination is a hotel in Munich where her employer, a wife’s doctor, is going to pick her up at six in the evening, and, as the train is arriving in the morning, the kind old man suggests her that would be interesting for her to pay a visit to the beautiful city, and he offers her to be her cicerone. The young woman has some doubts, but eventually accepts.
At the hotel, the girl again behaves clumsily, this time with the waiter,
when she doesn’t want to tip him. Moreover, this waiter suspects there is an
illicit relationship between her and the old man.
So the girl and the old man go round Munich to see the
sights. The man is perhaps a little bit too attentive because he buys her some
sausages, pays for her lunch, offers his umbrella and his arm when it’s
raining…
When it’s time (and even late) to go back to the hotel to meet her
employer, the old man insists her to show his little flat, telling her that she
doesn’t have to worry because there is a housekeeper. But when she goes in,
there’s nobody in his bachelor’s house; there he offers her some wine and asks
her to give him a kiss; and, as she denies it, he assaults her and tries to
steal a kiss in the mouth, and really he gets it. The girl defends herself, gets free and
runs away from the flat. Now she has discovered the old man’s true nature.
In the street, she asks a policeman for a tram to the station,
where her hotel is, but she doesn’t say anything about the assault. On the
tram, although everybody can see she is in trouble, nobody offers to help her.
In the end, she gets to the hotel and asks for the lady that had to come to
pick her up. But the girl has arrived too late, and the lady, being tired of
waiting, has gone away.
And now the waiter has had his revenge, because he has told
the lady that the girl had gone with a suspicious man. Moreover, he doesn’t tell
the girl if the woman is going to come back to pick her up the next day, so the
governess is in a big trouble: she doesn’t know if the lady is going to
keep the position for her. What is she going to do now?
As you can see, this story is very different from the
others we have read by Katherine Mansfield: there is a continuum and a crescendo in the narrative, and we foresee that a disgrace is going to fall down upon the girl. We can see the
famous cliché about appearances being deceptive. We can also find a kind of
morality in the story: don’t trust anybody because they can be a wolf in
sheep’s clothing. In fact, this story is a Mansfield version of the Red Riding
Hood, the famous tale for children. However, the primitive tale ended badly,
like Mansfield’s, very differently from the modern versions whose intention is entertaining children without frightening them. So, the question will be: what kind of truths must we tell our
children: the real cruel ones or the sweet and perhaps false ones?
QUESTIONS
-Do you agree
with people who don’t want to take their children to a public school? Do you
think it’s better a public education than a private one?
-“It’s better
to mistrust people at first sight than to trust them.” Is it your opinion too?
Why?
-Do you have a
point of view about these “ladies’ compartments”? Do you think they are
necessary to protect women?
-The way she
treated the porter (and the waiter at the hotel), was it a bit haughty?
-Are her fears for real, or only fancies of an inexpert woman?
-“Most old men
were so horrid.” According to you, is this most young people’s opinion?
-When and why
does she start to trust the old man?
-“She felt she
had known him for years.” When do you say this about a new acquittance?
-“His hand
shook, and the wine spilled over the tray.” What happened exactly to the old man
in his flat?
-Why the tram
was “full of old men with twitching knees”, according to what the little governess
saw?
-Is this a
moral story? What is its morality?
VOCABULARY
porter, rub up, tucked up, pink-sprigged, pounced, cinders,
flicking, spick and span, doddery, tangerines, pouted, dimpled, attar, cupped, swooped
Little Red Riding Hood, by Roald Dahl
