Justified Violence: Modernizing Themes of Virtue from “The Friar’s Tale” and “Little Red Riding Hood”

Although Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” was written three centuries after Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Friar’s Tale,” the stories share both similar villains and explicit morals that condemn the tales’ victims rather than the antagonists. In an essay analyzing these works, I find that Chaucer and Perrault moralize their villains' predation as retribution for the protagonist’s supposed wrongdoings. In order to challenge and expand on these themes, I wrote a novella about Noelle Wei, a thirteen-year-old girl, who is attacked but left alive by a beast known for killing only dangerous criminals. After the beast promises to return, Noelle and her community must reckon with his unspoken accusation.