Abstract:

Cengiz Aytmatov’s story Selvi Boylum Al Yazmalım, translated from Russian into Turkish, and the film adaptation of the same name, directed by Atıf Yılmaz and with the screenplay by Ali Özgentürk, have both formal and intertextual relations with the Grimm Brothers variant of the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood”. This article displays these relations as well as discuss that these three texts serve a similar social and moral function in the context of controlling and limiting the female body and sexuality within the patriarchal family structure. The study is structured on a comparative close reading of the three texts, in terms of plot, signs that make intertextual ties visible, and the formation of characters on the axis of individual-society conflict. The moral tale metaphorically conveyed in the “Little Red Riding Hood” is directly expressed in the aforementioned story and film. The tension between the woman’s effort to exist as a subject who desires and experiences the consequences of her desires outside the home and the forces which try to keep her at home as a passive object of desire, is resolved to the benefit of the latter. The maiden resolves the conflict between her individual desires and her social duties, by accepting her domestic role and maternal identity within the boundaries of the maledominated family, hence she crosses the threshold of puberty. While revealing the links between these three texts, various observations and interpretations on the “Little Red Riding Hood” variants and adaptations, as well as theoretical conceptualizations on the functions of characters in fairy tales were used together with an insight on the history of modernity and sexuality.

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