Similarly, little Goldilocks ventures out from home into the forbidden world of the great forest, where she eventually comes to the mysterious house belonging to the three bears. The wolves in “Little Red Riding Hood” or “The Three Little Pigs” are true to character. Bears, on the other hand, belong in the class of wild animals up to no good. A little girl with golden hair is normally expected to be made of sugar and spice and everything nice. In Goldilocks typical roles are reversed.
She breaks into a home she steals food she destroys property. Not to put too fine a point on it, she is a burglar. The worst Southey could muster was, “for they were good Bears-a little rough or so, as the manner of Bears is.” Goldilocks, on the other hand, is an out and out villain. There is no hint at all that they are monsters. They live in a snug little cottage in the middle of a forest, comfortably, good-naturedly, innocently. This picture is in marked contrast to the trio of bears, who are harmless, innocent, hospitable and good-natured. She was put out i.e., “ill-tempered.” Other adjectives include – “impudent,” “rude,” “naughty” and “truant.” In other words, she is altogether a “bad girl.” She was angry that Baby Bear’s chair bottom broke through. She dislodged the pillow and the bolster and didn’t put them back. After all, in Southey/Cundall et al, Goldilocks is described as not being well-brought up. If there is a monster in Goldilocks, it is Goldilocks herself and not the three bears. This latter categorisation surely cannot be right. For him Goldilocks is an example of plot type No 1: Overcoming the Monster as in, for example, Beowulf, Jaws or Jack and the Beanstalk. Christopher Booker (2004) sees the story in terms of his theory of there being only seven basic plots in all of storyland.
The story turns out to be grist for a great many mills. But for quite a long time beneath all those golden locks, Goldilocks retained the character of a nasty old woman. According to Tatar (2002) the three bears became a family around 1852 and Silver-hair became Goldilocks in Flora Annie Steele’s English Fairy Tales (1918). In 1850 Joseph Cundall, in his collection A Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children, transformed (with Southey’s approval) the old Woman into a pretty little girl called Silver-hair. Over the course of the years the tale was modified in ways designed to make it more palatable (pun still intended). And then she went to the porridge of the Little, Small, Wee Bear, and tasted that and that was neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right and she liked it so well, that she ate it all up but the naughty old Woman said a bad word about the little porridge-pot, because it did not hold enough for her. And then she tasted the porridge of the Middle Bear, and that was too cold for her and she said a bad word about that, too. So first she tasted the porridge of the Great, Huge Bear, and that was too hot for her and she said a bad word about that. Here is a taste (pun intended) from Southey’s The Story of the Three Bears: In his version, the protagonist is not a pretty little girl with golden locks, but an old woman, and not a very nice one, at that. Southey is credited with being the first to write it down. Like so many fairy tales, it has a long oral pre-history. In 1837 Robert Southey (1774-1843), a British poet and a member of the so-called Lake District poets that included Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote a fairy tale entitled The Story of the Three Bears, a precursor to one of the most popular of children’s stories, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Edvard Munch, The Fairy-Tale Forest, 1927 by Samuel Jay Keyser
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