“Little Red Cap” takes place first in a domestic neighborhood before quickly moving to the traditional “dark woods” of European fairy tales. The suburban houses represent the supportive and limiting childhood the speaker is leaving behind, while the woods represent the dangerous unknown. The latter setting often represents a transformative force, and here it becomes the chrysalis in which the speaker is reborn from child to woman. In trading her domestic upbringing for the mystery of an adult relationship, she sacrifices something of herself in order to gain worldly knowledge.