The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bettelheim Bruno

Author:Bettelheim, Bruno [Bettelheim, Bruno]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2010-12-22T05:00:00+00:00

Fairy stories speak to our conscious and our unconscious, and therefore do not need to avoid contradictions, since these easily coexist in our unconscious. On a quite different level of meaning, what happens with and to Grandmother may be seen in a very different light. The hearer of the story rightly wonders why the wolf does not devour Little Red Cap as soon as he meets her—that is, at the first opportunity. Typically for Perrault, he offers a seemingly rational explanation: the wolf would have done so were it not afraid of some woodcutters who were close by. Since in Perrault’s story the wolf is all along a male seducer, it makes sense that an older man might be afraid to seduce a little girl in the sight and hearing of other men.

Things are quite different in the Brothers Grimm’s tale, where we are given to understand that the wolf’s excessive greed accounts for the delay: “The wolf thought to itself, ‘That young tender thing, what a fat mouthful, it’ll taste much better than the old one: you have to proceed craftily so that you catch both.’ ” But this explanation does not make sense, because the wolf could have gotten hold of Little Red Cap right then and there, and later tricked the grandmother just as it happens in the story.

The wolf’s behavior begins to make sense in the Brothers Grimm’s version if we assume that to get Little Red Cap, the wolf first has to do away with Grandmother. As long as the (grand)mother is around, Little Red Cap will not become his.* But once the (grand)mother is out of the way, the road seems open for acting on one’s desires, which had to remain repressed as long as Mother was around. The story on this level deals with the daughter’s unconscious wish to be seduced by her father (the wolf).

With the reactivation in puberty of early oedipal longings, the girl’s wish for her father, her inclination to seduce him, and her desire to be seduced by him, also become reactivated. Then the girl feels she deserves to be punished terribly by the mother, if not the father also, for her desire to take him away from Mother. Adolescent reawakening of early emotions which were relatively dormant is not restricted to oedipal feelings, but includes even earlier anxieties and desires which reappear during this period.

On a different level of interpretation, one could say that the wolf does not devour Little Red Cap immediately upon meeting her because he wants to get her into bed with him first: a sexual meeting of the two has to precede her being “eaten up.” While most children do not know about those animals of which one dies during the sex act, these destructive connotations are quite vivid in the child’s conscious and unconscious mind—so much so that most children view the sexual act primarily as an act of violence which one partner commits on the other. I believe it is the child’s

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