Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 5 Psychoanalysis
moment and he thought: How the old woman is snoring; let’s see if anything’s
the matter with her. So he came into the room, and when he got to the bed he
saw the wolf lying there: ‘So I’ve found you here, you old sinner,’ he said, ‘I’ve
been looking for you for a long time.’ He was just about to take aim with his gun
when it occurred to him that the wolf might have swallowed the old woman and
she might still be saved – so instead of firing he took a pair of scissors and began
to cut open the sleeping wolf’s stomach. When he had made a snip or two, he saw
the bright red of the little girl’s cape, and after another few snips she jumped out
and cried: ‘Oh, how frightened I was, how dark it was inside the wolf!’ And then
her old grandmother came out too, still alive though she could hardly breathe.
But Little Redcape quickly fetched some big stones, and with them they filled the
wolf’s belly, and when he woke up he tried to run away; but the stones were so
heavy that he collapsed at once and was killed by the fall.
At this all three of them were happy; the huntsman skinned the wolf and took
his skin home, the grandmother ate the cake and drank the wine that Little
Redcape had brought, and they made her feel much better. But Little Redcape said
to herself: As long as I live I’ll never again leave the path and run into the forest
by myself, when my mother has said I mustn’t.
The above is a fairy story collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early nineteenth
century. A psychoanalytic approach to this story would analyse it as a substitute
dream (looking for the processes of the dream-work) in which the drama of the
Oedipus complex is staged. Little Redcape is the daughter who desires the father
(played in the first instance by the wolf). To remove the mother (condensed into the
composite figure of mother and grandmother), Little Redcape directs the wolf to her
grandmother’s house. In a story that is extremely elliptical, it is significant that her
description of where her grandmother lives is the only real moment of detail in the
whole story. Answering the wolf’s question, she says, ‘A good quarter of an hour’s walk
further on in the forest, under the three big oak trees, that’s where her house is; there
are hazel hedges by it, I’m sure you know the place.’ The wolf eats the grandmother (a
displacement for sexual intercourse) and then eats Little Redcape. The story ends with
the huntsman (the post-Oedipal father) delivering the (grand)mother and daughter to
a post-Oedipal world, in which ‘normal’ family relations have been restored. The wolf
is dead and Little Redcape promises never again to ‘leave the path and run into the forest
by myself, when mother has said I mustn’t’. The final clause hints at Freud’s point
about a resentful identification. In addition to these examples of condensation and displacement,
the story contains many instances of symbolization. Examples include the
flowers, the forest, the path, the red velvet cape, the bottle of wine beneath her apron
(if she leaves the path she may ‘fall and break the bottle’) – all of these add a definite
symbolic charge to the narrative.
What Freud said about the interpretation of dreams should be borne in mind when
we consider the activities of readers. As you will recall, he warned about ‘the impossibility
of interpreting a dream unless one has the dreamer’s associations to it at one’s