| Izteiksmīgi |
[12. Dec 2008|05:06] |
For a time, British mythologists preached the view that Little Red Riding Hood represents the burning sun which, in the course of a day, sets out on a westward journey until it is engulfed by the darkness of the night. Nonsense! was the response of psychoanalytically oriented critics, who had their own ways of reading this tale. For one of them, the wolf displays pregnancy envy by attempting to put living beings into his belly. In the end he is killed by stones, symbols of sterility that "mock his usurpation of the pregnant woman's role." Another contends that the story speaks of "human passions, oral greediness, aggression, and pubertal desire," with the wolf as nothing more than a projection of Red Riding Hood's "badness." Ideologists of the Third Reich, who hailed the Grimms' Nursery and Household Tales as a "sacred book," saw Red Riding Hood as a symbol of the German people, terrorized and victimized, but finally liberated from the clutches of a Jewish wolf. A recent American reading of the tale discovers in the story "a parable of rape" that teaches young women about the "frightening male figures abroad in the woods" and implies that "females are helpless before them."
(Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, pp. 39-41) |
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