The Uses of Enchantment

by Bruno Bettelheim

  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 unconscious equation of sexual excitement, violence, and anxiety which Djuna Barnes alludes to when she writes: “Children know something they can’t tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!”56 Because this strange coincidence of opposite emotions characterizing the child’s sexual knowledge is given body in “Little Red Riding Hood,” the story holds a great unconscious attraction to children, and to adults who are vaguely reminded by it of their own childish fascination with sex.

  Another artist has given expression to these same underlying feelings. Gustave Doré, in one of his famous illustrations to fairy tales, shows Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed together.57 The wolf is depicted as rather placid. But the girl appears to be beset by powerful ambivalent feelings as she looks at the wolf resting beside her. She makes no move to leave. She seems most intrigued by the situation, attracted and repelled at the same time. The combination of feelings her face and body suggest can best be described as fascination. It is the same fascination which sex, and everything surrounding it, exercises over the child’s mind. This, to return to Djuna Barnes’s statement, is what children feel about Red Riding Hood and the wolf and their relation, but can’t tell—and is what makes the story so captivating.

  It is this “deathly” fascination with sex—which is experienced as simultaneously the greatest excitement and the greatest anxiety—that is bound up with the little girl’s oedipal longings for her father, and with the reactivation of these same feelings in different form during puberty. Whenever these emotions reappear, they evoke memories of the little girl’s propensity for seducing her father, and with it other memories of her desire to be seduced by him also.

  While in Perrault’s rendering the emphasis is on sexual seduction, the opposite is true for the Brothers Grimm’s story. In it, no sexuality is directly or indirectly mentioned; it may be subtly implied, but, essentially, the hearer has to supply the idea to help his understanding of the story. To the child’s mind, the sexual implications remain preconscious, as they should. Consciously a child knows that there is nothing wrong with picking flowers; what is wrong is disobeying Mother when one has to carry out an important mission serving the legitimate interest of the (grand)parent. The main conflict is between what seem justified interests to the child and what he knows his parent wants him to do. The story implies that the child doesn’t know how dangerous it may be to give in to what he considers his innocuous desires, so he must learn of this danger. Or rather, as the story warns, life will teach it to him, at his expense.

  “Little Red Cap” externalizes the inner processes of the pubertal child: the wolf is the externalization of the badness the child feels when he goes contrary to the admonitions of his parents and permits himself to tempt, or to be tempted, sexually. When he strays from the path the parent has outlined for him, he encounters “badness,” and he fears that it will swallow up him and the parent whose confidence he betrayed. But there can be resurrection from “badness,” as the story proceeds to tell.

  Very different from Little Red Cap, who gives in to the temptations of her id and in doing so betrays mother and grandmother, the hunter does not permit his emotions to run away with him. His first reaction on finding the wolf sleeping in the grandmother’s bed is, “Do I find you here, you old sinner? I have been looking for you for a long time”—and his immediate inclination is to shoot the wolf. But his ego (or reason) asserts itself despite the proddings of the id (anger at the wolf), and the hunter realizes that it is more important to try to rescue Grandmother than to give in to anger by shooting the wolf outright. The hunter restrains himself, and instead of shooting the animal dead, he carefully cuts open the wolf’s belly with scissors, rescuing Little Red Cap and her grandmother.

  The hunter is a most attractive figure, to boys as well as girls, because he rescues the good and punishes the bad. All children encounter difficulties in obeying the reality principle, and they easily recognize in the opposite figures of wolf and hunter the conflict between the id and the ego-superego aspects of their personality. In the hunter’s action, violence (cutting open the belly) is made to serve the highest social purpose (rescuing the two females). The child feels that nobody appreciates that his violent tendencies seem constructive to him, but the story shows that they can be.

  Little Red Cap has to be cut out of the wolf’s stomach as if through a Caesarean operation; thus the idea of pregnancy and birth is intimated. With it, associations of a sexual relation are evoked in the child’s unconscious. How does a fetus get into the mother’s womb? wonders the child, and decides that it can happen only through the mother having swallowed something, as the wolf did.

  Why does the hunter speak of the wolf as an “old sinner” and say that he has been trying to find him for a long time? As the seducer is called a wolf in the story, so the person who seduces, particularly when his target is a young girl, is popularly referred to as an “old sinner” today as in olden times. On a different level, the wolf also represents the unacceptable tendencies within the hunter; we all refer on occasion to the animal within us, as a simile for our propensity for acting violently or irresponsibly to gain our goals.

  While the hunter is all-important for the denouement, we do not know where he comes from, nor does he interact with Little Red Cap—he rescues her, that’s all. All through “Little Red Cap” no father is mentioned, which is most unusual for a fairy story of this kind. This suggests that the father is present, but in hidden form. The girl certainly expects her father to rescue her from all difficulties, and particularly those emotional ones which are the consequence of her wish to seduce him and to be seduced by him. What is meant here by “seduction” is the girl’s desire and efforts to induce her father to love her more than anybody else, and her wish that he should make all efforts to induce her to love him more than anybody else. Then we may see that the father is indeed present in “Little Red Cap” in two opposite forms: as the wolf, which is an externalization of the dangers of overwhelming oedipal feelings, and as the hunter in his protective and r
escuing function.

  Despite the hunter’s immediate inclination to shoot the wolf dead, he does not do so. After her rescue, it is Little Red Cap’s own idea to fill the wolf’s belly with stones, “and as it woke up, it tried to jump away, but the stones were so heavy that it collapsed and fell to its death.” It has to be Little Red Cap who spontaneously plans what to do about the wolf and goes about doing it. If she is to be safe in the future, she must be able to do away with the seducer, be rid of him. If the father-hunter did this for her, Red Cap could never feel that she had really overcome her weakness, because she had not rid herself of it.

  It is fairy-tale justice that the wolf should die of what he tried to do: his oral greediness is his own undoing. Since he tried to put something into his stomach nefariously, the same is done to him.*

  There is another excellent reason why the wolf should not die from having his belly cut open to free those he swallowed up. The fairy tale protects the child from unnecessary anxiety. If the wolf should die when his belly is opened up as in a Caesarean operation, those hearing the story might come to fear that a child coming out of the mother’s body kills her. But if the wolf survives the opening up of his belly and dies only because heavy stones were sewn into it, then there is no reason for anxiety about childbirth.

  Little Red Cap and her grandmother do not really die, but they are certainly reborn. If there is a central theme to the wide variety of fairy tales, it is that of a rebirth to a higher plane. Children (and adults, too) must be able to believe that reaching a higher form of existence is possible if they master the developmental steps this requires. Stories which tell that this is not only possible but likely have a tremendous appeal to children, because such tales combat the ever-present fear that they won’t be able to make this transition, or that they’ll lose too much in the process. That is why, for example, in “Brother and Sister” the two do not lose each other after their transformation but have a better life together; why Little Red Cap is a happier girl after her rescue; why Hansel and Gretel are so much better off after their return home.

  Many adults today tend to take literally the things said in fairy tales, whereas they should be viewed as symbolic renderings of crucial life experiences. The child understands this intuitively, though he does not “know” it explicitly. An adult’s reassurance to a child that Little Red Cap did not “really” die when the wolf swallowed her is experienced by the child as a condescending talking down. This is just the same as if a person is told that in the Bible story Jonah’s being swallowed by the big fish was not “really” his end. Everybody who hears this story knows intuitively that Jonah’s stay in the fish’s belly was for a purpose—namely, so that he would return to life a better man.

  The child knows intuitively that Little Red Cap’s being swallowed by the wolf—much like the various deaths other fairy-tale heroes experience for a time—is by no means the end of the story, but a necessary part of it. The child also understands that Little Red Cap really “died” as the girl who permitted herself to be tempted by the wolf; and that when the story says “the little girl sprang out” of the wolf’s belly, she came to life a different person. This device is necessary because, while the child can readily understand one thing being replaced by another (the good mother by the evil stepmother), he cannot yet comprehend inner transformations. So among the great merits of fairy tales is that through hearing them, the child comes to believe that such transformations are possible.

  The child whose conscious and unconscious mind has become deeply involved in the story understands that what is meant by the wolf’s swallowing grandmother and girl is that because of what happened, the two were temporarily lost to the world—they lost the ability to be in contact and to influence what goes on. Therefore somebody from the outside must come to their rescue; and where a mother and child are concerned, who could that be but a father?

  Little Red Cap, when she fell in with the wolf’s seduction to act on the basis of the pleasure principle instead of the reality principle, implicitly returned to a more primitive, earlier form of existence. In typical fairy-story fashion, her return to a more primitive level of life is impressively exaggerated as going all the way to the prebirth existence in the womb, as the child thinks in extremes.

  But why must the grandmother experience the same fate as the girl? Why is she both “dead” and reduced to a lower state of existence? This detail is in line with the way the child conceives of what death means—that this person is no longer available, is no longer of any use. Grandparents must be of use to the child—they must be able to protect him, teach him, feed him; if they are not, then they are reduced to a lower form of existence. As unable to cope with the wolf as Little Red Cap is, the grandmother is reduced to the same fate as the girl.*

  The story makes it quite clear that the two have not died by being swallowed. This is made obvious by Little Red Cap’s behavior when liberated. “The little girl sprang out crying: ‘Ah, how frightened I have been; how dark it was inside the wolf’s body!’ ” To have been frightened means that one has been very much alive, and signifies a state opposite to death, when one no longer thinks or feels. Little Red Cap’s fear was of the darkness, because through her behavior she had lost her higher consciousness, which had shed light on her world. Or as the child who knows he has done wrong, or who no longer feels well protected by his parents, feels the darkness of night with its terrors settle on him.

  Not just in “Little Red Cap” but throughout the fairy-tale literature, death of the hero—different from death of old age, after life’s fulfillment—symbolizes his failure. Death of the unsuccessful—such as those who tried to get to Sleeping Beauty before the time was ripe, and perished in the thorns—symbolizes that this person was not mature enough to master the demanding task which he foolishly (prematurely) undertook. Such persons must undergo further growth experiences, which will enable them to succeed. Those predecessors of the hero who die in fairy stories are nothing but the hero’s earlier immature incarnations.

  Little Red Cap, having been projected into inner darkness (the darkness inside the wolf), becomes ready and appreciative of a new light, a better understanding of the emotional experiences she has to master, and those others which she has to avoid because as yet they overwhelm her. Through stories such as “Little Red Cap” the child begins to understand—at least on a preconscious level—that only those experiences which overwhelm us arouse in us corresponding inner feelings with which we cannot deal. Once we have mastered those, we need not fear any longer the encounter with the wolf.

  This is reinforced by the story’s concluding sentence, which does not have Little Red Cap say that she will never again risk encountering the wolf, or go alone in the woods. On the contrary, the ending implicitly warns the child that withdrawal from all problematic situations would be the wrong solution. The story ends: “But Little Red Cap thought ‘as long as you live, you won’t run off the path into the woods all by yourself when mother has forbidden you to do so.’ ” With such inner dialogue, backed up by a most upsetting experience, Little Red Cap’s encounter with her own sexuality will have a very different outcome, when she is ready—at which time her mother will approve of it.

  Deviating from the straight path in defiance of mother and superego was temporarily necessary for the young girl, to gain a higher state of personality organization. Her experience convinced her of the dangers of giving in to her oedipal desires. It is much better, she learns, not to rebel against the mother, nor try to seduce or permit herself to be seduced by the as yet dangerous aspects of the male. Much better, despite one’s ambivalent desires, to settle for a while longer for the protection the father provides when he is not seen in his seductive aspects. She has learned that it is better to build father and mother, and their values, deeper and in more adult ways into one’s superego, to become able to deal with life’s dangers.

  There are many modern counterparts to “Little Red Cap.” The profundity of fairy tales when compare
d to much of today’s children’s literature becomes apparent when one parallels them. David Riesman, for example, has compared “Little Red Riding Hood” with a modern children’s story, Tootle the Engine, a Little Golden Book which some twenty years ago sold in the millions.59 In it, an anthropomorphically depicted little engine goes to engine school to learn to become a big streamliner. Like Little Red Riding Hood, Tootle has been told to move only on the tracks. It, too, is tempted to stray off them, since the little engine delights in playing among the pretty flowers in the fields. To stop Tootle from going astray, the townspeople get together and conceive of a clever plan, in which they all participate. Next time Tootle leaves the tracks to wander in its beloved meadows, it is stopped by a red flag wherever it turns, until it promises never to leave the tracks again.

  Today we could view this as a story which exemplifies behavior modification through adverse stimuli: the red flags. Tootle reforms, and the story ends with Tootle having mended its ways and indeed going to grow up to be a big streamliner. Tootle seems to be essentially a cautionary tale, warning the child to stay on the narrow road of virtue. But how shallow it is when compared with the fairy tale.

  “Little Red Cap” speaks of human passions, oral greediness, aggression, and pubertal sexual desires. It opposes the cultured orality of the maturing child (the nice food taken to Grandmother) to its earlier cannibalistic form (the wolf swallowing up Grandmother and the girl). With its violence, including that which saves the two females and destroys the wolf by cutting open its belly and then putting stones into it, the fairy tale does not show the world in a rosy light. The story ends as all figures—girl, mother, grandmother, hunter, and wolf—“do their own thing”: the wolf tries to run away and falls to its death, after which the hunter skins the wolf and takes its pelt home; Grandmother eats what Little Red Cap has brought her; and the girl has learned her lesson. There is no conspiracy of adults which forces the story’s hero to mend her way as society demands—a process which denies the value of inner-directedness. Far from others doing it for her, Little Red Cap’s experience moves her to change herself, as she promises herself that “as long as you live, you won’t run off the path into the woods.…”