Self-Stalking Prey: A Study for a Portrait of Little Red Riding Hood
Carl Olsson
publication
Ronald Fairbairn had a simpler interpretation, describing the story as a tale about Little Red Riding Hood’s ‘own incorporative need in the form of a devouring wolf’8: a showcase of an early oral dynamic rooted in unsatisfied hunger rather than sexual competition. The recurrent vore fantasies (the wolf swallowing its victims whole) are cast as pre-Oedipal, more to do with hunger and infantile disappointment in the nourishing mother than the family triad; and it is in terms of hunger that we will think about theory replacement and the exhaustion of ‘our’ conceptual dependency on the inherited concept of subjectivity.
Departing from the psychodynamic interpretations, I want to consider Little Red Riding Hood as a conceptual rather than psychological drama that may, however, attain psychological import in due course. It is a developmental allegory for the self-effacement of the language that makes us ‘us’, such as in moving from an image of ourselves as rational agents to biological objects that can be explained. The little girl is a werewolf preying on herself. It is a story about self-overcoming in the double sense that it is a about the effacement of the subject as a theoretical entity and about an effacement that unfolds as the result of a dialectic initiated by the subject itself. The deep forest is a stage for a conceptual clash...(more)