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When the wolf had appeased his appetite, he lay down again in the bed, fell asleep and began to snore very loud. The huntsman was just passing the house, and thought to himself: “How the old woman is snoring! I must just see if she wants anything.” So he went into the room, and when he came to the bed, he saw that the wolf was lying in it. “Do I find you here, you old sinner!” said he. “I have long sought you!” Then just as he was going to fire at him, it occurred to him that the wolf might have devoured the grandmother, and that she might still be saved, so he did not fire, but took a pair of scissors, and began to cut open the stomach of the sleeping wolf. When he had made two snips, he saw the little Red-Cap shining, and then he made two snips more, and the little girl sprang out, crying: “Ah, how frightened I have been! How dark it was inside the wolf ”; and after that the aged grandmother came out alive also, but scarcely able to breathe. Red-Cap, however, quickly fetched great stones with which they filled the wolf’s belly, and when he awoke, he wanted to run away, but the stones were so heavy that he collapsed at once, and fell dead.
Then all three were delighted. The huntsman drew off the wolf’s skin and went home with it; the grandmother ate the cake and drank the wine which Red-Cap had brought, and revived, but Red-Cap thought to herself: “As long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so.” (Grimm and Grimm)
A Surface-to-Depths Reading of “Little Red-Cap”: Recapitulation of Characteristics of a Surface-to-Depths Reading
The reader in this mode of reading tends to picture a text’s important features as ‘outcrops’ connected invisibly beneath the surface. Items in a text’s surface string are perceived as leading to other, ‘deeper’ things.
The reader taking a text in this way is responding to the sense of something which is a (more real or important and displaced) focus or point of the story, one located away from the story as given. This response occurs before a decision is made about which of the possible (and more common) typification of such a response—for example, an allegorical, or symbolic, or Freudian, or Jungian—best fits it.
