| Chapter 1: | What Happens? What Is to Be Done? A Paean to Bricolage |
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The reader taking “Little Red-Cap” in a surface-to-depths manner might ask the following questions:
- 1. What is the significance of the grandmother liking Little Red-Cap so much more than she likes others?
- 2. What is the (deeper, undisclosed) significance of Little Red-Cap taking her identity from the cap she wears? What is the meaning of the fact that the wolf assumes the grandmother’s identity by the same means?
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3. Why are oak trees specified?
- 4. What is the significance of the wolf tempting Little Red-Cap on the grounds of her initial obliviousness to the beauty to be found in the woods? Why the contrast of the beauty of picking flowers with her school?
- 5. What is the significance of Little Red-Cap’s being drawn deeper into the woods the more she pursues beauty?
- 6. What is the meaning of the conjunction of strangeness and fear shown from the moment Little Red-Cap enters her grandmother’s house?
- 7. The huntsman performs a caesarean section on an ‘old woman’. This seems to set up disturbing resonances. What are they?
- 8. Why is the wolf killed by means of stones placed inside him?
Additional general questions which a reader reading in this manner might ask include the following:
- 1. What is it about (a) the story or (b) me which brings me to take the story in the way I do?
- 2. Why do I gravitate to the hidden things in this story? Is this a disposition the story imposes upon me, or a predisposition I bring with me to the story? If I do bring this predisposition to the story, then why to this particular type of story?
- 3. What about this story drives me deepest and most moves me? What of the explanations I find strikes me as most true to the story, and why?