Red Riding Hood: An Interpretation from Anthropology

Abstract

Today my initial problem is how to interpret a story when it is not clear whether it is meant to be funny or tragic, and when the whole social context is missing. It must be in line with critical theory to say that when all you have is the story itself, the meaning is whatever the reader assigns to it. In a sense you, the newest reader, become the author of the current meanings. This should be a comfort to the updating feminist readings of Mother Goose stories, and to psychoanalytic readings or jazzy Monty Python style reworkings or collections of old meanings (Zipes 1993). But it is very little comfort to folklorists or anthropologists who might want to know what the story originally meant to say. The folklorists I know are mild and tolerant

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