Well, she didn’t lie, exactly. But a British anthropologist has suggested the fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood, is far older than previously known. The Telegraph has the details:
Dr Jamie Tehrani, a cultural anthropologist at Durham University, studied 35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood from around the world. Whilst the European version tells the story of a little girl who is tricked by a wolf masquerading as her grandmother, in the Chinese version a tiger replaces the wolf.
Contrary to the view that the tale originated in France shortly before Charles Perrault produced the first written version in the 17th century, Dr Tehrani found that the varients shared a common ancestor dating back more than 2,600 years.
Using techniques biologists use to create taxonomies, Tehrani traced variants of the story as far as the sixth century B.C., and speculated a common ancestor in the even deeper past. Our narrative habits go way back. Therein lies a tale.
Humans use stories to organize their thoughts, their lives, their beliefs, and their actions. I’ve used the story of Little Red Riding Hood to teach the importance of narratives. It is commonly believed we can persuade by using the right word or frame. But words come in stories. People think in terms of heroes, villains, victims, hero helpers, etc. The habits of narrative are so ingrained that people fill them in for the storyteller if the teller leaves a blank, falls short, or uses a word or frame out of place.
If the glove doesn’t fit, the story must quit. If the Big Bad Wolf suddenly urges tolerance and waxes on about compassion, the story falls apart.
Did you really believe the headline above: “Little Red Riding Hood Lied About Her Age”? Probably not. It might have made you want to read on so you could watch this writer fall off the high wire (yes, the telling follows its own narrative arc, just like the tale). But the headline is so preposterous – Red’s a heroine, after all – it would never be believed. Which is why the claim was corrected quickly – after the reader’s attention was grabbed but before the writer plummeted to credibility death on the floor of the circus tent.
This is exactly how tabloid headline writers work, by the way. The old bait-and-switch. It is, when you think about it, just what the Big Bad Wolf did to Red.
You ask, if narrative expectations matter, why then do people believe the gossipy garbage? Because what’s garbage to us is narrative caviar to them. It meets their narrative expectations. They live in different narrative universe, a universe in which Elvis lives, an east wind brings disease, and presidents are illegal aliens. Frolicking in these narratives, they take the bait. So, by the way, do we, when the bait fits the narratives of our own encampment.
A hero in one narrative universe is a villain in another. So when you can’t understand how somebody could believe that, chances are the stories circulating in their heads are very different from those circulating in yours. This does not mean, by the way, that truth is relative. People once told stories about the curative power of leeches. Humans lost a lot of blood. The truth does, ultimately, matter.
Getting folks to abandon or alter their narratives is hard. It is a bit easier with open-minded folks who have the good habit of living with a bit of humility and uncertainty. To paraphrase some sage advice, they are more willing to turn the other narrative. Most people though, are lifelong creatures of narrative habit. Red notices the Wolf’s teeth are too big to be her grandmother’s, but she still must be rescued by a hunter.
Racism is, in part, a problem of narrative stickiness. People might learn there are drawbacks to publicly displaying bigoted opinions, but the underlying narratives are still their in their heads and hearts, doing what narratives have always done, creating a universe of belief and action. They will not change unless they are constantly challenged. Even then, it may take generations. Meanwhile, here’s yet another version of Little Red Riding Hood, a new cover of an old song telling the story in a new medium.