Gendered narratives of trauma in fairy tales

Fairy tales are commonly addressed to children, yet they consistently encode violence, fear, and vulnerability through symbolic and displaced forms. This article offers a comparative analysis of Hansel and Gretel and the Anatolian tale The Weeping Pomegranate and the Laughing Quince (Ağlayan Nar, Gülen Ayva) to examine how trauma is organised within gendered narrative structures. Combining trauma theory, feminist fairy-tale criticism, and structural analysis, the study approaches fairy tales as cultural narratives in which collective memory and social norms shape the representation of vulnerability. The analysis focuses on recurring motifs such as famine, abandonment, violated care, and the transformation of female figures into sites of threat. To examine these patterns, the article proposes a T–C–A (Trauma–Gender–Narrative) coding scheme that traces how trauma becomes legible through narrative sequences, spatial configurations, and role distributions. The findings demonstrate that similar narrative structures produce different configurations of gendered vulnerability. Fairy tales actively organise the distribution of suffering rather than merely reflecting it within narrative form.