Cinderella. Snow White. Little Red Riding Hood. Everyone's familiar with those fairy tales, thanks to the brothers Grimm (and their distant cousin Walt Disney). Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm spent years and years collecting folktales in their native Germany in the first half of the 19th century. Ever hear of The Frog Prince? The Girl Without Hands? The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage?
Even the slightly off-kilter ones that didn't get made into animated feature films are part of this huge collection of folktales which is just clamoring to be analyzed from a structuralist perspective. We can approach the Grimms' fairy tales in much the same way that Vladimir Propp analyzed Russian folktales, by looking for underlying patterns amidst the various princesses, talking animals, and meat products.
Some questions to chew on:
(1) If we look at a cross-section of the tales, can we find common plot structures across a wide variety of the stories? What sort of repetitions do we see?
(2) What sorts of "archetypes" appear again and again in these fairy tales?