Narrative Structure, Myth and Meaning in Selected Fairy Tales: A Structuralist Reading through Propp, Lévi-Strauss, and Barthes.

This thesis examines four fairy tales and fairy-tale-like narratives through a structuralist lens: the Grimm brothers’ version of Cinderella, Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale, George MacDonald’s Little Daylight, and J. K. Rowling’s The Fountain of Fair Fortune. Although these texts belong to different historical and literary contexts, they reveal the persistence and adaptability of fairy tale structures. The study applies three major structuralist approaches: Vladimir Propp’s morphology, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of binary oppositions, and Roland Barthes’s theories of textual codes and myth. The first aim of the thesis is to show how these narratives are organized through repeated functions, characters, and patterns. Propp’s model makes it possible to identify the narrative grammar that connects these tales, even when they differ in period, authorship, and ideology. However, the thesis also argues that the most meaningful aspects of the tales often appear where they modify or complicate Propp’s pattern. The second aim is to explore how the tales organize meaning through binary oppositions. Through Lévi-Strauss, the thesis reads these narratives as systems of thought that mediate contradictions such as high and low, male and female, beauty and ugliness, youth and age, nature and culture, suffering and reward, and magic and reality. These oppositions are rarely resolved directly; instead, they are mediated through symbolic figures, objects, or actions such as the slipper, the riddle, the moon-bound body, and the Fountain. Finally, through Barthes, the thesis examines how fairy tales transform cultural values into apparently natural truths. The analysis argues that these tales do not merely entertain or offer magical resolutions; they also naturalize ideas about gender, suffering, justice, recognition, agency, and happiness. While Cinderella reinforces patience and male recognition, The Wife of Bath’s Tale negotiates female sovereignty and moral education. Little Daylight connects feminine identity with beauty and recognition, while The Fountain of Fair Fortune revises the fairy-tale tradition through modern values of self-reflection, emotional healing, and personal growth. Overall, this thesis argues that fairy tales are not simple or childish narratives, but complex cultural systems. Their power lies in their ability to transform contradiction into narrative form. They make suffering meaningful, disorder bearable, and cultural values appear natural. At the same time, their structures remain flexible enough to be revised across different historical moments. Fairy tales, therefore, endure because they are both stable and adaptable, familiar and ideologically complex.