A Comparative Feminist Study of Western Fairy Tales and Bengali Folktales

When you start really paying attention to old fairy tales—especially the ones from Western countries and our own Bengali folk stories—you’ll notice they’re not just about magic or happy endings. At first, I just thought they were for kids, to be honest. But the more I read them, the more I began to see they carry serious ideas—about what it means to be a man or a woman, how people live and think, and even how stories shape our world. So, in this paper, I’ve tried to dig into those ideas. I focused mostly on well-known Western tales, like those collected by the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen. But I also looked at more recent writers like Angela Carter and Nikita Gill, because they kind of mess with the old stories. Then, I put those side-by-side with our traditional Bengali tales, especially the ones from Thakumar Jhuli, which I’ve heard about since childhood. To understand these stories better, I used some feminist theories and ideas from cultural studies. I also tried to break things down using a method called deconstruction—basically asking: What’s hiding behind the story? Like, maybe the tale looks innocent, but it might be quietly supporting some really old ideas about women staying quiet or men always being the hero. That’s kind of what I started to notice. But newer versions of these stories, especially the ones by women writers, flip those ideas around. What surprised me was how this is happening both in the West and in our part of the world. So even though the languages and cultures are totally different, the stories are fighting similar battles—especially when it comes to power, identity, and who gets to speak. One thing I couldn’t ignore was how these tales still keep old cultural values alive, but also give space for people to question them. That’s why I looked at them through a postcolonial lens too. See, after colonization, a lot of countries—including ours—had to rethink who we are. And stories became part of that. They show how people try to hold on to what’s theirs but also challenge what’s unfair. I think that’s really powerful. In the end, even though these stories are told in very different ways, they still raise the same kinds of questions—like what it means to be a woman, how society treats people based on their gender, and how stories can give voice to people who’ve been ignored. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting so many connections when I started out, but now I feel like there’s a kind of shared struggle going on. I didn’t just read the stories and leave it at that. I tried to go deeper by doing close readings—really paying attention to words, symbols, and how characters act. I also checked what other scholars had written about this stuff, and in a few cases, even talked to people informally to hear what fairy tales meant to them when they were kids. All of this helped me look at fairy tales not as something outdated, but as living texts that are still shaping how we think today. Through this, I hope my paper adds something small but meaningful to the wider conversation about how stories, gender, and culture mix and shift over time.