Narrative Criticism
Narrative Criticism of The Girl Without Hands
Wilson W. Ahrens
Old Dominion University Department of Communication
COMM 335W: Rhetorical Criticism
Dr. Frances Hassencahl
September 18, 2026
Narrative Criticism of The Girl Without Hands
The Girl Without Hands is fundamentally a “How to” guide on socialization into a gendered Christian moral framework. Set in a fairytale world where goodness is defined through a Christian lens, the story reflects apparent contradictions in our world where justice does not always appear to be immediate or proportional. This is demonstrated primarily through the plight of the girl. She is pious, pure, and faithful to God and yet, her goodness does not protect her from suffering (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 2, 5, 9-10). To resolve the tension of this potential injustice, the tale separates earthly prosperity from divine reward and transforms suffering into an expression of faith through resilience.
Manciaux defines resilience as “the capacity of persons or groups to continue projecting themselves into the future in spite of destabilizing events, difficult life conditions and traumas that may be serious” (as cited in Kaźmierczak, 2017, p. 19). Kaźmierczak argues that The Girl Without Hands can foster resilience through a mimetic-cathartic process, allowing audiences to experience resilience vicariously and potentially later imitate it (p. 31). I concur, and I find that teaching this form of resilience through storytelling is the fulcrum of socialization into the narrative’s moral framework.
Within it, suffering is framed as a consequence of mankind’s shortcomings rather than personal failure. Evil is owned and perpetuated by the Devil, who repeatedly exploits human failures of vigilance to cause suffering, while the girl, despite suffering, remains faithful and her prayers repeatedly produce divine assistance (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 2-3, 5, 7-10). These relationships function as if laws of nature: purity limits the Devil’s power, prayer is answered through providence, and loyalty to God eventually results in the realization of a just moral order (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 2-3, 5, 10, 13).
Narrative Criticism as a Method and Rationale
Narrative criticism provides a way to examine how The Girl Without Hands makes its moral framework meaningful to an audience. Foss (2026) identifies four characteristics of a narrative: at least two events or states, a temporal relationship between those events, a causal or contributing relationship, and a unified subject connecting them (p. 312). Foss then directs the critic to identify a narrative’s objective and to examine the features used to accomplish that objective (pp. 317-318). This analysis identifies socialization into a gendered Christian moral framework as an objective of the narrative and examines characterization, causal relationships, use of time, and distribution of suffering and reward as its main features.
Fisher’s (1984) paradigm evaluates narratives by assessing narrative probability and narrative fidelity to determine whether a narrative provides “good reasons” for belief and behavior (pp. 7-8). This is not literal belief in the events of the story. Hassencahl (2026, Slide 15) summarizes that, according to Fisher, probability depends on whether those events follow the rules established by the narrative: Are the messages internally coherent? Do the characters stay consistent in their actions? She also summarizes that fidelity depends on whether the story’s values ring true against the audience’s experiences and beliefs (Hassencahl, 2026, Slide 16). This demonstrates that fidelity may be weaker for audiences who do not share that moral framework, even though its internal probability remains intact.
Rhetorical Context and Artifact
Banks (2020) explains that the Grimms published their first collection of tales in early nineteenth-century Germany, seeking to preserve stories representative of German cultural heritage (pp. 1-2). The Girl Without Hands is explicitly interwoven with Christian imagery and supernatural morality, which provide the guiding framework for an assumed Christian audience (Grimm & Grimm, n.d.).
An impoverished miller, thinking he is offering an apple tree, promises the Devil “what is behind his mill” in exchange for treasure, unknowingly promising his daughter (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., para. 1). When the Devil returns, her purity prevents him from approaching, so he commands her father to cut off her hands; even then, he cannot claim her and loses all right over her (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 2-3). She leaves home, wandering until she enters the king’s garden, where the king recognizes her beauty and goodness and marries her (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 4-6). After she gives birth to a son, the Devil intercepts messages between the king and his mother and forges a command sentencing the girl and child to death (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 7-8). The king’s mother refuses, sending them into exile, where the girl lives under divine protection for seven years and her hands regrow (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 9-10). The king later searches for them for seven years, sustained by God, before the family is reunited (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 11-13).
Narrative Objective
Kaźmierczak (2017) identifies teaching resilience as an objective of The Girl Without Hands (p. 31). I do not reject that reading, but I expand that objective to include its broader role in socializing an audience into a gendered Christian moral framework for interpreting and handling suffering and injustice. Supporting this interpretation, Hassencahl (2026, Slide 11) identifies socializing audiences into community mores as an objective of stories. Resilience is a foundational tool that Kaźmierczak argues is taught by the narrative; I argue the narrative, just as importantly, teaches its audience how to interpret suffering within the framework.
The distribution of suffering is too unequal to simply teach us that goodness is rewarded and evil is punished. The morally pure girl suffers more than anyone, while those who contribute to her suffering often do not suffer proportionately (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 2-3, 7-10). This captures the feeling of uneven justice present in the world and then offers an alternative divine system of valuation through which suffering can be made meaningful. Her suffering becomes a condition through which resilience is performed faithfully (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 2-3, 5, 10, 13). If virtue always produced an immediate reward and wrongdoing always resulted in immediate punishment, then faith and resilience would have little purpose. The Girl Without Hands therefore teaches its audience how to have faith in a divinely ordered world when earthly experience appears to contradict it.
Characterization and Moral Roles
Foss (2026) identifies characterization as one of the features through which a narrative accomplishes its objective. The story’s narrator presents the moral system as inherent, which gives the characterizations of good and evil their “law of nature” feel. The daughter’s moral role is established before her suffering ever begins. She is introduced as a “beautiful, pious girl” who has lived “in the fear of God and without sin” (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., para. 2), establishing her innocence as arguably Christ-like. The Devil pressures her father to mutilate her, and he cooperates out of fear, yet her tears keep the wounds clean and the Devil “lost all right over her” (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., para. 3). Through these scenes’ characterizations, the girl becomes a spiritual role model of feminine virtue and the personification of goodness.
The Devil occupies the personified role of evil, while other humans’ shortcomings create opportunities for him to cause harm. The father cooperates first out of complacency and later out of fear (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 1-3), while the messenger’s fatigue allows the Devil to replace the king’s letters (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 7-8). These characterizations frame human shortcomings as failures of vigilance, but not as acts of evil. This keeps culpability for evil centered on the Devil while offering an explanation for why acts of man cause suffering: they are the mechanism, not the source, of evil.
The king and his mother represent proper moral order. The king’s role is gendered as active, protective, and vigilant. He recognizes the girl’s goodness and godly favor, refuses to condemn her when he receives the false message, and later spends years searching for her, sustained by God (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 6-7, 11-12). His mother likewise refuses a royal command, forged by the Devil to kill the queen and child, to protect their “innocent blood” (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., para. 9). This characterizes the king and his mother as beholden to a higher moral order; they possess the gift of discernment, placing them in the role of preserving moral order through alignment with God. These characterizations strengthen the tale’s narrative probability. The girl, the Devil, the king, and his mother behave consistently with the moral roles the narrative assigns them, helping the story maintain the internal coherence for providing an audience with “good reasons” for belief (Fisher, 1984, pp. 7-8; Hassencahl, 2026, Slide 15).
Causal Relations and the Distribution of Consequences
Foss (2026) identifies causal relationships as another narrative feature through which a story accomplishes its objective. Causal relationships are where the characters’ moral roles gain meaning. For example, as the personification of goodness, what the girl does is assumed to be the righteous thing, and what she suffers should not be considered punishment from God. Even when her body is violated, her righteousness is preserved, because her suffering is decoupled from her moral worth. Goodness suffers because man falls short, but goodness is not guilty because it suffers, and similarly the men are not framed as evil. Her eventual restoration comes through God’s grace because of her piety (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., para. 10), and her restoration does not require punishment for everyone who contributed to her suffering. These causal rules are fundamental for accepting the tale’s logic and understanding how resilience is performed and justice is won within the narrative’s framework. This supports Kaźmierczak’s (2017, p. 31) argument that the tale teaches resilience and adds another layer to Foss’s causal-relations analysis by allowing for self-identification with the heroine, strengthening narrative fidelity for an audience whose experiences and values align.
Other characters’ actions also reveal assumed truths. The father obeys the Devil and commits an atrocity, while the king’s mother disobeys authority and preserves innocent life (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 2-3, 8-9), showing that obedience and morality depend on alignment with God. After he mutilates his daughter, the father offers to keep her “most handsomely,” but she refuses, asking only for what compassionate people will provide (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., para. 4). The father seeks fortune, the girl is mutilated; the messenger falls asleep, the girl is exiled (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 1, 3, 7-9). If the girl’s refusal to stay and willingness to accept only what compassionate people provided are righteous, then the material prosperity offered by her father is implicitly less moral. These contrasting causal relationships help establish a hierarchy of goodness and evil, allowing us to map out the values presented, make sense of them, and identify with them.
Delayed Justice and Gendered Reward
Foss (2026) asks us to examine how temporal relationships help achieve the narrative’s objective. Delayed justice is a revealing temporal feature utilized throughout the story. Providence sustains the righteous during delays of justice by acting as an alternative reward in the form of blessings. When the girl reaches the royal garden, she kneels and prays, and an angel creates a path so she can reach the fruit (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., para. 5). Later, when forged letters force her into exile, she prays, and an angel leads her to refuge (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., para. 9). The relationship establishes that prayer provides the righteous with what they need to endure until restoration, which makes endurance meaningful. Kaźmierczak (2017) reads that endurance as resilience grounded in personal agency (pp. 30-31). This framing gives the audience a way to position their endurance as a choice instead of passively suffering and offers prayer as a real practice to imitate as a form of socialization.
Banks (2020) argues that Grimm tales communicate behavioral expectations by associating approved feminine behavior with social reward. At first glance, our story seems to complicate that claim. The girl is repeatedly valued through beauty and piety while quietly suffering the consequences of others’ actions (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 2-3, 6-10), but The Girl Without Hands does not present femininity as completely passive. The girl leaves home; she survives wandering in exile and prays actively, all while protecting her son. The king’s mother exercises agency by refusing a royal command and saving innocent lives (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 4-5, 9). Kaźmierczak (2017) highlights this use of feminine agency as well (pp. 26, 30).
Virtuous women are associated with protection, moral discernment, and familial preservation, while the king’s masculine virtue is represented through vigilance and protection. Her eventual reward is bodily restoration, reunion with her family, and a happy life (Grimm & Grimm, n.d., paras. 10, 13). That restoration is her ultimate reward, and includes material wealth, but unlike her father’s wealth, it was not pursued as an end. This extends Banks’s (2020) framing of gendered behavior and reward; the tale defines those things without reducing feminine virtue to only passive obedience.
Conclusion
Foss (2026) asks how the narrative’s features work together to accomplish its objective. Characterization establishes moral roles and causal relationships give those roles meaning by teaching the audience how consequences should be interpreted. Goodness does not prevent suffering, but the girl’s suffering is not a punishment. Other human characters are not framed as evil, but their failures become the mechanism by which evil causes harm. The use of time through delayed reward gives resilience and faith purpose while prayer redefines reward until the eventual restoration of a just moral order.
In Fisher’s (1984, pp. 8, 16) terms, these relationships give the narrative strong probability because its apparent contradictions remain consistent with the rules of the narrative. The narrative’s fidelity is dependent on the audience. For an audience that accepts the tale’s Christian assumptions, its interpretation of suffering may “ring true” against their existing beliefs, and may provide “good reasons” for resilience and faith, even when immediate consequences appear unjust (Fisher, 1984, pp. 7–8; Hassencahl, 2026, Slide 21). Meanwhile, some audiences do not share that framework, and may reject its religious themes, although many readers may still find value in the resilience modeled by the characters.
Kaźmierczak (2017, p. 31) concludes that the tale can provide a “vicarious experience” of resilience and a “desire of imitating it.” Banks’s (2020) analysis of gendered reward adds another layer of gendered analysis and socialization. Combining these ideas, I believe that the tale teaches resilience, but I expand this concept, arguing that it socializes audiences into a specific gendered Christian moral framework for practicing the story’s version of resilience. The reader is taught what goodness looks like, how evil operates, how suffering should be interpreted, and how virtuous men and women act when faced with hardship. Resilience is therefore one mechanism, and gendered reward another, through which The Girl Without Hands achieves its objective of socializing an audience into that gendered Christian moral order.
References
Banks, M. (2020). Rewards and punishments as developing gendered ideologies in Grimm Brothers’ Briar Rose. Literator, 41(1), Article a1618. https://doi.org/10.4102/lit.v41i1.1618
Fisher, W. R. (1984). Narration as a human communication paradigm: The case of public moral argument. Communication Monographs, 51(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637758409390180
Foss, S. K. (2026). Rhetorical criticism: Exploration and practice (6th ed.). Waveland Press.
Grimm, J., & Grimm, W. (n.d.). The girl without hands. Carnegie Mellon University. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/023.txt
Hassencahl, F. (2026, June 27). Narrative method [PowerPoint slides]. Canvas. https://canvas.odu.edu/
Kaźmierczak, M. (2017). Fostering resilience through fairy tales: The Girl Without Hands by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Studia Paedagogica Ignatiana, 20(4), 15-33. https://doi.org/10.12775/SPI.2017.4.001
