Reflections on “The Little Match Girl” and Our Perverted Modern Vices
It was December 31, New Year’s Eve, when the unnamed little girl who sold matches for a living walked barefoot through frosty snow, winding her way through the city’s narrow streets and alleyways. Her body shivered in the cold breeze. She could see light shining through the windows and Christmas trees, presents piled excessively beneath their branches. She could smell roasted goose nestled among apple slices. She heard laughter from families gathered together.
She had sold no matches and dared not go home that night, afraid that her father would give her a beating. But then again, what difference would it make? Her living conditions were so precarious, with the wind blowing right through the cracks into her room, that she would hardly be any warmer there.
Hans Christian Andersen’s 1845 story goes on until the girl dies of exhaustion and starvation after having a vision. She sees a bright beam of light, which is actually her grandmother - “the only person who had loved her, and who was now dead”[1], reaching out with open arms and swooping her away and off to heaven. Out of her misery and tribulation.
Tragedy adds to injury (for that matter, disdain and revolt) as the next day goes by. People wander around the streets, walking past her dead body, unaware of her most dreadful fate. Her story does not make the papers.
Magnolia Pictures / White Bird in a Blizzard
Death as solace and redemption
She dies a silent death - an act of acceptance in the face of the nasty and brutish vicissitudes of life. Not an act of resignation. The short fictional story sends shivers down your spine and leaves a sour taste in your mouth.
Her ghastly death evokes solace and redemption. Life is abruptly interrupted by sheer violence and chaos. Its tale echoes in a more modern example, the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo and the spin-off TV series: a poor, goodhearted soul, the heroine of the story, is caught in the middle when mayhem breaks out. And just like in the film, all that’s left is marks of blood in the snow.
Both Fargo and the children’s tale evoke the idea that beauty and purity are disrupted by the violent condition in which the protagonists find themselves. The 2014 art film White Bird in a Blizzard is another such example, the difference being that in Fargo and White Bird, cruelty and mayhem unfold beneath an apparent sense of normalcy, while the brutal reality and predicament of the match girl are explicit right from the beginning.
Death is paramount in the historical unfolding that comes later in the 19th century, that of the fin de siècle, a period marked by decay of values, world-weariness, and irrationality. That, in turn, brings forth what Austrian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl referred to as the universal nervousness of our century[2]. What these have in common is redemption.
“I’m just a (little match) girl in the (bitterly cold) world”
The girl in The Little Match Girl carries more meaning than first catches the eye. Charlotte Yonge of the Girl’s Own Paper,[3] first published in 1880, refers to a girl in her early twenties as a “home daughter”, a wife and mother aged seventeen or a self-supporting member of the workforce at twelve. This was our little girl: a working-class gal, not an upper-middle class of the Victorian Age, obnoxiously preoccupied with courtship, marriage, social status, and prestige.
As a young woman of the masses, what would she have to say about survival of the fittest? How much must one struggle to be deemed a heroine, a fighter, or a loser? Would her story be considered the story of a loser in today’s discourse?
Tomorrow’s devices at yesterday’s prices
There are various ways to comprehend how things have come to be as they are today. The excesses of the fin de siècle and the scepticism of rationality may prove a useful resource. The sentiment that irrational passions and desires were uncovered by the veil of rationality surfaced as an opposition to reason. After all, even [wo]men of science are themselves driven by a passion for knowledge[4].
In this sense, passions and desires are a constant in human life. The argument that humanity moves toward an increasing level of perfection through time (Hegel)[5] seems implausible for those who experience the degradation of society in the flesh. This was the case in the fin de siècle and may well be what we are currently witnessing in the world today. Or as Nancy Fraser put it in the title of her most recent work, directly quoting Antonio Gramsci, The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born.
To reveal irrationality under the guise of progress is to dismiss a linear historical perspective and acknowledge the antagonisms of the modern person. That is to say, we keep doing the same things the way we have been doing for ages but have more complex methods of achieving the same goals - namely, technological advancements and language. Consider social media and dating apps. What is one really searching for on these platforms? If Schopenhauer were alive today, he would still probably have argued that the survival and perpetuation of the human species were at stake. Perhaps this is the most violent act in the match girl’s story. She negates life and embraces her death, not through an abstract idea, but her will to live ceases.
What Schopenhauer calls the eternal subject of cognition leads to universal human kindness and enables one to recognize all the suffering in the world as their own[6]. Correspondingly, this Hans Christian Andersen winter holiday story translates to other human experiences in other eras. This season is a time for reflection, compassion, coexistence, forgiveness, solidarity, and redemption - or simply the nobility of spirit.
In the spirit of Christmas and winter holidays, I would like to thank the Stúdentablaðið team for the gift of sharing my favorite children’s story from childhood and my humble reflections. Also, I would like to thank my professors and peers for the inspiration.
[1] Hersholt, J. (trans.). [Hans Christian Andersen]. [1846] (1949). The Little Match Girl. “Den Lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne”. The Complete Andersen. New York: The Limited Editions Club:
https://andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheLittleMatchGirl_e.html
[2] Adler, J. (2003, April 17). You Dying Nations [Review of Poems and Prose]. London Review of Books, 25(08). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n08/jeremy-adler/you-dying-nations
[3] Vallone, L. & Nelson, C. (1994). Introduction to The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830 1915, eds. Nelson and Vallone. Athens: University of Georgia Press, p. 3.
[4] Meštrović, S. G. (1993). The Barbarian Temperament: Toward a Postmodern Critical Theory. New York:
Routledge.
[5] It could be argued that his focus was instead on the historical conflicts and events that emerge as we progress.
[6] Schopenhauer, A. [1788-1860] (2010). The Essential Schopenhauer: Key Selections from The World as Will and Representation and Other Writings. New York: Harper Perennial, p. 419.