A New Year’s Reading of “The Little Match Girl”
By: Ayeh Solouki
Tags: Hope, Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Match Girl, New Year, Acceptance

As we are coming to the end of the holiday season, the real Danish winter is about to hit us with the cold and dark days. Decorative lights that had given off a sense of celebration and hope will be wrapped up soon, and we are left with the reality of darkness. I don’t know about you, but one of the first things we were taught at school was seasons and how they work. Years and years of experience affirm the facts I learned as well, so I do know that the days have already started to get longer and winter will indeed end up in spring, but this knowledge does little help in facing the cold and the dark. And I have come to appreciate the importance of light further since I’ve been living in Denmark. I remember seeing the animation of “The Little Match Girl” by Odense’s own son, Hans Christian Andersen, as a child, and I wondered why the little girl had stayed out so late in the dark, not knowing that it might have well been three thirty in the afternoon. And though I wasn’t used to the Christmas celebrations shown in the movie, I could imagine the total misery of the little girl being alone and helpless while apparently everyone else around her was safe and happy. The asymmetry of power between a child and a grown up is still a captivating subject, and, even if not best depicted in this story, it is as palpable today as it was when I was a child myself. One is at the mercy of grown-ups at all times; if your favourite toy is on a shelf too high, it is impossible to have it without the help of a grown-up. The world is only as big as the grown-ups allow it; if the candy shop is across the street, it might as well be in France, since only a grown-up can take you there. The convenience of power is easy to observe and understand in that setting, but as the setting changes throughout our lives, the decisiveness of power and those who enjoy it keep us company, dictating options and destinies.

As a child, I didn’t really get the Little Match Girl story. It was, to me, a very sad and gut-wrenching account of helplessness, with no real takeaways, other than, perhaps, to remember to wear my gloves and warm boots when outside. I did like the light, though. The windows, the candles, the trees… all shiny and beautiful. Like a good drawing, one needs the dark for the colours to gain depth and nuance, and being a night owl myself, I have enjoyed witnessing the dance of light and darkness thousands of times over thousands of dawns and dusks. But the Little nameless Match girl didn’t seem to have any chances of witnessing the stunning scenes of light and darkness on her final day out, at the New Year’s Eve. We don’t know much about her ordinary routine, but on this day she is out with a number of match boxes, poorly clothed, trying to make a bit of money by unloading the matches. From a marketing perspective, she’s a promising character to make sales; an innocent blond little girl, a portrait that apparently evokes the likeness of angles to lots of people, especially when it comes to the religious imagery of angels. She evokes pathos, as the pathetic little thing is weak and cold and helpless, scared to go back to her abusive dad, and wronged by the boy who stole her shoe. So how could anyone resist buying a matchbox from her? One could always use the matches, plus one would feel morally superior by helping out some poor little kid. It didn’t work, though. Seems like she was too consumed with the symptoms of the onset of hypothermia that she wasn’t using her disadvantages to her advantage to make a sale. So, if the elicitation of pathos was not meant to garner some sweet money, why else is H. C. Andersen putting us through this despairing story, on the verge of the New Year?

From my childhood memories, I couldn’t remember the fate of the unnamed match salesperson. I knew that she was somewhere in the city, probably begging people to buy from her, and, in my imagination, I had decided that someone, most likely a lovely grandma, had taken her in and served her hot porridge or the like. That must have been some sort of a defence mechanism shielding my childish mind from the tragic ending of the story. The Little Match Girl succumbs to hypothermia and dies, with a smile on her face. Hans Christian, believing himself to be a good friend of God, had furnished the girl with an ending that would not only give her an eternal smile, but also was meant to be something to envy, by the people who found her the next day: the Little Match Girl had gone to God, in heaven, and in the company of the only person who’s ever been kind to her, her dead grandmother. Upon being found, the next morning, by the townspeople, the Little Match Girl has a smile on her frozen face, and all her matches are burnt. Those surrounding her dead body speculate that she’s burnt the matches to keep warm, but we know that she’s been seeing/hallucinating heavenly lights and glorious images of warmth and comfort and kindness, so, perhaps, Hans Christian is suggesting that though she looked poor and cold and even dead, she was better off at the end. Obviously, the religious outlook could offer some justification to this ending, but the reality of such sickly-sweet hope in the near-death hallucinations of a dying child doesn’t sit very well with me.

Mr Andersen himself was a believer in God and he was even convinced that God wanted him to be the best writer in Denmark, if not the whole world. He kept journals in which he wrote his prayers to God, his bargaining, demands, thanks, and complaints. He was pretty sensitive to his critics in Denmark, especially as in contrast, he was known internationally to be a genius and a marvellous writer. In this light, the Little Match Girl could be taken as a representation of Hans Christian, the innocent, beautiful, and underappreciated person he thought himself to be, and her death as a relief with vengeance, where he not only gets promoted to a better world, but also mocks the wealth and power of his countrymen. It is reminiscent of a child’s idea of punishing the parents by giving them a guilt trip. Both the punishment and the reward in this story seem anaemic, however. Yes, it is a relief to know that death can be like a fun drug-induced experience even if one is slowly freezing, but that is not really a reward for being nice and innocent; and on the other side, seeing yet another poor person dying because we’ve been negligent must come easy to lots of us since we are doing it on a daily basis, so, again, not a massive punishment. Even the photo of the Syrian child at the shore was eventually forgotten. There are other things at hand to put the blame on: the inequality in the society, the parents of the little girl, lack of governmental support, etc. In some sense, Hans Christian seems to have forgotten the real pain of being poor, though he came from such background, since for most of his life he enjoyed royal grants, rich patrons, and high society life, be it in Denmark, Europe, or the “Orient”.

The Little Match Girl story is set at the New Year’s Eve, so I am going to end on a high note. Our Little Girl was incredibly unlucky and naive; she didn’t have the proper tools to deal with the cold weather and the frozen hearts. She had already given up when she decided to sit in the snow. I know of a young man from a far away country who, because of his political disagreement with some power-hungry community, was taken in a windowless van in the middle of the night to be dropped off in knee-deep snow, left to his own destiny. Surrounded by predators, he ran as best he could, for hours in the dark, cold night until he finally reached home. Hope is not always a viable solution, as the pursuit of hope got our Little Girl killed. She hoped that the lights would save her, but the lights of love and humanity, from her matches or the windows and trees, were not strong enough to engulf her with the much needed warmth. The cold is the absence of such light and warmth, and that was the end for innocence and naivety. But the realization of this perspective also shows that acceptance, embracing the circumstance, toothy and bitter as it is, can actually set us free. And freedom provides another form of power; not quite comparable to the one that affords influence and privilege, but the kind that offers peace. Perhaps it could be compared to Ibsen’s last line in An Enemy of the People: “The strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone.”