Summary
Narrated from a third-person limited omniscient perspective, “The Little Match Girl” opens on a dark New Year’s Eve.
Snow falls on gloomy, freezing-cold streets. The story’s protagonist, a poor little girl, walks with no hat to keep her head warm and nothing covering her bare feet. The narrator comments that she had been wearing slippers when she left her house, but the slippers—which belonged to the girl’s mother—were too big for the girl.
The narrator comments that the slippers had fallen off the little girl’s feet while she ran across a road to get out of the way of two horse-drawn carriages rattling quickly past. One slipper was lost in the snow while the other had been stolen by a boy; the boy said he would use the slipper one day as a cradle for his child.
Now, without shoes, the little girl’s feet have gone red and blue from the cold. She wears an old apron in which she carries packages of matches; she also holds a box of matches in her hand. All day she has tried and failed to sell her matches. No one has given her a cent.
The poor girl shivers from the cold and the hunger she feels. She creeps along the street, a walking portrait of misery itself. Snowflakes collect in her long blonde hair, which hangs in curls over her neck. Around her, light shines out from windows. There is also a pervasive smell of roast goose—served because it is New Year’s Eve, she thinks.
The girl stops walking when she finds a corner formed by the exterior walls of two houses, one of which sticks out farther into the street than the other. She sits, drawing her small feet under her legs.
Though she is growing increasingly colder, she fears going home. Because she sold no matches and earned no money, her father would beat her as punishment. Regardless, her home is also cold. The wind whistles through the family’s roof even though the largest cracks are stuffed full of rags and straw.
Analysis
The opening paragraphs of Hans Christian Andersen’s 19th-century fairy tale “The Little Match Girl” establishes a third-person narrative perspective that is capable of understanding the thoughts and dreams of the eponymous protagonist while simultaneously viewing her plight from a distance. By narrating the story this way, Andersen acts as a facilitator between reader and subject bringing the detached reader into the dying girl’s innocent, hopeful point of view to evoke pity and sadness in the reader.
The opening paragraphs also focus on the doomed circumstances the girl is in through the use of kinesthetic (i.e. temperature-based) imagery. The terrible cold slowly enters the girl’s vulnerable body through her uncovered feet and head. These details function to set a narrative timer, foreshadowing the girl’s inevitable death from freezing.
The scene in which the girl loses her mother’s slippers in the snow introduces the themes of poverty and cruelty. The slippers symbolize her poverty. If it wasn’t for her family’s poverty, the girl might have her own shoes, which would have been fitted to her feet and wouldn’t have fallen off. She also loses them while trying to get out of the way of carriages, the mode of transportation for wealthy people in the nineteenth century, when the story is set. She knows the carriages will not go out of their way to avoid striking a lowly poor girl, and thus the carriages force her into a position where she must defer to their power and run out of the road. In this way, the loss of her slippers directly links her poverty to her eventual death.
The incident with her slippers also highlights the theme of cruelty. She loses one in the snow, but the other is stolen by a cruel boy. Exhibiting no empathy for the little girl’s plight, he claims he’ll use the slipper to cradle his baby one day, putting the imagined life of theoretical offspring before the immediate needs of the barefoot human who shivers in the snow before him.
The girl’s poverty is also encapsulated in the fact that she has been out all day trying and failing to sell matches. Similarly, her parents, though impoverished themselves, exhibit cruelty by forcing their child to walk freezing cold streets to make money against the threat of being beaten. It is the threat of a beating from her father that keeps her away from her home and leads her to freeze.
