“The Little Match Girl” in America and the Topos of the Dying ... - Kiến Thức Cho Người lao Động Việt Nam

“The Little Match Girl” in America and the Topos of the Dying Child HENRIK R. LASSEN (University of Southern Denmark) To a modern reader, Hans Christian Andersen’s short tale “The Little Match Girl” 1 may seem to be something of an anomaly. It is not a fairy tale in the conventional sense of “a simple narrative dealing with supernatural beings that is typically of folk origin and written or told for the amusement of children”, according to Webster’s handy definition (1981: 816). And even as a fairy tale or wonder tale in a more specific Andersen sense, this short description of the lonely death of a poor child seems an oddity in terms of both form and genre. 2 Although the combined main theme and motifs of the story – its topos – was a popular convention entirely familiar to, and well loved by nineteenth-century readers, the sentimentalism that permeates the story tends today, in Jerome McGann’s words, to be “something of an embarrassment … so far as high culture is concerned—at best a topic of academic interest, at worst a perceived threat to the practice of art” (1996: 1). As I shall demonstrate, the effect of the narrative does not so much depend on standard character development and plot as it relies on the depiction of a meaningful moment presented interdependently with a set of complex traditional expectations. Andersen’s use of the traditional topos – a culturally encoded combination of certain stock motifs and a widely recognized theme – is unusual in some ways, but it also adheres closely to popular literary standards and metaphysical creeds of his time. For this reason a narratological analysis of the story “The Little Match Girl” must include the general cultural context of the story as well as the more specific context involving Andersen’s creation of the story and the various factors which may have influenced the author directly. The general context is often ignored in the analysis of Andersen’s work, but it is unavoidable if we are to focus on his stories as narratives, first and foremost. In spite of cultural distances and critical anti-sentimentalism, “The Little Match Girl” remains an effective narrative today at an elementary, emotional level. We approach the story from a vastly 1 Other English translations of Andersen’s “Den lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne” include, ” The Little Match-Girl”, “The Little Matchgirl”, “The Maiden With the Matches”, “The Little Match-Seller” as well as, confusingly, “The Little Matchstick Girl”. 2 From the earliest English translations of Andersen’s stories started to appear in the mid-1840s, they have often been called ‘wonder tales,’ ‘legends’, or simply ‘tales’ rather than fairy tales. As a perceptive, if anonymous, writer explained in The Riverside Magazine for Young People in 1869, “the stories by Andersen, which we all read and speak of, sometimes as fairy tales, sometimes as legends, or simply as stories, are, in the Danish language, called eventyr, a word that had the same origin, perhaps, as our adventure; the meaning is not the same, however, for the eventyr are adventures or scenes which have something wonderful about them, something out of the common line of incidents; and when Andersen published his “Eventyr fortalte for Börn,” he meant to say that these were strange stories of storks, of tops and balls, of mermaids, princes, and princesses, told for bairns.” “Hans Christian Andersen, The Danish Storyteller” (1869: 42 ).

“The Little Match Girl” in America and the Topos of the Dying …