Episode Transcript
Episode 12: An Antifascist Rewrite of the Little Match Girl
Matthew:
Hey everyone. No jingle or joke this time for this dark solstice week. This episode will be published on Christmas Eve, and I wanted to do something fitting. By the way: if this festival is in your heritage, I hope it brings you all the familiar warmth. If it’s not I hope the partiers or carolers or churchgoers around you aren’t too irritating: I hope they think to invite you in.
If they were to invite you in, what would they offer? Music, jokes, Santa hats, hot cider or chocolate. These are all fun and fine.
And if you knew nothing of Christianity and you started to look for its deeper stories, you could find some gold. The nativity passages in the gospel of Luke. In the Bleak Midwinter by Christina Rosetti. With lines like: Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, and what can I bring Him, poor as I am?
Or you might see Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, realizing he didn’t actually kill himself by leaping off that bridge, and that he could sober up, throw off his despair, and make it home in time to be the hopeful and supportive man he was meant to be.
There’s plenty of great stuff there. Like Dylan Thomas’s younger self in A Child’s Christmas in Wales, you TOO can plunge your hands in the snow and bring out whatever you can find.
But you may bump into stranger material that echoes the contradictions of a festival in which God himself is born in abject poverty and under state surveillance. In these more conflicted stories we see that a festival of light and generosity can both illuminate a culture of cruelty, and sometimes attempt, and fail, to pardon it.
We see it in Dickens offering the rehabilitation of Scrooge, if not the restructuring of the banking system that allowed him to become a twisted ghoul. We see it in a Christmas Eve story by Anton Chekhov called Vanka, about a rags-poor peasant boy who writes a letter to his grandfather begging to be saved from poverty and the beatings of his feudal master. He writes himself into a reverie of his grandfather appearing. But the story ends with us knowing the boy is still alone, still shivering, that the relief was all in his mind.
It seems there’s a period in European literature in which Christmas could be openly explored as a moral stress test for bourgeois society. This was a Christmas where charity, class, faith, sickness and death collided in an annual ritual, flaming like a yule log. Was this a more honest and Christian literature, in which poverty and death could appear amidst abundance?
By the time we get to the 1950s, the trope of the dangerous Christmas is fading. Maybe because modern capitalism, after two world wars, can no longer afford a ritual that exposes its own moral failures. Christmas is firmly rebranded as a festival of emotional safety, ideological reassurance, and the ecstasy of consumerism.
The most dangerous Christmas story I know from before our current age is The Little Match Girl, by Hans Christian Andersen, 1845. Dangerous in that it exposes the gross wealth inequality of Copenhagen at that time. More dangerous because Andersen uses that exposition to offer an opiate: a transcendent rather than revolutionary answer.
I’ve always hated this story, along with feminist and Marxist critics who read it as a failed attempt to paper over economic contradictions with the glow of angels. The grandmother’s saintly but silent return offers love, warmth, and recognition in place of wages, shelter, or care. The girl has been abandoned, and so she’s offered a private, gendered consolation that asks nothing of society. Andersen does not heal the contradiction between abundance and deprivation but aestheticizes it, allowing capitalism and patriarchy to remain unchallenged while the girl’s death is reframed as spiritual communion.
One of the worst things about this story is that in reading it, one absorbs the impression that her poverty is simply an act of God, that to accept existence you must accept that some young girls are warm and well fed, and others are freezing and starving. But it’s very particular who is freezing and starving. Andersen’s match girl is white with golden locks, and he invites the bourgeois reader to empathize with her as one of their own. Maybe this story played a role in bourgeois reformism of that time. But you would never guess from this story that the wealthy of Copenhagen have what they have not only because little working class girls can be exploited to death, but because in 1845, Denmark was still an economy dominated by capital from plantations worked by enslaved people in the Global South. There’s no world in which Andersen’s little match girl is not white, because the not-white person would carry with her a truth about Danish culture no religious vision could soothe.
I hate this story so much I rewrote it, or at least wrote a better ending for it starting when the grandmother appears. I think you’ll hear where that revs up. Up till that point it’ll be the old English translation from the 1940s by Danish American actor Jean Hersholt.
H.C. Andersen : The Little Match Girl
It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. Evening came on, the last evening of the year. In the cold and gloom a poor little girl, bareheaded and barefoot, was walking through the streets. Of course when she had left her house she'd had slippers on, but what good had they been? They were very big slippers, way too big for her, for they belonged to her mother. The little girl had lost them running across the road, where two carriages had rattled by terribly fast. One slipper she'd not been able to find again, and a boy had run off with the other, saying he could use it very well as a cradle some day when he had children of his own. And so the little girl walked on her naked feet, which were quite red and blue with the cold. In an old apron she carried several packages of matches, and she held a box of them in her hand. No one had bought any from her all day long, and no one had given her a cent.
Shivering with cold and hunger, she crept along, a picture of misery, poor little girl! The snowflakes fell on her long fair hair, which hung in pretty curls over her neck. In all the windows lights were shining, and there was a wonderful smell of roast goose, for it was New Year's eve. Yes, she thought of that!
In a corner formed by two houses, one of which projected farther out into the street than the other, she sat down and drew up her little feet under her. She was getting colder and colder, but did not dare to go home, for she had sold no matches, nor earned a single cent, and her father would surely beat her. Besides, it was cold at home, for they had nothing over them but a roof through which the wind whistled even though the biggest cracks had been stuffed with straw and rags.
Her hands were almost dead with cold. Oh, how much one little match might warm her! If she could only take one from the box and rub it against the wall and warm her hands. She drew one out. R-r-ratch! How it sputtered and burned! It made a warm, bright flame, like a little candle, as she held her hands over it; but it gave a strange light! It really seemed to the little girl as if she were sitting before a great iron stove with shining brass knobs and a brass cover. How wonderfully the fire burned! How comfortable it was! The youngster stretched out her feet to warm them too; then the little flame went out, the stove vanished, and she had only the remains of the burnt match in her hand.
She struck another match against the wall. It burned brightly, and when the light fell upon the wall it became transparent like a thin veil, and she could see through it into a room. On the table a snow-white cloth was spread, and on it stood a shining dinner service. The roast goose steamed gloriously, stuffed with apples and prunes. And what was still better, the goose jumped down from the dish and waddled along the floor with a knife and fork in its breast, right over to the little girl. Then the match went out, and she could see only the thick, cold wall. She lit another match. Then she was sitting under the most beautiful Christmas tree. It was much larger and much more beautiful than the one she had seen last Christmas through the glass door at the rich merchant's home. Thousands of candles burned on the green branches, and colored pictures like those in the printshops looked down at her. The little girl reached both her hands toward them. Then the match went out. But the Christmas lights mounted higher. She saw them now as bright stars in the sky. One of them fell down, forming a long line of fire.
"Now someone is dying," thought the little girl, for her old grandmother, the only person who had loved her, and who was now dead, had told her that when a star fell down a soul went up to God.
She rubbed another match against the wall. It became bright again, and in the glow the old grandmother stood clear and shining, kind and lovely.
"Grandmother!" cried the child. "Oh, take me with you! I know you will disappear when the match is burned out. You will vanish like the warm stove, the wonderful roast goose and the beautiful big Christmas tree!"
No Marie, I won’t. As long as you are alive, I will be here.
Marie was shocked that the apparition had spoken. And used her name. She could feel a thread of warmth glowing inside her.
“How can you be speaking, Nana?” Marie asked. “You’re dead.”
“The same way you are speaking,” said Nana. “You think of the words, and I say them. And I think you should leave that narrator behind. You’ve been hearing his voice, yes?”
“He’s been in my head for a long time.”
“That’s not your voice.”
“Why should I leave him behind?”
“Because he pities you, but he cannot imagine a better world for you. He didn’t even give you a name. All he wants is this final scene between us where some of your last matches show you a vision of me offering to make your death beautiful. I’m not going to do that.”
“What are you going to do, Nana?”
“First I want to keep us both alive. If you die, I disappear as well.”
“But wouldn’t I see you in heaven?”
“No. That’s not where I am. I’m inside your mind and heart and memory. So I want you to live. And that means more than just comforting you, and so let’s see what we can do. Do you have the strength to rub your hands together and warm your feet with them? We can’t stay here. But if we move to the lane behind these shops, you can light a proper fire to warm you. These people have so much they throw things away. It is not right that you have nothing.”
Nana drifted off and beckoned Marie as she turned the corner. In the alleyway, Marie found a barrel of workshop scraps: wood left over from making dolls, bits of paper used for accounting and shipping manifests, and scraps of fabric.
“Bind those around your feet,” said Nana.
With one of her matches, Marie soon had a blazing fire in the barrel, and warmth flooded through her.
“Won’t I be beaten if I’m found out?” Marie said.
“If you warm up, you’ll be able to run.”
The flames rose and threw brilliant shadows against the brick.
Then Nana fixed Marie with her gaze. “I heard the narrator say that your dad beats you for not selling enough matches.”
Marie looked down at the snow. Nana was talking about her own son, and she didn’t want to disappoint her with the truth.
“That is the worst thing he could do for the person he is responsible for. If he remembers me I’ll tell him so. He needs to think carefully about why he’ll never see you again and what that feels like. He needs to learn. But he also needs the support of comrades who will not let him pass his despair and anger down to children. Whatever he punished you for, it is not your fault.”
Marie’s body was now surging with heat and excitement, and hot tears streamed down her face, because she had never thought of herself as a blameless person. Maybe she was actually good, deep within herself.
A harsh voice called out from an upper window. A man, yelling that she should move on, that he would summon the police. Marie looked up at his face red with brandy and his neck cinched by a ruffled collar. She turned to Nana, who of course the man could not see.
“Time to run, Marie. Are your feet bound up?”
“Yes.”
Nana drifted forward out of the alley, leaving the dancing shadows behind, but still glowing with the fire. They turned down this street and that, crossed avenues and boulevards and then a bridge over to encampments beyond the city limits, where Marie could see fire burning in tiny shelters. As she got closer she saw that among the workers huddled around the flames there were young people, and families, people from other lands. Some people were singing and playing tin flutes. There was a fiddle.
Marie sat down on a short brick wall at the end of the row of shanties and gazed up at the stars. None of them were falling. Nana sat down beside her and said:
“Like your father, some of these men and women are so oppressed by the powerful they will not have the strength to help you. Some might even try to hurt you. But the only hope you and I have is that we find a friend here, whoever and from wherever, who will see you as a person, and can offer you a bit of shelter and food. I believe you can find a friend, because you and I would be friends like that. We would help if we could, right? We can’t be the only ones. It will be a long road to spring time, and to your ability to make a living. But this is where it starts.
Nana stood up and drifted down the row of lean-tos, turning to wave her hand for Marie to follow. Marie saw her duck into a stable near the end of the row. Marie approached the stable and looked around the corner to see a woman, her mother’s age, boiling soup over a small fire. Nana had disappeared, but the woman looked at her as Nana did, with her full attention.
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
“Sit down then. We all need our strength for the strike tomorrow.”
“What’s a strike?”
“We will not work, and we will block the railways and march on the factories to stop them from running. And the capitalists will know their power is limited.”
The woman went on, talking about things Marie couldn’t understand. She felt something she’d never felt before. There might be people in the world like her who knew they deserved to survive and be happy, and they could help each other do it.
The soup was hot and delicious. The woman said: “Get some sleep.”
Marie remembered Nana’s words about trust. She felt safe and serene, but would sleep with one eye open to see whether this woman and her people could be trusted. But she had a good feeling about it, and as she dozed she heard the carols rising in the camp, and wondered what the morning with these new people would bring.
There Hans, fixed it for you. Happy deep midwinter everyone. Take care of each other.
