The Little Match Girl (Den lille pige med svovlstikkerne, 1846) of Hans Christian Andersen is undoubtedly the tale par excellence of festive Christmas literature that holds a prominent position in the canon of Andersen’s work. It is a widely recognizable text that has fed the dreams and the cogitations of millions of readers all over the world and enjoys catholic acceptance.
A poor and defenseless little girl nestles in the street corner. She clenches in her cold hands the little matches and tries to warm herself up, as the snowflakes fall on her long, blonde hair. It is New Year’s Eve and the poor little girl, through the hallucinatory light of the matches, looks for homeliness and Christmas euphoria.
The Little Match Girl (just as generally Christmas literature does) takes advantage, to the outmost, of the atmosphere of the sumptuous feast and the general happiness, in order to heighten the tragedy of the lonely and persecuted people, particularly the children. Some binary oppositions orchestrate the story by adding tension and emotional vibration to Andersen’s tale and facilitate the reader’s sentimental communion with the text: the frozen road and the warmth of the kindled fireplace; the abundance of the Christmas table, the starvation and the indigence of the little girl; the illuminated homes and the tenebrous lofts in which the lame ducks live.
Nonetheless, within the intensely Christian and eschatological universe of Andersen, the hope of the metaphysical redemption is always present. Catharsis comes about through posthumous justification, when his angel-like heroine returns to Heaven and therefore is elevated above the harsh and unworthy reality, leaving behind the earthly difficulties and the insolvable social adversities. When the immaculate New Year’s sun rises, the little girl has already escaped towards the Garden of Eden, “where it is no longer cold and there is neither hunger nor fear” (The Annotated Andersen, 2008: 222).
It is doubtless very difficult for a contemporary writer to resort to a classic text, like the genuinely touching tale of Andersen, in an authorial field of post-modern suspiciousness, as well as in an era of doubt and miscellaneous barbarity. So one would plausibly question the meanings that the adaptation of The Little Match Girl have today, since the modern writer refuses, right from the beginning, to accept or cite the precursor text, without question or critique. Every adaptation has more or less the recognized ability to respond to the original text, from a new or revised political and cultural position, in order to highlight troubling gaps, silences or anachronistic ideas within the canonical text to which it refers.
Andersen’s tale is certainly a classic text with unsurpassable beauty and we as readers usually recollect it with a lyric diffusion, or perhaps, with a romantic élan. It is a text that delivers the bourgeois festive decoration of Christmas but at the same time in the foreground, there is the very figure of the child, innocent, celestial, fragile and affectionate. Made from angel stuff, the little girl reminds us of the eighth psalm of David: “Thou madest him a little lower than the angels;” (cf. Letters of St Paul, Hebrews 2.7). Andersen is deeply religious and his child focusing vision places it in mid air, between Heaven and Earth.
Nevertheless the contemporary authors have the advantage to rework, a well known text that serves as a cultural treasure, to which we endlessly return.The relationship between Andersen’s tale and its modern adaptations, could be described, according to Genette’s terminology, as an adaptive relationship between a “hypotext” (original text) and a “hypertext” (recreation) (Genette, 1997 : ix). The hypertext is allusive to the founding original text, so a good knowledge of the hypotext (of the source) is crucial for the reader, to fully appreciate the twists and the turns of the adaptation. As Genette says: “The hypertext invites us to engage in a relational reading” (Genette, 1997 : 399).
The basic aim of all modern adaptations of The Little Match Girl, is to relocate the source text in cultural, historical, temporal or geographical terms. Genette could describe this as a movement of proximation (1997 : 304) which brings the source tale closer to the frame of reference of today’s audience.
Zipes uses the term “transfiguration” to describe the reworking procedure of this kind. “Transfiguration does not obliterate the recognizable features or values of the classical fairy tale, but cancels their negativity by showing how a different aesthetic and social setting relativizes all values” (Zipes, 1991 : 180).
A quintessential adaptation of The Little Match Girl is the story of Allumette (1975) written and illustrated by the Alsatian writer Tomi Ungerer, who is well-known for his “irreverent, sly and anarchistic” (Zipes, 1991:182) revisions of some classic fairy-tales. Ungerer is undoubtedly a radical author of modern children’s literature who uses irony and clever plot’s reversals in order to break the sexual taboos of the old tales and to scrutinize some of the ideological clishés of the traditional narratives.
In his Allumette he chooses a simple and fluent, a rhythmic and cumulative narrating style that reminds us of the Bible as well as of the folktales. Allumette is an orphaned, homeless girl who lives in rags. It is Christmas and the little girl sells matches that nobody wants. The writer describes the festive atmosphere in a highly ironical way in order to demonstrate the reification and the commercialization of Christmas. The text as well as the illustration is full of ironic details such as the musician angel (a frequent iconographic motif of religious painting) which is decontextualized in the industrial setting of a modern metropolis.
Further on, Ungerer illustrates the urban setting in gloomy shades of black and grey. The city is a dystopian, infernal place inhabited by hostile people, hypocritical politicians and ferocious soldiers. Everywhere there are signs of destruction, over-industrialization and war: burnt trees, weapons, tanks, gas masks and military equipment, fire-rockets and even an active and destructive volcano. Of course in the foreground of this horrific setting there is the “endless procession of the miserables”.
The writer mocks and ridicules the sybaritic habits and the sensuality of the upper class and the bourgeoisie. Their luxurious way of living is opposed to the impoverishment and the starvation of the poor people.
Ungerer twists the plot of the original tale using a magic realism device. Allumette casts a wishing spell and all her wishes come true: Everything, everything Allumette had ever wished for, in her wildest dreams, came pouring down. Ironically the things that poured down were not only food or warm clothes but also items such as furniture, television, bicycles, teddy bears etc. associated with the consumerist and leisured society. Allumete decides to distribute the goodies to the poor. Soon an increasing number of volunteers (even the greedy baker Lacroute) came to help her. So the little match girl became the head of a charity foundation which offers help wherever there is famine, fire, floods or war.
Ungerer undermines also, in a very discreet way, the religious aspects of the original tale. The God is absent from this bleak modern world. The narrator says very cunningly that the flying cornucopia which was sent (by somebody-whom?) to the little girl was “possibly” a miracle or “a stunt, staged by the mayor to make himself popular”. But “most people thought it was Santa Claus. The real one”. In a materialistic society such as ours only the Coca-Cola saint with the rosy cheeks has a real existence, since people more easily believe in him than in God.
Ungerer chooses a highly ambivalent ending or even a self consciously naïve utopian ending which has not the meaning of “all’s well that ends well”, although the little girl escapes death by a miraculous incident. The author knows very well that all the philanthropic deeds or even the benevolent action of some individuals will never give rise to a really better world and will never change the status quo of society or the mechanisms that constitute social injustice and exploitation. Besides, how philanthropic is charity? Of course the author wants us to notice one more ironic picture of him: an ugly and kitsch wealthy lady offers to the poor people not only money but also a totally useless (and also very kitsch) decorative statue.
A subversive adaptation of Andersen’s tale is suggested by the famous illustrator George Lemoin in H.C. Andersen’s La Petite Marchande d’Allumettes (1999). Without changing the original text and through his illustration, Lemoin transmits the tale to the war in Bosnia and specifically to Sarajevo’s siege. For the accomplishment of the illustration he relied upon the work of two important press photographers, namely Jean-Claude Courtausse and Gérard Rondeau, who both covered this period providing the world with devastating photographic evidence of the sufferings and the hardships of the civilians.
The little match girl paces a landscape of Apocalypsis. The city appears besieged: it is illustrated as a field of ruin on the day after an enormous disaster. The girl, dressed in rags, encounters desperate children, debris, toppled statues (symbols of past glory) and graves. The illustrator approaches the source text with intentional objectiveness and with deliberate absence of sentimentalism, holding the strong subjective stance that tends towards dramatization. His pictures raises spectres of violence and monstrousness that might be seen as the stuff nightmares are made on. The overall impression which is conveyed is of cold and suffocating. Lemoin uses cold colours - that means colours with a low degree of brightness (greyish, greenish, brown etc.) - in order
The Little Match Girl (Den lille pige med svovlstikkerne, 1846) of Hans Christian Andersen is undoubtedly the tale par excellence of festive Christmas literature that holds a prominent position in the canon of Andersen’s work. It is a widely recognizable text that has fed the dreams and the cogitations of millions of readers all over the world and enjoys catholic acceptance.A poor and defenseless little girl nestles in the street corner. She clenches in her cold hands the little matches and tries to warm herself up, as the snowflakes fall on her long, blonde hair. It is New Year’s Eve and the poor little girl, through the hallucinatory light of the matches, looks for homeliness and Christmas euphoria.The Little Match Girl (just as generally Christmas literature does) takes advantage, to the outmost, of the atmosphere of the sumptuous feast and the general happiness, in order to heighten the tragedy of the lonely and persecuted people, particularly the children. Some binary oppositions orchestrate the story by adding tension and emotional vibration to Andersen’s tale and facilitate the reader’s sentimental communion with the text: the frozen road and the warmth of the kindled fireplace; the abundance of the Christmas table, the starvation and the indigence of the little girl; the illuminated homes and the tenebrous lofts in which the lame ducks live.Nonetheless, within the intensely Christian and eschatological universe of Andersen, the hope of the metaphysical redemption is always present. Catharsis comes about through posthumous justification, when his angel-like heroine returns to Heaven and therefore is elevated above the harsh and unworthy reality, leaving behind the earthly difficulties and the insolvable social adversities. When the immaculate New Year’s sun rises, the little girl has already escaped towards the Garden of Eden, “where it is no longer cold and there is neither hunger nor fear” (The Annotated Andersen, 2008: 222).It is doubtless very difficult for a contemporary writer to resort to a classic text, like the genuinely touching tale of Andersen, in an authorial field of post-modern suspiciousness, as well as in an era of doubt and miscellaneous barbarity. So one would plausibly question the meanings that the adaptation of The Little Match Girl have today, since the modern writer refuses, right from the beginning, to accept or cite the precursor text, without question or critique. Every adaptation has more or less the recognized ability to respond to the original text, from a new or revised political and cultural position, in order to highlight troubling gaps, silences or anachronistic ideas within the canonical text to which it refers.Andersen’s tale is certainly a classic text with unsurpassable beauty and we as readers usually recollect it with a lyric diffusion, or perhaps, with a romantic élan. It is a text that delivers the bourgeois festive decoration of Christmas but at the same time in the foreground, there is the very figure of the child, innocent, celestial, fragile and affectionate. Made from angel stuff, the little girl reminds us of the eighth psalm of David: “Thou madest him a little lower than the angels;” (cf. Letters of St Paul, Hebrews 2.7). Andersen is deeply religious and his child focusing vision places it in mid air, between Heaven and Earth.Nevertheless the contemporary authors have the advantage to rework, a well known text that serves as a cultural treasure, to which we endlessly return.The relationship between Andersen’s tale and its modern adaptations, could be described, according to Genette’s terminology, as an adaptive relationship between a “hypotext” (original text) and a “hypertext” (recreation) (Genette, 1997 : ix). The hypertext is allusive to the founding original text, so a good knowledge of the hypotext (of the source) is crucial for the reader, to fully appreciate the twists and the turns of the adaptation. As Genette says: “The hypertext invites us to engage in a relational reading” (Genette, 1997 : 399).The basic aim of all modern adaptations of The Little Match Girl, is to relocate the source text in cultural, historical, temporal or geographical terms. Genette could describe this as a movement of proximation (1997 : 304) which brings the source tale closer to the frame of reference of today’s audience.Zipes uses the term “transfiguration” to describe the reworking procedure of this kind. “Transfiguration does not obliterate the recognizable features or values of the classical fairy tale, but cancels their negativity by showing how a different aesthetic and social setting relativizes all values” (Zipes, 1991 : 180).A quintessential adaptation of The Little Match Girl is the story of Allumette (1975) written and illustrated by the Alsatian writer Tomi Ungerer, who is well-known for his “irreverent, sly and anarchistic” (Zipes, 1991:182) revisions of some classic fairy-tales. Ungerer is undoubtedly a radical author of modern children’s literature who uses irony and clever plot’s reversals in order to break the sexual taboos of the old tales and to scrutinize some of the ideological clishés of the traditional narratives.In his Allumette he chooses a simple and fluent, a rhythmic and cumulative narrating style that reminds us of the Bible as well as of the folktales. Allumette is an orphaned, homeless girl who lives in rags. It is Christmas and the little girl sells matches that nobody wants. The writer describes the festive atmosphere in a highly ironical way in order to demonstrate the reification and the commercialization of Christmas. The text as well as the illustration is full of ironic details such as the musician angel (a frequent iconographic motif of religious painting) which is decontextualized in the industrial setting of a modern metropolis.Further on, Ungerer illustrates the urban setting in gloomy shades of black and grey. The city is a dystopian, infernal place inhabited by hostile people, hypocritical politicians and ferocious soldiers. Everywhere there are signs of destruction, over-industrialization and war: burnt trees, weapons, tanks, gas masks and military equipment, fire-rockets and even an active and destructive volcano. Of course in the foreground of this horrific setting there is the “endless procession of the miserables”.The writer mocks and ridicules the sybaritic habits and the sensuality of the upper class and the bourgeoisie. Their luxurious way of living is opposed to the impoverishment and the starvation of the poor people.Ungerer twists the plot of the original tale using a magic realism device. Allumette casts a wishing spell and all her wishes come true: Everything, everything Allumette had ever wished for, in her wildest dreams, came pouring down. Ironically the things that poured down were not only food or warm clothes but also items such as furniture, television, bicycles, teddy bears etc. associated with the consumerist and leisured society. Allumete decides to distribute the goodies to the poor. Soon an increasing number of volunteers (even the greedy baker Lacroute) came to help her. So the little match girl became the head of a charity foundation which offers help wherever there is famine, fire, floods or war.
Ungerer undermines also, in a very discreet way, the religious aspects of the original tale. The God is absent from this bleak modern world. The narrator says very cunningly that the flying cornucopia which was sent (by somebody-whom?) to the little girl was “possibly” a miracle or “a stunt, staged by the mayor to make himself popular”. But “most people thought it was Santa Claus. The real one”. In a materialistic society such as ours only the Coca-Cola saint with the rosy cheeks has a real existence, since people more easily believe in him than in God.
Ungerer chooses a highly ambivalent ending or even a self consciously naïve utopian ending which has not the meaning of “all’s well that ends well”, although the little girl escapes death by a miraculous incident. The author knows very well that all the philanthropic deeds or even the benevolent action of some individuals will never give rise to a really better world and will never change the status quo of society or the mechanisms that constitute social injustice and exploitation. Besides, how philanthropic is charity? Of course the author wants us to notice one more ironic picture of him: an ugly and kitsch wealthy lady offers to the poor people not only money but also a totally useless (and also very kitsch) decorative statue.
A subversive adaptation of Andersen’s tale is suggested by the famous illustrator George Lemoin in H.C. Andersen’s La Petite Marchande d’Allumettes (1999). Without changing the original text and through his illustration, Lemoin transmits the tale to the war in Bosnia and specifically to Sarajevo’s siege. For the accomplishment of the illustration he relied upon the work of two important press photographers, namely Jean-Claude Courtausse and Gérard Rondeau, who both covered this period providing the world with devastating photographic evidence of the sufferings and the hardships of the civilians.
The little match girl paces a landscape of Apocalypsis. The city appears besieged: it is illustrated as a field of ruin on the day after an enormous disaster. The girl, dressed in rags, encounters desperate children, debris, toppled statues (symbols of past glory) and graves. The illustrator approaches the source text with intentional objectiveness and with deliberate absence of sentimentalism, holding the strong subjective stance that tends towards dramatization. His pictures raises spectres of violence and monstrousness that might be seen as the stuff nightmares are made on. The overall impression which is conveyed is of cold and suffocating. Lemoin uses cold colours - that means colours with a low degree of brightness (greyish, greenish, brown etc.) - in order
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