The Little Match-Girl has no shoes

The Little Match-Girl dies in the story. She dies “frozen to death.” She has used up her allotment of matches to engage in beautiful fantasies. This is how she has chosen to approach her state of need. There is the question of whether she really had a choice—there is the reality of difficult environmental conditions, and the truth that sometimes we are helpless—but we will consider that question later. Let us consider the inner state of helplessness.

We are told that when the Little Match-Girl “had left the house she had certainly had slippers on; but what use were they? They were very big slippers, and her mother had used them till then, so big were they. The little maid lost them as she slipped across the road where two carriages were rattling by, terribly fast. One slipper was not to be found again, and a boy had seized the other, and run away with it. He thought he could use it very well as a cradle, some day when he had children of his own. So now the little girl went with her little naked feet, which were quite red and blue with the cold.”

The Little Match-Girl is shoeless. What does it mean to be shoeless? It is difficult to move along (and get along) in life without shoes, shoes provide some protection in our contact with the ground. We come into contact with the ground through our feet. They are our anchors in the concrete world. Another way of saying this is that shoes aid our grounding in reality—“to walk shod is to take possession of the ground.” The Little Match-Girl has no shoes. The reality principle is disturbed, and this is in keeping with our overall theme that she engages in fantasy when her needs are unmet.

Symbolically, what do her mother’s “very big slippers” and the boy who steals her slippers suggest might be going on with her relationship to the ground?

Little Match-Girl, an overview

Watch an animated short of The Little Match-Girl:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ig26YFmgdc

I want to give a broad outline of this fairy tale’s psychological meaning. It depicts a particular psychological state of being, or in the language of Carl Jung, a complex. When one is in this experience, one feels very young—our heroine here is a young girl. The experience is one of feeling young, alone, cold and hungry. When this particular psychological state of being is constellated, we feel the interior coldness of disconnection from ourselves and others. We also experience the hunger of wanting to be fed, a metaphor perhaps of how we feel nourished when we have significant human contact and empty without it.

The story involves how the little girl goes about handling her psychological experience of cold and hunger, in other words her feelings of being loveless and devoid of human warmth. When one is “in a complex” one handles the feeling aspect of the complex in particular ways. How one handles the feeling, or the behavior itself, characterizes the complex. For some people, feeling devoid of human contact and warmth might manifest in a state of denial—“I don’t need anyone”—for example. The Match-Girl handles her feeling state by engaging in fantasy.

The Little Match-Girl strikes the matches and each time she does so, a fantasy image emerges. The matches themselves are metaphors for our libido, or in other words, how we expend our energy. We all have a limited amount of energy/libido and we make choices as to how we use it. Our libido is directed in particular directions. The little Match-Girl uses hers fantasizing about those things that she hopes to experience in her life, ultimately fantasizing about embracing the “only person who had loved her,” her now deceased grandmother.

She uses all of her matches (all of her energy) at this point to maintain the fantasy of her grandmother’s embrace and in the end, makes a wish that her grandmother take her with her when the matches burn out. The grandmother “took the little girl in her arms, and both flew in brightness and joy above the earth, very, very high, and up there was neither cold, nor hunger, nor care—they were with God!”

The story ends as we are told that the Little Match-Girl is found “frozen to death on the last evening of the Old Year. The New Year’s sun rose upon the little corpse!” We are told that the people who found her believed “She wanted to warm herself…” and that “no one imagined what a beautiful thing she had seen.”

As the readers of this story we are privy to the two perspectives, we know what the Little Match-Girl imagined, but was also know that she was not ultimately warmed (objectively) by the fantasy of her grandmother’s embrace, and that she died “frozen to death.”

The Little Match-Girl

A fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ig26YFmgdc

This fairy tale is set in winter. We are told, "It was terribly cold, it snowed and was already almost dark, and evening came on, the last evening of the year. In the cold and gloom a poor little girl, bareheaded and barefoot, was walking throught the streets."

The setting of the tale depicts not just the outer atmosphere, but the inner atmosphere, that is the psychological state of being. The weather is cold, this corresponds to a place of solitude, perhaps a loveless state of being--devoid of the warmth of real human contact.

This particular cold atmosphere is one which is not sought after by our little heroine but one imposed on her. She does not go to it willingly but instead she seeks warmth. We know this because of her fantasies--fantasies that emerge when she strikes the matches she has with her.

Stripped and Naked

In his "Psychology of the Transference," Jung uses a set of alchemical pictures to describe the transference relationship between doctor and patient. In these pictures from the Rosarium Philosophorum, there is an alchemical image that Jung titles "The Naked Truth." This image represents the archetypal theme of "getting naked." It is the archetypal theme in the individuation drama involving the stripping away of the false self and encountering onself as he or she really is. This kind of stripping also occurs in the myth of Innana's descent. Innana is a Summerian goddesss of sexual love, fertility and warfare. The story of Innana includes her well known descent into the underworld. "Innana's reason for visiting the underworld is unclear. The reason she gives to the gatekeeper of the underworld is that she wants to attend her brother-in-law's funeral rites. However, this may be a ruse; Innana may have been intending to conquer the underworld. Erishkigal, queen of the underworld and Innana's sister, may have suspected this, which could explain her treatment of Innana.

Innana dresses elaborately for the visit, with a turban, a wig, a lapis lazulli necklace, beads upon her breast, the 'pala dress' (the ladyship garmet), mascara, pectoral, a golden ring on her hand, and she held a lapis lazuli measuring rod. Perhaps Innana's garments, unsuitable for a funeral, along with Innana's haughty behavior make Erishkigal suspicious. Following Erishkigal's instructions, the gatekeeper tells Innana she may enter the first gate of the underworld, but she must hand over her lapis lazuli measuring rod. She asks why and is told 'It is just the ways of the Underworld.' She obliges and passes through.

Innana passes through a total of seven gates, each removing a piece of clothing or jewelry she had been wearing at the start of her journey. When she arrives in front of her sister she is naked. After she had crouched down and had her clothes removed, they were carried away. Then she made her sister Erec-ki-gala rise from her throne, and instead she sat on her throne. The Anna, the seven judges, rendered their decision against her. They looked at her--it was the look of death. They spoke to her--it was the speech of anger. They shouted at her--it was the shout of heavy guilt. The afflicted woman was turned into a corpse. And the corpse was hung on a hook."

Here is an image of this archetypal theme of nakedness in an Alanis Morrisette video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp_wtj879ak