Pippi Longstocking

Character Analysis

An Inauspicious Beginning

Pippi Longstocking is a nine-year-old girl living on her own because her mother died when she was just a baby and her father, a ship's captain, fell overboard on their most recent sea journey. With that beginning, you might expect her to have a tragic existence—to be poor, destitute, and malnourished, taken advantage of by society's less honorable members. But Pippi's existence is precisely the opposite.

Things Are Looking Up

She proves herself incredibly competent at looking after herself, managing to cook elaborate meals, care for uncommon pets (a monkey and a horse), keep her house reasonably clean, and remain positive and busy while awaiting her father's return from the presumed dead. Pippi tells both her mother, who she believes is watching her from above, and the sailors on her father's ship, "Don't you worry about me. I'll always come out on top" (1.2, 6), and by the time we finish the first chapter, we believe her. But even though she's overwhelmingly positive and resilient, Pippi isn't a simple, one-dimensional character.

More Complex Than Meets the Eye

Pippi is made up of numerous contradictions, which make her more human than her superhuman strength would suggest. The first and most obvious contradiction is exactly that: she's a nine-year-old girl with the strength of Paul Bunyan. This strength gives her power that's uncommon for anyone to have—and it was especially uncommon for a female, particularly a nine-year-old female, to have this ability to stand up to anyone, anywhere, anytime in the 1940s and 50s. In this way, her strength makes her both a hero and a bit of an outlier in the book.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

Another contradiction exists in Pippi's character: she lies like a rug, even though she knows and willingly admits that, "Yes, it's very wicked to lie" (1.22). Furthermore, her penchant for telling tall tales actually seems to be something about herself that she both rejoices in and regrets. In one breath, it's:

"You're right,: she said sadly, "I am lying." (1.20)

And in the next, it's:

"But I forget it now and then. … And for that matter, … let me tell you that in the Congo there is not a single person who tells the truth." (1.22)

And yet, despite all her lies, Pippi is very principled. She stands up against bullies and burglars, and even when she makes unethical suggestions, like keeping an old man in a rabbit hutch (2.38), we get the feeling that she says such things for their shock factor and has no intention of following through on them.

Freud on Pippi

In a lot of ways, Pippi could be seen as a selfish character, a kind of living id that seeks to do whatever she wants to do at any time with no regard for how it will affect others. She does, after all, completely disregard authority figures for her own amusement and resist attempts by others to get her to follow the rules.

At the same time though, Pippi is incredibly generous of spirit. She gives her friends numerous gifts and does more to rehabilitate Thunder-Karlsson and Bloom in one evening than the criminal justice system could do in ten-to-life. Her constant declarations of what's fair and unfair show that she does have a code of ethics and rules by which she lives, which indicates the presence of a superego.

And of course, the time she takes time to care for her pets and manage her household while also getting what she needs to be happy and healthy show us that there has to be a bit of ego in there somewhere balancing things out.

We All Have a Place in the Sun

Pippi is unable for most of the book to find a place where she truly belongs, and this becomes her great struggle. As she explains when things don't go so well at school, "You understand, Teacher, don't you, that when you have a mother who's an angel and a father who is a cannibal king, and when you have sailed on the ocean all your life, then you don't know just how to behave in school with all the apples and the ibexes" (4.56).

The one time that Pippi really attempts to fit in, by taking out her trademark braids and dressing up in what she perceives to be appropriate clothing for the coffee party, it has disastrous results. And of course the harder she tries with all of her Malin stories, the worse things get. At first this little setback seems to knock Pippi for a loop, but she re-establishes herself as the local wunderkind who is to be both feared and revered when she rescues two boys from a burning building to the cheers of the townspeople.

And when she declares in the very last line, "I'm going to be a pirate when I grow up. Are you?" we know that Pippi's comes to terms with all of her contradictions and found her place. She'll fit into society when she does, and she won't when she doesn't, but at all times she'll be herself.