The Significance of the Title

Selma Lagerlöf titles her story after the very object the wandering peddler makes and sells for a living. The little wire rattraps he peddles from door to door are humble, everyday things, yet the writer lifts one small idea he entertains to keep his own dark thoughts company and turns it into the organising metaphor of the whole tale. Because of this, the title is not just a label for the plot; it names the philosophy at the heart of the story.

As the tramp trudges the roads, cold and half-starved, he amuses himself with a bleak fancy: that the entire world is nothing but an enormous rattrap. It exists, he decides, only to bait and catch people. All the good things life dangles before a person — riches, comfort, food, shelter, warmth — are simply the cheese and pork set out to tempt the unwary. The moment anyone reaches out and takes the bait, the trap snaps shut and closes over them, and after that everything comes to an end. The peddler enjoys this idea partly because the world has always treated him unkindly, so it pleases him to think of the very world that shut him out as itself a snare that catches the comfortable and the greedy.

The title therefore works on two levels. Literally, the man sells rattraps. Figuratively, the rattrap is the entire scheme of worldly temptation, and every character can be measured against it. This double meaning is what makes the title so apt and so memorable. …