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The Princess and the Pea
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"The Princess and the Pea" (Danish: "Prinsessen paa Ærten"; literal translation: "The Princess on the Pea" is a fairy tale by Danish poet and author Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875). It was first published with three other tales by Andersen in an inexpensive booklet in Copenhagen, Denmark on 8 May 1835. The story is about a young woman whose royal identity is established through a test of her physical sensitivity.
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Encyclopedia
"The Princess and the Pea" (Danish: "Prinsessen paa Ærten"; literal translation: "The Princess on the Pea" is a fairy tale by Danish poet and author Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875). It was first published with three other tales by Andersen in an inexpensive booklet in Copenhagen, Denmark on 8 May 1835. The story is about a young woman whose royal identity is established through a test of her physical sensitivity. Andersen heard the story as a child and the tale likely has its source in folk material, but such a tale is not known in the Danish oral tradition. It is possible he heard a Swedish version. "The Princess and the Pea" and Andersen's six other tales of 1835 were not well received by the Danish critics who disliked the casual, chatty style of the tales and their lack of morals. The tale has since become a childhood favourite and one of Andersen's most enduring tales. In 1959, "The Princess and the Pea" was adapted to the musical stage in a production called Once Upon a Mattress starring Carol Burnett. The tale has since been adapted to television, a board game, and a spoof by Jon Scieszka.
Plot summary
The tale opens with a prince wanting to marry a real princss but failing to find one. Something is always wrong with those he meets; he cannot be certain they are real princesses. One night, a storm breaks (always a harbinger of either a life-threatening situation or the opportunity for a romantic alliance in Andersen), and a young woman drenched with the rain seeks shelter in the castle. She claims to be a real princess. The Queen decides to test the truth of her claim by placing a single pea on a bedstead and piling twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds atop it. There, the young woman spends the night. In the morning, she tells her hosts (in a speech colored with double entendres), that she endured a sleepless night, being kept awake by something hard in the bed. She is certain she has been bruised by it. The prince rejoices. Only a real princess has the sensitivity to feel a pea through twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds. The two are married, and the pea is placed in the Royal Museum.
Sources
In his preface to the tales in the second volume of Tales and Stories (1863), Andersen claimed to have heard the story as a child, but the tale has never been a traditional one in Denmark. As a child, he may have become familiar with a Swedish version, "Princess Who Lay on Seven Peas", that tells of an orphan child establishing her identity after a sympathetic helper (a cat or a dog) informs her that an object (a bean, a pea, or a straw) has been placed under her mattress.
Composition
Andersen deliberately cultivated a humourous and colloquial style in the tales of 1835 reminiscent of oral storytelling techniques rather than the sophisticated literary devices of the fairy tales written by les précieuses, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and other precursors. The earliest reviews criticized him for not following such models. In the second volume of the 1863 edition of his collected works, Andersen remarked in the book's preface on his first tales: "The style should be such that one hears the narrator. Therefore, the language had to be similar to the spoken word; the stories are for children, but adults too should be able to listen in."
While no materials appear to exist specifically about the composition of "The Princess and the Pea", Andersen does speak to the composition of the first four tales of 1835 of which "The Princess on the Pea" was one. On New Year's Day 1835, Andersen wrote a friend: "I am now starting on some 'fairy tales for children.' I am going to win over future generations, you may want to know", and, in a letter dated February 1835 he wrote the poet, Bernhard Severin Ingemann: "I have started some 'Fairy Tales Told for Children' and believe I have succeeded. I have told a couple of tales which as a child I was happy about, and which I do not believe are known, and have written them exactly the way I would tell them to a child." Andersen had finished the tales by March 1835 and told Admiral Wulff's daughter, Henriette: "I have also written some fairy tales for children; Ørsted says about them that if The Improvisatore makes me famous than these will make me immortal, for they are the most perfect things I have written; but I myself do not think so." On 26 March, he observed that "[the fairy tales] will be published in April, and people will say: the work of my immortality! Of course I shan't enjoy the experience in this world."
Publication history
"The Princess and the Pea" was first published in Copenhagen, Denmark by C.A. Reitzel on 8 May 1835 in an unbound 61-page booklet called Tales, Told for Children. First Collection. First Booklet. 1835. (Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. Første Samling. Første Hefte. 1835.). "The Princess and the Pea" was the third tale in the booklet, which included "The Tinderbox" ("Fyrtøiet"), "Little Claus and Big Claus" ("Lille Claus og store Claus"), and "Little Ida's Flowers" ("Den lille Idas Blomster"). The booklet was priced at twenty-four shillings (the equivalent of 25 Dkr. or approximately US$5 today), and the publisher paid Andersen 30 rixdollars for it (US$450.). A second edition of the booklet was published in 1842, and a third in 1845. "The Princess and the Pea" was reprinted on 18 December 1849 in Tales. 1850. with illustrations by Vilhelm Pedersen. The tale was published again, on 15 December 1862, in Tales and Stories. First Volume. 1862.
The first Danish reviews of Andersen's 1835 tales appeared in 1836 and were hostile. Critics disliked the informal, chatty style and the lack of morals, and offered Andersen no encouragement. One literary journal never mentioned the tales at all while another advised Andersen not to waste his time writing "wonder stories". He was told he "lacked the usual form of that kind of poetry...and would not study models". Andersen felt he was working against their preconceived notions. He returned to novel-writing, believing it was his true calling.
Charles Boner was the first to translate "The Princess and the Pea" into English but worked from a German translation that inflated Andersen's lone pea to a trio of peas in an attempt to make the story credible. Boner's translation was published as "The Princess on the Peas" in A Danish Story-Book in 1846. Boner has been blamed for missing the satire of the tale by ending with the rhetorical question, "Now was not that a lady of exquisite feeling?" rather than Andersen's joke of the pea being placed in the Royal Museum.
Commentaries
Andersen blends his childhood memories of a primitive world of violence, death, and inexorable fate with his social climber's private romance about the serene, secure and cultivated Danish bourgeoisie, which did not quite accept him as one of their own. The nervousness and humiliations Andersen suffered in the presence of the bougeoisie were mythologized by the storyteller in the tale of "The Princess and the Pea" with Andersen himself the morbidly sensitive princess who can feel a pea through twenty mattresses.
Unlike the folk heroine of his source material for "The Princess and the Pea", Andersen's princess has no need to resort to deceit to establish her identity; her sensitivity is enough to validate her nobility. For Andersen, "true" nobility resided not in one's birth but in one's sensitivity. Andersen's insistence upon sensitivity being the exclusive privilege of nobility challenges modern notions about character and social worth. The princess's sensitivity, however, may be read metaphorically as an indication of her depth of feeling and compassion.
The princess has provoked negative responses. Her sensitivity is viewed as bad manners rather than a manifestation of noble birth. Such views are said to be based on "the cultural association between women's physical sensitivity and emotional sensitivity, specifically, the link between a woman reporting her physical experience of touch and negative images of women who are hypersensitive to physical conditions, who complain about trivialities, and who demand special treatment."
Jack Zipes notes the tale is told tongue-in-cheek with Andersen poking fun at the "curious and ridiculous" measures taken by the nobility to establish the value of bloodlines. He notes that the author does make a case for sensitivity being the decisive factor in determining royal authenticity and that Andersen "never tired of glorifying the sensitive nature of an elite class of people."
Adaptations
"The Princess and the Pea" was adapted to the musical stage in 1959 as Once Upon a Mattress with comedienne Carol Burnett portraying the play's heroine, Princess Winnifred the Woebegone. The musical was revived in 1997 with Sarah Jessica Parker in the role. A television adaptation of "The Princess and the Pea" starred Liza Minnelli in a Faerie Tale Theatre episode in 1984. The story has been adapted to film, a board game from Winning Moves, and a spoof by Jon Scieszka as "The Princess and the Bowling Ball" in The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales.
Similar tales in world culture
Tales of extreme sensitivity are infrequent in world culture but a few have been recorded. In the eleventh century CE, Book XII of Somadeva's Kathasaritsagara tells of a young man who claims to be especially fastidious about beds, and, after sleeping in a bed atop seven mattresses newly made with clean sheets, the young man rises in great pain. A crooked red mark is discovered on his body, and, upon further investigation, a hair is found upon the bottommost mattress of his bed. An Italian tale called "The Most Sensitive Woman" tells of a woman whose foot is bandaged after a jasmine petal falls upon it. The Grimms included a "Princess on the Pea" tale in an edition of their märchen, but removed it when they discovered it belonged to Danish literary tradition. A few folk tales feature a boy discovering a pea or a bean assumed to be of great value. When the boy enters a castle and is given a bed of straw for the night, he tosses and turns in an attempt to guard the pea or bean from being lost. Others believe he is unaccustomed to sleeping upon straw and therefore of aristocratic blood.
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