Anatomy of a Princess: Dissecting What Makes a Princess “Real”
Gina Yoo (ISB 11)
Staunch contrarian and writer at Buddy!, Gina Yoo (11) is known for her extensive resumé from STUCO member to Gentle Cat Mom. When she is not busy with schoolwork and extracurricular activities, she indulges herself in her love for history and literature (at the end of the school year she will most likely be found coercing underclassmen into taking IB History). Her piece “Anatomy of a Princess”— where she takes on an ambitious literary and historical analysis of the original “Princess and the Pea— is a testament to her passions and her notoriously witty demeanor.
“Congratulations, Your Highness, you are now certified as royalty and to be wedded with the heir to the throne this afternoon. Your background consists of: one bad night of sleep. Sincerely, the Queen.”
Little girls all around the world are tossing and turning at night, with desperate hopes of receiving the letter above when they wake up in the morning. Why? Because they are being fed deceitful messages from the fairytales they read before going to bed. Our job as Gen Z Social Justice Warriors? To bring justice to our youth and prevent them from believing this distorted account of reality. Our mission, if we choose to accept it: to break down the anatomy of “The Princess and the Pea.” Pack up your backpacks, Dora the Explorers, because we’re talking a walk down memory lane and the stormy streets of the 17th century.
“The Princess and the Pea” was originally published in 1835 in Tales, Told for Children, First Collection, a small chapbook of three tales that also included “The Tinderbox” and “Little Claus and Big Claus.” Unlike Andersen’s later works, this chapbook was not well received by literary critics, likely due to its short length and the unconventional, casual style of its narration. Nevertheless, overtime, the story became loved by families and soon evolved into the common story we hear today.
The story begins with a prince on his continuing endeavor of finding a suitable wife (as all fairytales must). Thus far, all of the bachelorettes he had met were unworthy of the title of a princess: they always had bad table manners or were terribly unsightly (these struggles remain incredibly prevalent in modern day, as portrayed in American reality shows such as The Bachelor and Love Island). One stormy night, a young lady, drenched in rain and terrified of the worsening storm, sought refuge in the prince’s castle and claimed that she was a princess. The queen was skeptical about her self-proclamation and decided to secretly test her identity by placing a single pea under 20 layers of mattresses and 20 feathered beds, which the queen later invited the guest to sleep on. The queen did this knowing that if the guest was truly a princess, she would be so accustomed to living in luxury that she would be attuned to any sort of imperfection. Surely enough, when the guest awoke the next morning, she told the queen about how she slept horribly and was bruised by something hard under the mattresses. The prince took that as a verification that she was a princess and the one for him, and then married her.
(From illustrator Edmund Dulac)
Happy ever after.
Andersen claims that he had written the story after hearing it during his childhood; however, the peculiar thing about that statement is that there is no indication that any version of the story was commonly known in his home country of Denmark. There were, however, traditional oral tellings of a similar story in Sweden.
Back in the 17th century, it was widely accepted that members of the royal family were inherently different from regular citizens. That idea of royalty was essentially the premise of the Swedish traditional fairytale and Andersen’s later adaptation. In the original fairytale, the queen tested the guest in a series of trials, which occurred over the course of several nights. On the first night, the girl slept on 7 mattresses with a pea between each, and over the course of the trial, the queen began to insert increasingly smaller objects under the mattresses, including pieces of straw. At this point, you might be thinking that even air particles would bother this girl. The twist is that in the story, the girl was actually a princess, but could not detect the imperfections of her bedding. She was unable to prove herself a princess until her (get this) talking dog warned her about the queen’s trials. After heeding her dog’s advice, she complains to the queen about her bedding and marries the prince shortly after.
Happy ever after.
Hans Christian Andersen (From Britannica)
I prefer this version of the story for two reasons. Firstly, the queen’s experiment is much more grounded as she undertakes multiple trials and effectively utilizes an independent variable (thanks Science 10), and secondly, it’s not as ridiculous. Andersen likely wrote “The Princess and the Pea” in a satirical tone, but all I could think about when reading the story was about how the princess was supposed to give birth! I mean, if the princess got bruised because of a single pea under 40 thick mattresses, how is she to give birth to a whole 8-pound baby? She’d literally be ripped apart. The princess’s extreme reaction towards the pea was exaggerated to the point where it wasn’t simply royal delicacy, but rather a life-threatening medical condition. So why did Andersen exaggerate the sensitivity of his princess to such a great degree? Are there deeper historical connections between sensitivity and royalty that we are unaware of? To further explore that topic, we must go forward in time to the story of “The Most Sensitive Woman” in 1867 Italy, aka another woman who probably has a hypersensitive skin disorder.
“...to give birth to a whole 8-pound baby?“
Imagine a 25-year-old guy who lives in his parent’s basement and doesn’t have a job – yeah, he’s the prince. His parents, the king and queen, find him pitifully single so they send him to travel across the kingdom to find the most sensitive woman in the world to be his bride.
Meet girl 1: her entire head is bandaged up because one of her maids pulled out one of her hairs while brushing it. Not sensitive enough.
Meet girl 2: she thinks she has the flu because there was a wrinkle in one of her bedsheets. Not sensitive enough.
Meet girl 3: she has a cast on her foot because a flower petal fell on it. To the prince, that cast was made out of wife material.
Happy ever after.
Although “The Most Sensitive Woman” was published after “The Princess and the Pea,” it was not necessarily influenced by the earlier work. And seeing how so many more stories are similar to these ones in describing sensitive women and their qualifications as a princess, we can determine that the theme of royal delicacy was prevalent in 17th century fiction, and the idea of it was greatly honored by the older society.
Putting a graphic birth-giving visual and a broken childhood aside, what we as individuals can take away from all renditions of “The Princess and the Pea” is to not take things at face value. By reading about how not all real princesses completely fit the expectations of “true royalty,” as portrayed in the traditional Swedish tale, we can learn not to judge an individual by their superficial characteristics, but instead by their background and true identity. Likewise, after examining Andersen’s story through a contextual lens, we are able to determine that Andersen’s story was not just a story about a spoiled brat, but instead a satirical story shining light upon how society used to view and treat members of the aristocracy and royal bloodline. Guns Back down, SJWs. Don’t cancel Hans Christian Andersen just yet.
The End.
