OK. Let’s go straight to the point. If you don’t know what I am talking about, read the short story here. If you don’t know who Hans Christian Andersen is, take a look here.Have you ever questioned yourself what the hell that short story by Hans Andersen means? THE PRINCESS AND THE PEA is one of those texts you read the first time and think: There’s more there than the eyes meet. And then you read again, and again…Well, I read that a lot by now. And I also read about that. And I could find nothing to reinforce my interpretation of it, which let me even more intrigued. Am I seeing what nobody else sees?
Now, let me introduce you to my intriguing observations.
1. So a Prince is desperately in search of a real Princess. There are lots of princesses in the world, but none is good enough. Then, out of the blue, under a stormy night, a princess shows up at the city gate and who is going to open it? THE KING!!! A king opening gates? How come? In what reign would that happen?
“Suddenly a knocking was heard at the city gate, and the old king went to open it.”
2. The quantity of mattresses and eider-down beds forming forty layers on just a minuscule pea, placed there by the Queen herself. OK. It is a story. It has no commitment with the truth. Later on I’ll comment on that.
3. The Princess not only feels the pea under the forty layers, she also gets “black and blue all over my body”. What sensibility, hum?
4. Finally, Hans, ironically (at least it sounds ironic for me), ends the story stating:
“There, that is a true story.”
5. Isn’t it strange that no servants were present in the story?
So here is what I concluded from all of this: That Princess was raped by the king. And here are the evidences Dear Judge:
“what a sight the rain and the wind had made her look”
So the king had a “sight” of a girl completely wet by the storm. What happens with clothes when they get wet? Exactly! They glue in the body. And it is clear by the description of the scene that the king looked at her from up to down:
“The water ran down from her hair and clothes; it ran down into the toes of her shoes and out again at the heels”
Well, most of you may agree that the vision of a woman in wet clothes could be rather sensual.
The girl claims to be a Princess, but instead of investigating her origins, the Queen has the spectacular idea to put a pea under forty layers of mattresses and eider-down beds. She, a monarch, herself does what a servant should do: makes her bed.
“On this the princess had to lie all night. In the morning she was asked how she had slept.
“Oh, very badly!” said she. “I have scarcely closed my eyes all night. Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It’s horrible!””
The Princess was violated all night, probably by the king because it was him who had the sight of her at the door. But she is a “real” princess and knows that the royal secrets must be kept in silence. As the example of a woman who is beaten by her husband and says to her neighbours that she fell off the stairs, the princes says that “Heaven only knows what was in the bed”.
The Queen had the “perfect” excuse: a pea under the forty layers!
In my point of view, Hans uses the absurd to make us unveil the crime. He invites us to question all of those inconsistencies. There are no witnesses out of the family scope in the story. All the small activities that should be performed by servants like, opening the gate, making the bed, were made by the Queen and King themselves. What happened that night was very serious. It was a family secret, a pact. And the princess was intelligent enough to understand what was at stake. She was a real princess indeed!
“Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that.”
Hans also lets it clear in his closing sentence:
“There, that is a true story.”
So, “there”, people may have bought that ridiculous account, but not everywhere, not everyone, not me.