This drawing was rendered by a young and promising artist entering the High School for the Performing Arts this coming fall semester, and is an image of the princess of the Princess and Pea story as she lays unknowingly atop a pea placed among the many mattresses and eider down bedding by the old queen:
The old queen upon the arrival of princess, “went into the bed-chamber, took all the bedding off, and put a pea on the flooring of the bedstead; then she took twenty mattresses and laid them upon the pea, and then twenty eider-down beds upon the mattress.”
Continuing with the interpretation of Andersen’s Princess and the Pea, what happens when we find ourselves laying on “twenty mattresses and twenty eider-down beds?” Usually, we fall asleep. There are two things at work in this aspect of the fairy tale, the height of the mattresses on which the princess is placed, and also the comfort of the eider-down: the height shows the distancing from the little irritant, and the eider down, the soporific state of regressed comfort.
The many layered bedding, and the soft sleep-inducing comfort of the eider down, is an image of a powerful psychological defense. Sleep, don’t notice those things that bother you, place them as far away from consciousness as possible, stay high above it, or sleep through it, ignore…this is the image of the bedding defense…and is the reason why such a delicate princess is needed: only a true princess will notice and be effected by the seemingly insignificant irritants that might prove themselves not so insignificant.
