Twenty Mattresses and Twenty Eider-down Beds

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.

The Princess and The Pea

The Princess and the Pea is a Hans Christian Andersen tale. There is a parallel myth found in Grimm’s called “The Pea Test.” In both tales, there is a test designed to ferret out if the princess that appears in the kingdom is a “true” or “genuine” princess. It is her “sensitivity” and “delicacy” that will prove her true:

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. On this the princess had to lie all night. In the morning she was asked how she had slept.

‘Oh miserably!’ said the princess. ‘I scarcely closed my eyes all night long. Goodness knows what was in my bed. I lay upon something hard, so that I am black and blue all over! It is quite dreadful.’

Now they saw that she was a real princess; for through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider down beds she had felt the pea. No one but a real princess could be so delicate.”

If we take the kingdom as a metaphor for our psychological landscape, what is needed in this kingdom? What is the delicate princess that is being sought? And why an image of delicacy that is so exaggerated, i.e. that the princess would turn “black and blue” because of a pea underneath so many mattresses and down beds?

The particular psyche represented by this kingdom is one missing delicacy or sensitivity. The word delicate is defined as “keenly sensitive as to feeling,” or “pleasing to the senses in a subtle way.” Sensitive as “a capacity of the organism or sense organ to respond to stimulation, irritability; the degree to which a radio receiving set responds to incoming waves, the capacity to be easily hurt…”

What is missing is responsiveness to stimuli including feelings, both one’s own and other’s feelings. The sensitive princess is perhaps the antidote to Rapunzel in the tower who is locked up in a sort of schizoid encapsulation. With this sensitive princess, you have entering the psychological landscape a princess who can respond to stimulation.

This particular princess however, is not only sensitive, she is hyper-sensitive. Her hyper-sensitivity is compensatory. To have this kind of sensitivity in reality might not me very desirable but what the image is doing is exaggerating to bring into focus the missing element in the kingdom, i.e. its compensating for an inability to be responsive to either inner or outer stimuli and feelings.

This particular psyche is someone who has difficulty registering their own reactions, they are not reactive enough to know when something either stimulates them or irritates them. Perhaps they sleep-enticed by that wonderful eider bedding, and don’t notice those little irritants that are full of meaning.