SOURCE: Esrock, Ellen J. “‘The Princess and the Pea’: Touch and the Private/Public Domains of Women's Knowledge.” In Research in Science and Technology Studies: Gender and Work, edited by Shirley Gorenstein, pp. 17-29. Stamford, Conn.: JAI Press, Inc., 2000.

When most people reflect on Hans Christian Andersen's “The Princess and the Pea,” they imagine a beautiful young maiden sleeping atop an enormous pile of mattresses. Though readers of all ages seem to recall this picture, what they do not recall with such uniformity is the story itself. What is even more curious are the radical differences in their understanding of what one would suppose was a straightforward fairy tale. Granted, Andersen addressed this story and his others to different audiences. While enchanting the small children gathered about him in various homes, he also enjoyed amusing the sophisticated adults who listened from afar. But differences in one's understanding of the story are not simply a matter of one's age.

The conflicting interpretations of Andersen's fairy tale are symptomatic of conflicting cultural attitudes about a subject that lies at the heart of the tale—women's bodily knowledge, which is represented textually through the sense of touch. Although the story poses interpretive complexities to its readers because of its use of touch and bodily knowledge, “The Princess and the Pea” also helps illuminate these complexities by exhibiting their cultural dynamics. Specifically, the story warns women of the consequences of transferring their bodily knowledge from the private domain into the public, where this knowledge is defined and judged by public standards.

Such a cautionary message might on first thought seem unlikely, as the tale concerns the rewards, not the punishments, given to a Princess for public, bodily proof of her royalty. In this paper, this claim is supported through an analysis of the story and the responses of its readers. Analysis will also show how this message is conveyed through a discourse in which the notions of public and private, expressed through various metaphors, alternate and overlap with one another, echoing the dual realities of women's lives.

A brief recounting of Andersen's story will refresh the reader's memories. “The Princess and the Pea” begins with the quest of a Prince to find a “real Princess.” His search has failed until one night there arrives at his castle a bedraggled young girl who claims to be a real Princess. Offered hospitality by the Prince's wary mother, the girl spends a wretched night, tossing and turning in a bed into which the Queen has placed a small pea under 20 mattresses and 20 comforters. When the Queen inquires in the morning as to the accommodations, the girl describes sustaining terrible black and blue bruises from something in the bed. The Queen is delighted because this hypersensitivity reveals, beyond the power of words, the girl's royal lineage. She is accepted as a real Princess and promptly married to the Prince. The pea goes on display in a museum.

From a few casual conversations with friends about this story, I discovered that people tended to characterize the Princess negatively. Interested in learning more about this reaction, I conducted a set of interviews with students and with a number of my colleagues. Guiding these interviews was the premise that memory is reconstructive, a well-accepted concept articulated by psychologist F. C. Bartlett (1932) in his experiment with British schoolchildren. Using a folk story from a foreign culture in which events occurred that were not explainable within the cultural experience of the students, Bartlett had the children read the tale and recount it at intervals over a number of years. He found that as time went on the students not only remembered less of the story but that they misremembered the story in ways that made sense of those elements that were originally foreign to them. In other words, in remembering the story they were reconstructing or “naturalizing” it consistent with their own cultural experiences.

Under ideal conditions I would have had access to my interview subjects at the first time in childhood that they encountered “The Princess and the Pea” and at subsequent intervals until the present day. Such a comparison of adult and child might have reliably demonstrated naturalizations over time that serve to explain incomprehensible aspects of the story. Moreover, adult responses might also have shown a slightly different kind of reconstruction than the one that Bartlett discusses. I refer to a reworking of the original responses in terms of its significance within a larger cultural pattern. This would not so much involve an alteration of the story elements as a description of them in terms of adult systems of knowledge. For example, one interview subject reported her childhood concern about no one accepting the Princess' identity. As a child, this person might have said simply “And no one believed she was really a Princess.” The term “identity” is an adult expression that conveys a range of issues about the self that a child would not yet grasp.

Though lacking these experimental conditions, I decided to ask my students and colleagues for their memories of childhood. I reasoned that at least Andersen's story existed as a point of reference against which to evaluate any reported changes, though there was still the problem of people not having heard the same version of the story and, beyond this, of people lying about their memories. As these interviews were not intended to serve as rigorous social science experiments but inquiries used to elicit provocative material, I chose to take the interviews at surface value: I had no reason to doubt the sincerity of the respondents and therefore accepted their proposed memories as truthful reconstructions of childhood experiences. The responses were used as indicators of naturalized changes made from the original Andersen text and, more extensively, as adult conceptualizations of childhood experience, which would reflect something about both childhood and adult responses to the tale.

I interviewed two groups of people about their early reactions to the Andersen story: the first was a group of colleagues—individuals from different disciplines who possessed strong interpretive skills. The second was a class of 17 undergraduate students from a 1998 Women Writers course given at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I asked each group to try to recall what they thought about the story when they were children and to let me know if they had encountered recent versions of the tale. I planned not to examine the responses of those who had recent exposure to the story in order not to taint the reconstructed childhood memories. As the students were in a literature class, I urged them not to do any kind of “literary interpretation” but just try to recall their early impressions. I made a similar request to my colleagues.

The responses I collected and analyzed displayed naturalizations, which Bartlett would have described as a result of the story conflicting with cultural norms, and curiously conflicting interpretations. For the most part, the responses of my colleagues showed greater complexity than those of the students. This I attribute to their having reconstructed more of their memories in terms of their own cultural experiences, which are more verbally and conceptually developed than those of the students. My interest, however, lies not so much in these differences in the level of complexity but in the similarities among different kinds of responses and the evidence of naturalizations and conflicts that characterize the full spectrum of reactions.

Evident on this spectrum were naturalizations that appeared in the students' efforts to explain parts of the story that were incomprehensible or were not detailed in the original version. Specifically, one student notes that the Princess “fell off a boat or something and swims to the castle of some other royalty,” which explains the woman's mysterious bedraggled appearance at the door of the castle. Another student said of the Princess that “She was orphaned or something,” a response which explains why no one knew she was a Princess or worried that she was missing. Attempting to make sense of the many mattresses, one student recalled: “The Princess kept complaining because of a small pea in her bed. It was making her uncomfortable and several [people] kept adding bedding to try to make it better.” Here the student eliminated the pea test by imagining that everyone was trying to make the poor girl more comfortable. Finally, one student recalled the story as having to do with a man who senses a small lump in the bed, and another student mused, “I remember a little Princess who plants a pea and believed it to be magical. But I think that is the story of Jack and the Beanstalk.” Perhaps these two later alterations might reflect the reconstructing of the tale into something that is more familiar—either by assimilating the story into another or substituting the gender of the main character so as to parallel familiar hero quest stories.

These naturalizations make sense of something that is unusual and not easily reconciled with norms within our culture. More common than such naturalizations, though reflecting a similarly unfamiliar quality of the story, are the interpretative conflicts generated by the fairy tale. These are apparent when the interview responses are grouped together in terms of the three topics that seemed to produce the most striking differences in interpretation. They are: (1) the girls' sensitivity, (2) the test, and (3) the girl's character.

The first concerns the exceptional sensitivity that marks the disheveled girl as a real Princess. Some students interpreted this sensitivity as a metaphor for conventional moral goodness:

• • Wow, if I can remain good and pure, I'll pass whatever tests to get my Prince charming.
• • I felt very sympathetic for the Princess. She had something beautiful inside her, but the Prince couldn't see that, when he realized it in the morning, I felt vindicated. I like happy endings.

I also received a literal interpretation of this sensitivity:

• • I used to think that it was really odd that someone could be that sensitive. I used to sleep on all my toys when I was little.

Predominantly, there were negative assessments of this sensitivity, whether interpreted literally or metaphorically:

• • I thought she was prissy and why would they want her to believe that.
• • I got that refined girls have to be sensitive and be stereotypically squeamish. We should be affected by small things and be of a fragile mind.
• • At the time I was confused and a little put off that Princesses were so sensitive, little boy that I was.

On the matter of the test, some readers did not interpret it metaphorically as part of a means of ascertaining true value but responded to it literally, as a superhuman feat, which they accepted or ignored:

• • Ridiculous that a Princess could feel a pea underneath her.
• • How come she never realized this simple cause in the first place … instead of going through all that.
• • I was at first confused and in disbelief, because, logically, a pea would be crushed by the weight of the many mattresses … [I] disregarded it as pure imagination.
• • True love won out at the end. It didn't matter to me [about] the pea being felt under the mattresses. Was somewhat of a farfetched idea.
• • It made absolutely no sense to me.

One student seemed to personalize the test, confessing:

• • I remember thinking I would never sleep in the castle to prove I was a Princess.

Most importantly, in regard to the girl's character the majority of students judged her negatively when she reported having spent a miserable night:

• • This was a very ungrateful Princess, not like other fairy tales.
• • The only reaction I remember having was how spoiled she was and ungrateful.
• • I could never complain about something so stupid. My mom wouldn't have stood for it.

Similar responses were echoed by my colleagues. Though they responded somewhat differently, they also reacted to negative judgments about the Princess' sensitivity to the pea—whether their own judgments or those of others. One woman told me that when she and her husband want to refer to someone making a big fuss over something (e.g., being overly sensitive), they use the term “Princess Pea.” A second woman recalled not liking “the complaining girl” and concluded, “I thought it was bad to be aristocratic.” Along these same lines, another reported feeling “What an incredible lot of trouble to go to find someone who is going to be a lot of trouble.” For one man, this fussy quality was a trait of girls: “I thought it was about how incredibly hypersensitive some little girls are to the slightest discomfort.”

Some of the responses were not so uniformly critical of the Princess. Applying the Princess' sensitivity to herself, one woman said, “It taught me not to be proud of my sensitivities but to try to hide them because they were trouble to other people.” Another spoke of feeling defensive of the Princess for “not being believed about something as important as one's identity.” Though she had only a vague recollection of the story, this same woman recalled that it had to do with “oversensitivity and pain” … something about pain as a threshold … people will believe your pain.” Another woman remembered accepting her mother's characterization of her as being like the Princess but defending this special sensitivity with retorts like, “So, what's wrong with that!” One woman actually recalled feeling conflicted about the story. On the one hand, she mused, “It was supposed to be good to have this special power and to be rewarded with a Prince. On the other hand, what a waste of talent.”

When these responses are taken as a whole, they show several common interpretive conflicts: One concerns whether the girl is to be judged positively or negatively, even though she is characterized positively within the narrative. The other is an unresolved shifting between literal and metaphorical levels of meaning, that is, a lack of uniformity in deciding what is literal and metaphorical. For example, some people interpret the pea test literally, as a legitimate measurement of a power and others take it metaphorically; some take the girl's sensitivity as a metaphor of her goodness and others as a literal trait.

The professional reviewers of the story in Andersen's time and the present day showed some of the same interpretive conflicts as those noted above. Admittedly, if one first hears the tale as an adult one would likely interpret it to be about a kind of sensitivity that is emotional rather than physical—and not worry about the durability of peas. However, even with a metaphorical interpretation of sensibility, critics have not been unanimous on how to interpret Andersen's ethical stance. One reviewer in Andersen's time (cited in Toksvig 1932, p. 177), appalled by the rewards granted the hypersensitive Princess, criticized the story for the moral lesson it would teach children:

As for ‘The Princess and the Pea,’ it seems to the reviewer not only indelicate but also indefensible, in so far as the child might absorb the false idea that great ladies must always be so terribly thin-skinned.

But even if one feels that the story is not about aristocratic gentility but emotional sensibility, it is still unclear whether Andersen is criticizing or praising it. Commentators disagree. Signe Toksvig (1932, p. 177) talks about the tale as a teasing rebuke against emotional oversensitivity, suggesting that Andersen was writing it for his little friend Henriette Wulff, “who has been so sensitive in a very small matter.” From this perspective, the tale is ironic. On the other hand, contemporary critic Pavel Trost (1985, p. 298) notes that the people who have most sensibility in the culture are poets like Andersen and describes the story's theme as the “self-mirroring of a poet.” Admittedly, by all accounts Andersen was a high-strung, stereotypically “sensitive” poet, whose works are understood to increasingly reflect on personal questions of sensibility, truth, and inner beauty.

I suggest that what fuels all of these interpretive conflicts is a component of the tale that is mentioned only occasionally in the interviews. It does not figure into the readers' assessment of the girl's character, though it is the character trait that directs the plot. I refer to the girl's heightened sense of touch. The sense of touch and bodily knowledge generates these confusions because of its particular cultural history. History validates touch in some contexts, for instance, when associated positively with nurturing and sexuality. Yet throughout history touch has also been denigrated in comparison with the other senses, especially when touch is associated with a subordinate aspect of women, as also occurs in connection with emotional and physical nurturing and sexuality.

Certainly, we have many reasons to value touch. Developmentally, touch is among the first senses to mature, presumably because it is most necessary for survival at the time. Opinion is divided as to whether the various senses are unified at birth and subsequently individuated or whether the senses are originally compartmentalized and integrated with one another over time. Either hypothesis is consistent with the well-accepted observation that vision and touch are almost immediately interconnected in infants. That is, infants seem to use one sensory modality to express something about the other (Stern 1985). Such intermosal connections not only demonstrate the extent to which touch is networked into other complex sensory systems (e.g., vision), but suggest that touch might be experienced through some kind of sensory translation—whether from sight to touch or touch to sight. Speculations about such interconnection abound. Are they neuroanatomical or metaphorical? In Touching, Ashley Montague notes that vocal sounds, specifically repetitive sounds, such as those of Eskimo poetry, create a “soothing tactile quality” (1971, p. 23). Similarly, the rhythms of Eskimo poetry might well imitate the rhythmic pattern of motion felt by the child who rides continuously on the mother's back (p. 232).

Although the importance of being touched to the emotional and physical development of baby animals was demonstrated by Harry Harlow in the 1960s and in numerous subsequent studies of animal primates, long-standing, cultural wisdom has been that the young need holding and stroking. The physical grooming rituals of animals, in which touch is the vehicle of social communication, can be discerned in the highly paid services of human masseuses, cosmeticians, and hair stylists.

Touch functions positively not only for purposes of physical and emotional health but also for spiritual health and well-being. Throughout the centuries spiritual healers have touched their patients. Touch might draw out negative energies, reconstitute such energies, or infuse healthy energies into the sick. Christians during the Middle Ages undertook arduous pilgrimages to sites having holy relics that they might physically touch. Later generations sought out the healing touch of the secular Monarch, who strove to embody religious powers.

But touch also elicits negative associations. One has a foreshadowing of this when looking through the massive folk-motif indexes (Thompson 1966, pp. 187-189). Under the category “Extraordinary Powers of Perception,” I found numerous references to extraordinary sight, such as “the person who ‘finds tracks of swine stolen seven years before his birth’” (Welsh) and the man who “can see celestial nymphs dancing in divine world” (India). I also found many references to extraordinary hearing, such as the man who “can hear grass (wool) grow” (Icelandic, Irish) and the man who “can hear one sleeping by putting ear to ground” (Italian). When shifting from these distal senses, which communicate though distance, to the proximal sense of touch, which is referred to as “marvelous sensitiveness,” I found only four references. One, of course, is “The Princess and the Pea.” Another, closely referenced, is to an Indian tale in which a “Prince thinks he has slept on a beam and a hair is found on his bedding.” The third pertains to a man who feels the point of a little thorn in his clothing, and the fourth to an adulterous woman who fakes an injury from rose leaves falling on her. None of these four tales has the spiritual, magical, or practical power that is communicated by the folk motifs about sight and hearing.

Although such motifs emerge within diverse cultural traditions, I shall focus only on those within Western culture, where their influence would be more direct on Andersen and on our reception of the tale. In this context, the negative aspects of touch might be traced back to Aristotle's definition of the senses. Sight, according to Aristotle, is the keenest of the senses. It is clear and pure. Aristotle considered touch to be the most fundamental sense because it is basic to animals, which sometimes lack the other, more developed senses, and because touch works in the most direct manner. However, because of the fundamental nature of touch, it is the most degraded of the senses, judged on ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical grounds.

Such condemnations of touch were reflected in the ascetic movement of Christianity, with its denial and mortification of the flesh. Aquinas reaffirmed this basic sensory regime with his privileging of the intellect over the senses—and thus more intellectual senses over lower senses, of which touch is the lowest, and of men over animals. This same rank order is echoed throughout the centuries in religious and philosophical traditions, which similarly polarized the mind and the body, rationality and emotion.

Within these orderings, touch stands on the same side as emotion and body, a connection that is reflected in our ordinary linguistic expressions. When we are emotionally moved by something—an experience, a picture, a song—we say “it's touching; I'm touched.” Here we are attributing something with the capacity to effect us/touch us/through its emotional power. Thus, we find a cultural link between touch and emotion, emotional sensitivity, and, perhaps also, artistic sensitivity.

Predictably, gender figures into these sensory orderings. Women, like animals, are more closely associated with touch than with the intellective, abstractive, distance senses like sight. The moral dimension appears clearly when touch is understood as animal touch—sensual touch, which is the powerful, unholy weapon of women. Indeed, some argue that women are more sexually responsive to touch than to sight, unlike men (Irigiray 1985, pp. 25-26). Curiously, women are also linked with touch not through associations with sexuality but with emotionality. As linked to the animal side of the epistemological spectrum, their mode of knowing is less abstractive and more emotionally guided. Women are regarded as emotionally vulnerable—in other words, sensitive. The clustering of these various associations leads to the easy translation of touch sensitivity into emotional sensitivity.

By highlighting some of these vicissitudes in the cultural history of touch, I do not mean to suggest that the other senses have not also been subject to positive and negative associations. Sight, for instance, is sometimes hailed as the supreme sense yet also dismissed as inferior to the faculty of abstract understanding. In contrast to sight, however, touch has been more consistently designated as inferior within Western philosophy and the general culture, especially when it is associated with the inferior or marginalized status of women. As witnessed by the folk-indexes, even outside of the Western tradition touch has not been assimilated into the ranks of supersensory powers that are traditionally slotted into fairy tales and other popular forms.

This cultural history supports two conclusions. First and foremost, what motivates some of the readers' criticisms of the Princess—a reversal of the story's positive characterization of the girl—is 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.

The second conclusion draws also on the readers' responses to the story. I suggest that the use of touch as the positive test marker in “The Princess and the Pea” so unbalances one's understanding of the tale—even for children—that readers shift between the literal and metaphorical levels of the story, grasping onto various possibilities of meaning. This shifting about permits parts of the narrative to emerge into the forefront of one's awareness, where they are judged by different standards than would be the case in a more conventional fairy tale, where it is clear what is fanciful and metaphorical. The pea test is not understood as proof of nobility but as a reflection of poor manners.

These interpretive shifts might be further explained by reference to the interview responses. As noted above, one of the readers recalled that pain was integral to the test and another noted thinking that she would never stay in such a castle. The same reader who recollected pain also spoke about how terrible it was that no one believed the girl. A third reader spoke about how she felt obliged to keep her needs to herself, as they would pose a burden to others. The idea that the girl's physical condition, personal identity, or emotional needs were not respected by other people might arouse an element of ambivalence about the favorable outcome of the story. Such ambivalence might parallel historical attitudes towards touch, which do not make it a conventional sign of royalty. In sum, they would destabilize one's conventional fairy tale reading of the text and thus open the field for alternative interpretations.

Although Andersen's fairy tale generates striking interpretive conflicts, the story also illuminates the issues of touch by commenting on a particular aspect of women's bodily knowledge. “The Princess and the Pea” cautions women about the consequences of translating their bodily knowledge from the private domain into the public. In advancing this thesis, I shall use the following broad, metaphorical notions of public and private. The most literal uses of the terms concern institutions. “Public” here pertains to public institutions, symbols, and practices that organize commerce and other aspects of society outside the home, whereas “private” refers to domestic institutions, practices, and symbols.

A broader use of these terms applies them to competing epistemologies and bodily systems of perception conventionally associated with these epistemologies. What I characterize as public pertains to intersubjectively observable phenomena, things that need a public to confirm, and to the sensory modality of sight, which provides knowledge at a distance from its object and is thus most appropriate for knowing in large public contexts. By contrast, the private concerns subjective experience, not verifiable to the public, and the sensory modality of touch, which provides information only when the stimulus is close to the private body of the perceiver.

Public and private also characterize different kinds of story telling. What is public pertains to written literature that is available to a wide public audience who can experience it outside of any particular home setting where it might be orally told. In contrast, the private refers to the tradition of oral telling, which is temporally and spatially localized in its availability, and, in Andersen's world, generally confined to domestic environments. Along these same lines, public would refer to literary forms that are highly conventional and private to those forms that are considered more informal.

Andersen's storytelling combines features of both public and private. The story is circulated in printed editions, as a reproduced object available to the public and requiring no determinate site of enactment. On the other hand, the manner of telling the story is that of an oral recitation in a private home, where the audience and storyteller confront one another directly in a specific time and place. Moreover, the public presentation of the story is that of a fiction, a fairy tale and yet it might be argued that the story has an autobiographical component, as do many other Andersen tales.

Consider finally the mixture of public and private elements that the story itself combines. The Prince expresses a desire to marry a “real Princess” and though he “traveled all over the world to find one. … Nowhere could he get what he wanted.” The marital interests of a Prince are of a mixed sort. On the one hand, the selection of a mate can be regarded as something intensely personal and nonpublic. Certainly the quest for a “real Princess” and not someone who merely occupies a public position of nobility could reflect an interest in the private sphere, a reality that transcends conventional cultural rankings based on lineage. Accordingly, his quest could be understood as a challenge to public classifications. On the other hand, the marriage of a Prince is no private matter. It is a matter of state and a public performance. In this light, the search for a “real Princess” could reflect a heightened commitment to the public sphere, where the best royalty gets the best, that is, the most real Princess. Indeed, the very quest might reflect an elitist demand for the best.

This ambiguity of public and private characterizes the introductory lines of the story and continues when the self-declared real Princess arrives. When “knocking was heard at the city gate. … The old King went to open it,” and when the bedraggled girl was taken to bed, it was the Queen who “took all the bedding off the bedstead” and made up the bed. As these are ordinarily tasks assigned to servants, the fact that the King and Queen perform these homey tasks suggest not the public realm of kingship and government but of private domesticity.

Wet and disarrayed, the girl's appearance does not reflect the public presentation of royalty, despite her claim to be a “real” Princess. If she is indeed “the real” Princess, her qualifications, at that moment, cannot be defined visually by the conventional public symbols—and yet, this is what will be required.

In response to the dearth of the semiotic codes denoting princesshood—no less “real princesshood,” the Prince's suspicious mother devises a test. The very notion of a test occupies a well-established place in public discourse: it offers results that many people can agree upon. In other words, like any piece of conventional science, it is intersubjectively verifiable. Curiously, this particular “public” test monitors a highly subjective experience, one that is associated with the intimate sense of internally experienced touch. Moreover, the test is conducted in the most intimate of private settings—in bed—during the mental state least accessible to public inquiry—sleep.

The outcome of this test is critical to establishing the claims of the Princess and to granting her an identity within the public sphere. Note, the queen asks “how she had slept” and the girl responds “Oh, very badly” and goes on to explain that she was lying on a thing so hard that she sustained bruises all over her body, “I am black and blue all over my body. It's horrible!” What the girl describes is an inner feeling—pain—and the visible manifestation of this pain, the bruises that only she can see—an inference I draw as otherwise the question is meaningless. These experiences from the private sphere are communicated, in language, by the girl to the mother, who occupies the site as a guardian of the entrance to the public sphere of royalty—kingship, the law of the father—through union with her son. In effect, the girl's body and soul are invisible—she claims to be a real Princess but no one believes her, until a test permits her to enter the public domain through bodily pain. The Prince then takes her for his wife, completing the program for marriage inscribed within the public sphere or, in the alternative interpretation, recognizing the inner beauty of a real Princess, unadorned, that constitutes a private realm of being.

The pea, which functioned originally as an anonymous instrument of discomfort in the private bedchamber becomes officially recognized and encased in glass within a public museum, like a trophy from a hunt, or a relic worthy of respect. Trophies and relics are objects, available to public scrutiny—through vision not touch—that have lost their original status and now function as objects commemorating this status. Insofar as this museumification moves the object from its use value to a symbol of its use value, I suggest this semiotic placement locates the object within definitions of the public sphere. The final phrase in the description of the pea's instatement within the museum, “where it may still be seen, if no one has stolen it,” testifies, on the one hand, to the importance of sight as the sensory modality that confirms public value—recall, the Princess was doubted because she did not “look” right. The phrase also recognizes that the public object may have been reappropriated back into the private realm—that is, stolen and circulated in the nonofficial nonpublic spheres of exchange. Thus, the possibility of a return to the private concludes the actual story line.

On the surface, “The Princess and the Pea” does not seem to provide a cautionary message, as the girl is rewarded for demonstrating publicly that she is has the sensibility that marks her as a Princess. This surface reading dissolves, however, when the reader's critical judgments about the girl are taken into account. In light of the readers' responses, the tale reveals how the girl's private sensitivity to touch would never have been criticized by the reader—and rewarded by the story—were her bodily knowledge of the pea, and all that such knowledge represents about women's corporeal experiences, not made public. In reporting her experience in language, she translated this non-verbal experience into the public arena. In other words, the private possession of knowledge, and knowledge about the private sphere conventionally associated with nurturing and sexuality, would not have been judged negatively by readers. Only when such private, bodily knowledge is brought into the public domain is it subject to negative judgment. By immersing the reader in a story that shifts imperceptibly between public and private, Andersen permits the reader to experience symbolically the shifting domains of women's corporeal knowledge.

Works Cited

Andersen, H. C. (1835) 1975. Hans Christian Andersen: The Story of His Life and Work 1805-75. Translated by E. Bredsdorf. New York: Phaidon Press.

Bartlett, F. C. 1932. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Irigiray, L. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by C. Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Montague, A. 1971. Touching. New York: Columbia University Press.

Stern, D. 1985. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books.

Thompson, S. 1966. Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Toksvig, S. 1934. The Life of Hans Christian Andersen. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company.

Trost, P. 1984. “H. C. Andersen: Die Prinzessin auf der Erbse” (“H. C. Anderson: The Princess on the Pea”). Pp. 297-298 in Archiv fur das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen. Berlin, Germany.