“The Princess on the Pea” in North American Popular Culture

Abstract

This essay explores how Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Princess on the Pea” (1835) has been transformed in North American popular culture since the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on the 1959 Broadway musical Once Upon a Mattress and its many adaptations, the study identifies a set of local conventions that have come to define the princess figure: red hair, comedic assertiveness, and willful disobedience. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s concept of myth (1972), alongside perspectives from Critical Heritage Studies, Memory Studies, and Cultural Studies, the essay argues that these traits function as signifying elements within a broader framework of popular cultural memory and mythmaking. The princess becomes a mythic figure, her features objectivized and circulated across media through processes of familiarity and intertextual recognition. The analysis traces how these conventions emerge, stabilize, and eventually transform, suggesting that the North American version of Andersen’s princess now exists as a cultural myth – distinct from, yet rooted in, the original tale.