Princess and the Pea Venn Diagram Project

This project asked to find a creative way to compare two versions of a traditional tale using a venn diagram. I chose the story of the Princess and the Pea.


The first story was adapted and illustrated by Lauren Child. Her story followed the traditional tale that I have heard before pretty closely while ofcourse adding her own sense of humor into the narration. The King and Queen have a handsome son who needs to be married. In her story he wants to marry for love and wants her to have a certain "something". The King and Queen want him to find a real princess and she eventually finds them one stormy night. They give her dry clothes and allow her to sleep at the castle. The queen puts a single green pea under a pile of mattresses and says that if she is truely a princess she will be able to feel it. The next morning, after the princess has had a terrible nights sleep, she meets the prince and he thinks she has that "something" that he has been looking for. The queen also finds out that the princess is so sore from sleeping on the pea all night and she approves of her marrying her son.

The second story, adapted and illustrated by Alain Vaes, departed from the traditional tale a lot more. He added the story line of the Queen having a love for jewels and that is the reason she tests all the princesses so harshly when her son comes to her wanting to get married. The king and queen in this story really are kind of stupid people. After several princesses fail the test the Prince goes for a drive and his car breaks down, yes this is set in a more modern time period. A girl comes and fixes his car and he finds out that she is the princess of the neighboring country. He takes her back to his house, after she has agreed to marry him after having known him for a very short time, probably just a couple of hours. She passes all the tests and then there is the final test of the pea under all the mattresses. She doesn't sleep very well but it is not because of the pea it is because her necklace slipped around to the back and the opal jewel was sticking into her back. The next morning it appears she has passed the test and the Queen is not very happy about this until she finds out that the princess will come into ownership of the crowned jewels of her country very shortly. All in all, I thought this was a terrible adaptation but it makes for a good comparison of different variations of a traditional tale.

For the venn diagram I decided to use a teacup to represent Child's story because the Queen in this story realizes that the Princess is sore from the pea when the princess says "ouch" trying to pick up the teacup that the prince dropped. Vaes' story is represented by the opal charm that the princess wore, and the similarities are written on a pile of mattresses with the pea in the middle because they both had this element in common. For the sake of an art class I decided it would be good for students to also explore the difference in the materials used in each book's illustrations. Lauren Child uses collage as a way to illustrate her story so students could explore that method to make the object representing that story. I could not find any direct information about Vaes' materials but it looked like watercolors. Students could explore using water colors represent the object for that story. On the shared object I would suggest that students experiment with using the two techniques together, watercolor and collage.