Small-toothed Dog

 My reading of the sixth story from Ruth Manning-Sander's children's anthology "A Book of Magic Animals" (1974), entitled 'The Small-toothed Dog'. This is basically a British version of Beauty and the Beast with a canine twist. Stories of this trope have come in for some stick in recent years as normalising abusive relationships, giving young girls the fancy that if only endure plenty of beastly behaviour eventually their future husbands will turn int handsome princes. Whilst there is undoubtedly a tendency for people to believing that infinite patience will turn vindictive curmudgeons into romantic figures (an ideal that cuts across gender lines), it seems unfair to blame fairy stories for pushing such an agenda. Colette Dowling blew that idea up out of all proportion and made a mint with her "Cinderella Complex".

A Jungian reading would see Beauty and the Beast not as two separate people but as differing aspects of the same person. Whereupon it becomes a tale not of enduring crappy relationships but of redeeming ones own Shadow side. A theological spin could also suggest that the animalistic nature of the Beast is important - because he is our baser, more physical appetites which the cerebral, civilised, high-minded part of the Self looks down on as brutish, smelly, vulgar, and generally embarrassing. His transformation into a Prince is the realisation that the body is not the awful thing to be avoided, as the Manicheans believed, but a thing of beauty and power that can come into alliance with the Beautiful Self. In the better known French version of the story it is only when Beauty grieves the loss of the dying Beast that she sees his value. For some people it is only when their body is falling apart and they are reminded of its imminent demise that they start to value it.