Elsa and the Bear


 My reading of the final story from Ruth Manning-Sander's book "A Book of Magic Animals" (1974). The last tale is a German one, 'Elsa and the Bear'. It is a variation on Beauty and the Beast, a trope that riles and inspires people in equal numbers. Those who get irked by it often do so because they interpret it as a moralistic story that encourages young girls to marry abusive monsters (of the more human sort) in the naive hope that they can transform them into handsome princes through patience and compassion.

Those with a more upbeat view are sometimes just romantics who believe in the power of redemption (as do billions of Christians, of course, though I think it would be stretch plausibility a bit to see Elsa as emblematic of the Holy Spirit or the Shekinah bringing a lost soul back from its bestial state). Others take a more Jungian view that Beauty and the Beast are two sides of the same person - Higher and Lower Selves and that the one can eventually transform the other. A less dramatic interpretation might be that any relationship leads to change as one person rubs off, for good or ill, on the other. The Beast may change, but so does the Beauty.

Whichever view you go with (if any of those) is wholly up to you



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