The Dog in The Manger - The Sexual Reading

The Sexual Reading

One of Lucian's allusions to the fable gives it a metaphorically sexual slant: 'You used to say that they acted absurdly in that they loved you to excess, yet did not dare to enjoy you when they might, and instead of giving free rein to their passion when it lay in their power to do so, they kept watch and ward, looking fixedly at the seal and the bolt; for they thought it enjoyment enough, not that they were able to enjoy you themselves, but that they were shutting out everyone else from a share in the enjoyment, like the dog in the manger that neither ate the barley herself nor permitted the hungry horse to eat it.' (Timon the Misanthrope)

In the 1687 Francis Barlow edition of the fables, Aphra Behn similarly sums up the sexual politics of the idiom: 'Thus aged lovers with young beautys live,/ Keepe off the joys they want the power to give.' It was of exactly such a situation involving a eunuch and his slaveboys that Straton had complained in the Greek anthology. More innocently, two of the Brontë sisters fit the idiom to occasions of heterosexual jealousy. In Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights it arises during an argument in Chapter 10 between Catherine Linton and Isabella Linton over Isabella's love for Heathcliff. In Charlotte Brontë's Villette it is used in the quarrel between Mme Beck and Lucy over Paul Emmanuel (Chapter 38).

Lope de Vega adapted a Spanish version of the story to his play El Perro del Hortelano (The Gardener's Dog, 1618), which deals with the emotional complications of class conflict. The haughty countess Diana rejects her many aristocratic suitors and falls in love instead with her handsome young secretary, Teodoro, who is the lover of her maid. Unwilling to let the couple marry, she is also unwilling to marry him herself. The play was originally adapted for Russian TV as Sobaka na sene in 1977 and released in the USA as "The Dog in the Manger". The same title was applied to the Spanish film made of the play, released in 1996.

De Vega's title relates to the parallel European idiom current in Dutch, Danish, German, French, Portuguese and Italian as well. It refers to a variant story in which a gardener sets his dog to guard his cabbages (or lettuces). After the gardener's death the dog continues to forbid people access to the beds, giving rise to the simile 'He's like the gardener's dog that eats no cabbage and won't let others either' or, for short, 'playing the gardener's dog' (faire le chien du jardinier).