This theme is also shown through the woman that the main character winds up marrying. When Bearskin helps her father, her father offers one of his daughters to him as thanks. The two older sisters find him repulsive and refuse to associate with him but the youngest is kind and thankful for what Bearskin did and so agrees to marry him. She is rewarded when Bearskin's seven years are up and she ends up with a handsome, wealthy husband.
Another theme is that the wicked get punished. The two older daughters both want Bearskin after he returns since he is now handsome and rich. They cannot have him however and so they kill themselves.
The deaths of the older sisters also adds a bit of a dark cast to the otherwise happy ending. Although it is the two "bad guys" in the story who die, the story ends on the note of the devil saying how he has won after all because he got two souls out of the bargain rather than just Bearskin's.
It's so interesting how so many tales overlap. The idea of the youngest child being attributed with positive characteristics is a common trope amoung many fairytales. But why the younger sibling? Why not an older figure, like in "A Tale About A Boy Who Went Forth To Learn What Fear Was?" Perhaps the younger sister in the tale is more so associated with innocense, and in saying that, is not necessarily worried about marriage as her older sisters are. For this girl, marriage just sort of happens, and she does not have to trick the man by lying in bed and replacing the true queen or prepare a feast and invite possible husbands. In the end, the younger daugther does not let ugliness determine whether or not she will wed such a beast. One could even say that if he did marry one of the older sisters he would remain unshaven, and its the youngest sister's pureness that is rewarded with a handsome husband.
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