The Thing in the Forest

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2003

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Themes

War, Trauma, and Their Effects

World War II is the central event in this short story and drives the action from the very first paragraph. The girls, Primrose and Penny, are evacuees because their homes are at risk of being destroyed in the bombing of London. Byatt’s narration alludes to the war with similes and subtle imagery that create context for the psychological trauma that the girls will later experience. “The Thing in the Forest” is not a single portrait of trauma; rather, it stays true to the reality of traumatic experience by showing characters that respond and later attempt to recover in different ways.

First, there are the children on the platform along with Penny and Primrose. The story provides little insight into their experiences, but enough to indicate that these evacuated children are enduring emotional turmoil. Primrose and Penny’s mothers both sent the girls away without explanation, and it is fair to assume that many of the others received the same send-off. This touches on a key question in the psychoanalysis of trauma: how to find the words to explain the unexplainable. For a young child, this trauma of separation is tremendously upsetting, and naturally there is a great deal of fear and crying, especially in the darkness of the mansion. However, the mothers’ struggles to articulate the realities of the war indicate that it has traumatized them as well.

Penny and Primrose then experience another tier of trauma in the forest. The sight of the worm would traumatize any person, and its effect is more severe for the two young girls, who are already teetering from being set adrift from their mothers. The narrator’s descriptions of the Loathly Worm involve military language and other signals of conflict, inviting the reader to see it as a symbol of the war that set all this into motion. It cleaves the girls’ friendship apart, and they thus endure another painful separation. The period they afterwards spend in temporary housing seems endless, which alludes to the way that trauma can affect the perception of time, often causing it to seem slow and distorted.

After enduring the trauma of separation and relocation, the girls return to their families. However, the world is still not safe because the bombings they were sent away to avoid persist, creating even more trauma. Added to this, the war claims their fathers’ lives. The girls struggle to recall memories of the men clearly—likely because they are both young children, but their distorted memories are another hallmark of trauma. At such a formative age, the traumatic memories of the Loathly Worm become amplified, looming large and in some ways obscuring the memories of their fathers. The grief of this loss is enormous for Penny’s mother and practically ends her life, but Primrose’s mother quickly remarries. In these examples, Byatt represents the varied, often contrasting ways that traumatic loss affects people.

This same dichotomy emerges in the lives Penny and Primrose lead: Penny’s trauma drives her career, while Primrose escapes into imaginary worlds. One commonality is their nightmares and flashbacks, both of which are common in trauma survivors. Penny feels these most intensely, to the point that she becomes distracted and finds her patients indistinguishable. Here, Byatt again represents the way that traumatic events distort the perception of time. Penny’s mind is constantly thinking of the Loathly Worm, while also possibly reliving the separation from her mother and her grief following her father’s death. When she uses words like “unseen things,” she invokes psychoanalytic theory framing psychological trauma as an invisible wound. There are instances where she uses other language of trauma, like when she talks about “the unthinkable” that she has seen and experienced. In the end, Penny, with her psychoanalytic training, knows she must face the worm—something Primrose also instinctively realizes but approaches very differently. This final confrontation is the culmination of the necessary journeys, whether literal or figurative, that one must make in order to recover from trauma.

The Stories We Tell

This short story is a work of metafiction in that it references the act of storytelling while telling its own story; storytelling is specifically important to Primrose, one of the story’s two protagonists. From the first sentence, A. S. Byatt creates the sense that this is also a story with a credibility problem. The phrase “[…] saw, or believed they saw” puts readers in position to question the events that follow (4). The third person narrator, who often occupies an (ostensibly) objective position in literature, ironically contributes to this. The historical records of the war kept in the mansion-turned-museum also tell an incomplete story. These records, a form of the nation’s collective memory of the conflict, obscure some of the details of that dark moment in time. The building’s photographic history keeps no record of its brief function as a holding place for the children, as if someone has deliberately sought to erase this painful memory. These gaps and qualifications are reminders of the subjectivity of narratives and the power one has to tell their own version of their story. This is a tool that will prove useful for Primrose’s recovery.

Penny and Primrose both have hazy memories of their fathers and substitute their own stories about the way their deaths unfolded. Penny associates ash with her father because of his fiery death; she thinks she remembers this but is unsure if she is just recalling the memory of hearing about his death. Primrose rejects the story of her father’s death altogether, replacing it with a fantastical underwater scenario instead of visualizing the trauma of a horrific drowning. This is where Primrose begins to understand that there is tremendous power in storytelling, especially for a survivor of a traumatic experience. Later, she seizes control of her own story by relinquishing her quest to find out whether the Loathly Worm is real or not. By speaking her story aloud to the children, presumably with less terrifying elements, she transforms her trauma and finds a measure of relief. This approach is specific to Primrose and ties into the story’s overarching theme that each person’s experience of trauma differs.

Notably, Primrose’s story begins with the same words as Byatt’s, further blurring the line between “objective” reality and subjective narrative even as the phrase itself acknowledges that what follows may be “imaginary.” This relates to Byatt’s use of fantasy to represent the way trauma “breaks” our perceptions of ordinary reality. The repetition also gives the story a recursive structure that mimics the nature of traumatic memory, which recurs but can also be overwritten.

Beyond the Real: Elements of the Fantastical

“The Thing in the Forest” begins, “There were once two little girls,” which is reminiscent of the “once upon a time” openings of traditional fairy tales. It is a sign that this story, which situates itself as a work of historical fiction, is also one that paradoxically incorporates elements of fantasy. Four paragraphs later, Penny and Primrose talk about “Hansel and Gretel,” a German fairy tale written by the Brothers Grimm, while describing the blacked-out signs on their train journey. The girls lean on this story to bring an element of fantasy into their harrowing journey, perhaps hoping that their story will have a fairy-tale happy ending as well. It is notable, however, that Hansel and Gretel do not return home without trauma of their own. It takes an act of violence—the killing of the witch. With this allusion, Primrose unwittingly foreshadows the trauma that lies ahead for her and Penny, and Byatt reminds readers that fantasy is not necessarily a form of escapism.

Primrose displays a strong attachment to the worlds of fantasy, falling back on imaginary stories repeatedly throughout the narrative. Learning that her mother rather than Santa Claus was responsible for the toys Primrose created stories about is almost traumatic for her. It threatens the integrity of a belief system that she heavily relied on for protection during a time of vulnerability. Despite this, Primrose questions the nature of reality and remains willing to believe in worlds beyond the real, physical world. This is likely what makes her better equipped than Penny to let go of the need to prove the worm’s existence.

The thing in the forest, also known as the Loathly Worm, is where Byatt’s use of fantasy is most pronounced. It is well-known enough in the area to be legendary and worthy of a place in the museum. It is a creature that by the logic of realism cannot exist, and yet both girls see it. The awful things that somehow come together in its writhing shape are unnatural and straight out of a fantasy, albeit a nightmarish one. Its realm, the forest, is a similarly fantastical place that invites comparisons to the enchanted forests of lore. It is full of strange sights and sounds, and it feels almost like an entirely different world, distinguishing it from the world the girls knew up until that moment. This is significant, as the uncanniness of the forest and the worm mirror the nature of real-world trauma, which survivors often describe as surreal, inexpressible, and even impossible. The literal location of the forest therefore doubles as the figurative location of a great psychological wound.