Symbolism, Figurative Language, & The Thing in the Forest

As a child, I spent a lot of time in the forest. To me, the forest was a magical place where all the things of my wild imagination could come to life without being so wild anymore. For hundreds of years, the forest has been used by authors as a kind of wild place – a place where anything can happen. One such example of this is William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The forest is a place with endless possibilities as it does not function within the constraints of social order. In the short story The Thing in the Forest, the forest is a wild place where Primrose and Penny could imagine a monster just as gruesome as the events that surrounded their lives as children. Because so many stories depict the forest as a place both good and bad, readers generally associate a forest with a place that has endless possibilities outside of reality.

“She smelled rottenness, but it was normal rottenness, leaves and stems mulching back into earth. She heard sounds. Not birdsong, for it was too late in the day, but the odd raucous warning croak. She heard her own heartbeat in the thickening brown air” (363). Given this description, Byatt intends for readers to feel that the forest is nothing more than an ordinary forest while simultaneously awaiting a reveal due to the tension she has built surrounding the moment that each woman returns to the forest. The rather unemotional response that the description brings to the reader is the same that Penny has in realizing that the forest is not as dark and scary as she remembered it to be with the absence of the Thing. I believe the forest in this story symbolizes the wild unknown that the girls were faced with during the war and the realization that they cannot forget or escape the reality they faced as children in their adult lives.