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The main theme of the short story “The Thing in the Forest,” by A.S. Byatt is trauma and loss. There are many reasons and examples Byatt show throughout the story. Thought out the main three paragraphs will explain more in detail.
Throughout the short story “The Thing in the Forest,” by A.S. Byatt, it all comes together from the author of short emotions about World War II happening. In many stories, it deals with the process of “coming of age,” experiences of trauma and loss often encourage characters to accept the reality that the real world can be a harsh, unforgiving, and scary a very place. Penny and Primrose handle literal and figurative loss throughout their journey to make sense to meet with The Thing in the forest. Thus, makes the character’s pursuit of the truth should be healed for them, in the story’s ending suggests that Penny is destroyed by her search (which later becomes an obsession). Byatt, the author, encourages the girls to confront their losses and traumas from their past while warning them there is no guarantee that such conflicts will ultimately be healing. The girls suffer several traumas in their childhoods. Apart from the common trauma of the war and their evacuation. Each of their fathers dies during the war, leaving their mothers to hold together their fall-apart families. However, the author suggests the girl’s mothers each fail their daughters in different ways, setting the stage for the girl’s eventual return to the forest as adults.
In the wake of her husband’s death, Penny’s mother “embraced grief, closed her face and her curtains.” This withdrawal is no doubt the loneliness and abandonment Penny felt when she was sent to the country mansion during the evacuation, and when her father died. By returning to the forest to confront the loathly worm, she is also confronting her feeling of being abandoned by her past. Primrose’s mother, on the other side, marries again, has several children, and lives an extremely hard life, developing “varicose veins and a smoker’s cough.” Primrose likewise has unsettled adulthood. This event is how her childhood was unsettled by World War II, her father passing away, and by the appearance of five new siblings from her mother's new marriage. The loathly worm symbolizes the characters' traumas of the girl's childhood. Parts of growing up are facing traumas and overcoming them, step by step. Byatt illustrates simply how frightening and difficult this process is through Penny and Primrose’s fear of the loathly worm. A fear that stays with them as they grow into young adults. They meet the loathly worm as children. This leaves the girls to something nightmarish leaving them “shaking with dry sobs” and unable to escape the memory of what they witnessed.
The dread of war, loss, fear, and uncertainty that many children feel when they meet the real world finally. As adults, they reflect on the death of the younger child, Alys, who wants to go into the woods with them. Her death symbolizes how the loathly worm “finished off” young Penny and Primrose. In other words, the worm is a symbol of the trauma and confusion of war or the loss of a parent. Alys represents the girls’ innocence, this is why the worm destroyed them without leaving a single trace. As adults, the girls return to the woods in search of the loathly worm. After they have attempted to contain their memories of it for several years, the women realize that making that journey again to meet the worm is the only way to overcome the traumatic experiences of their childhoods. They approach the battle in different ways, with different results. Instead, Primrose's mind wonders as she thinks of toys her mother gave her, and the stories she made up featuring herself and those toys. Later, she turns her experience into a story that she tells to amuse the children as she reads. Primrose reaches her trauma by entering the world of imagination which seems to heal her. After Penny returns to the forest and does not find the worm, she returns a second time, strong and willing to “look it in the face.” She does not tell herself a story like Primrose and then walks away. Rather, Penny feels a need to analyze her childhood trauma closely. She needs to see and hear it. They return to the forest to face the worm as well as their pasts.
In conclusion, the theme of “The Thing in the Forest” is fairly simple to recognize with all the points above explained. With the examples given and reasoning why Byatt came to be one of the girls who grow up later in the story.
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