Summary
Sitting on a mossy mound in what she decides is the center of the forest, Primrose asks herself, Now what? again. She tells herself she wants to go home, but her home is a small flat above a Chinese restaurant. The forest seems far more real than her home. She remembers the day her mother said her father was dead, and how she thought her mother’s ugly dripping nose seemed unreal, as though she were faking her grief. She wonders if that moment was real, and if it was home. She remembers what Penny said about “things that are more real than we are” and considers how she had seen in the forest something more real than she was. She wants badly to go home, yet she wants never to move. When the squirrel moves again, Primrose gets up and licks the bramble scratches on her arms.
The point of view switches to Penny as she walks steadily down field-edge paths. She remembers the Thing clearly and thinks of it daily, and realizes she is in this part of the world because she must “settle with it.” However, she walks in what she believes is the opposite direction. After a day of walking, she approaches an entrance to the forest at nightfall. Once inside, she moves cautiously through the thicket, smelling the air for the rottenness. She smells only the regular rottenness of leaves and stems mulching. She hears birds, and twigs breaking.
Penny finds areas where “something might have rolled and slid.” Detritus is caught in the thorns: damp wool, fur, dishcloth cotton, newsprint. She crawls on hands and knees to get a better look, and finds sausage-shaped tubes of membrane that contain hair and bone fragments. The leavings remind her of owl pellets and cats’ hairballs. She knows the creature must have been there, but when she sniffs the air and listens, there is nothing. Penny then arrives at a clearing she remembers. Trees are decorated with tattered banners and pennants and streamers.
Penny moves dreamily through the clearing, finding things like hair clips and bird skeletons and bones. She sits and wonders if she should dig a hole to bury the bones. She considers how she is watching herself like in a dream where everything seems safe, until suddenly the dream is no longer safe and you cannot escape what is happening. The narrator comments that Penny’s childhood encounter with the Thing led her to “deal professionally in dreams.” Something resembling unreality lumbered into reality, and Penny saw it. She grew up to be good at studying what could not be seen. She tells herself she became a psychotherapist in order to be “useful,” but she realizes that is not quite accurate. Penny was in the world of the unthinkable ever since the corner of the blanket that covered the unthinkable was turned back.
The narrator comments that it is no accident Penny is a specialist in severely autistic children. She often thinks these children, who have no dreams to discuss and usually cannot communicate other than by babbling or thrashing around, are the ones who inhabit the real world. It is their parents who are at least partly shielded from that real world. Most people couldn’t “occupy themselves with the hopelessness,” but Penny felt she could.
Penny hears something heavy and sluggish stirring in the distance. She sits still, hearing the blind rumble and smelling the old stink. Rather than come from one direction, the sound and smell rise all around her, encompassing the woods, traveling in multiple fragments, just as described in the old text she and Primrose read. In the darkness, she sees only shades of black and gray.
The turmoil ceases, the woods becoming still again. Above the treetops hangs a white-gold moon that deepens the shadows around her. Penny recalls her father saying once that the bombers would strike that night because the sky was cloudless and the moon full. She recalls the men who came to tell her mother he had died in a fire he was fighting. At the funeral, Penny’s father’s coffin was incredibly light because pretty much nothing of his body had been recovered. They “had been living behind the black-out anyway,” and Penny’s mother continued living behind drawn curtains long after the war ended.
To Penny, it is as though the moon has “released the wood.” She stands, brushes herself off, and finds her way back to the fields and her village, led by the light of the moon. She was ready for the Thing, but it didn’t come. She wasn’t sure if she’d wanted to defy it, or simply see if it matched her memory. She is disappointed, in a vague way, to be released from the forest. Penny and Primrose take the same train back to London. They don’t run into each other until they alight and scurry for the exit, remembering when they were sent away as girls carrying gas masks. They raise their heads at the same time and see each other as faces in the crowd. They remember the miserable face of the Thing, and consider how the other is their witness: the person who prevents them from having the comfort of believing they might have imagined it. They stare at each other without acknowledgment, then pick up their baggage and turn away into the crowd.
Later, Penny cannot stop thinking about faces: her parents’, Primrose’s, Alys’s, and the half-human face of the Thing. Meanwhile, her patients’ faces are blank discs and “shadowed moons,” indistinguishable from one another. The Thing’s face is a distraction. It has “trampled on her life, [and] sucked out her marrow.” She decides to go face the Thing, taking a train back past the fields. This time, she enters the forest the original way and finds the path of detritus quickly. She reaches the clearing and senses the Thing’s sound and scent immediately. When it arrives, she will look it in the face and see what it is. She clasps her hands in her lap. Her nerves relax and her blood slows. She is ready.
The point of view returns to Primrose. She is in a shopping mall, putting out children’s chairs. The mall is clean and gleaming. Next to an indoor fountain, Primrose sits and adjusts her golden hair. She smiles. She tells the children to listen to her, because she’ll tell them something amazing—a story that’s never been told before. “The Thing in the Forest” ends with Primrose saying, “There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest.”
Analysis
After she makes peace with the forest by thinking of it as the site of both her trauma and everything that makes life magical, Primrose recalls the feelings of grief and resentment that arose when her father died. Resentful thoughts about her mother’s apparently feigned sorrow are uncomfortable for Primrose to sit with, leading to a paralyzing sense of not being able to follow her desire to leave. However, she lets the thoughts rise and then fall away before she gets up. In an action that symbolizes the psychological healing she has undergone, Primrose licks the scratches on her arms in an instinctive effort to heal them.
The narrative shifts to Penny’s parallel storyline to show how she also approaches her unprocessed trauma and grief. Penny, however, cannot quite face her emotions as directly as Primrose does, and she spends a long time avoiding the forest despite knowing she must end up there. In contrast to Primrose’s experience, Penny happens upon the trail of household detritus the Thing leaves in its wake. In the Thing’s clearing, she reflects on how her childhood trauma led her to become a specialist in dreams and the world of the unthinkable. She believes that witnessing the unreality the Thing represents meant she became capable of occupying the same reality as her severely autistic patients. In this way, her loss of innocence and her early experience with grief have given her an unusual ability to confront “hopelessness.”
As it did the first time she saw it, the Thing announces itself through an overload of the auditory and olfactory senses. However, the fragments of sound and scent stop materializing, as though they have been neutralized by the presence of the moon. With a sense of anticlimax, Penny leaves the forest by the light of the moon. The next day, the women mutually ignore each other when leaving the train platform because each knows the threat the other poses to their continued repression and isolation.
Despite having tried to face her past, Penny continues to obsess over the Thing and other faces she associates with her childhood. Penny’s storyline ends with her resolving to go back to the forest to complete the processing she began after seeing Primrose. This time, rather than waste time walking in the area around the forest, Penny heads straight into the woods to find the clearing. She is angry that it has taken over her life, and she wishes to confront it and to “see what it is.” With a meditative calm, she readies her body for the encounter and waits. But despite the buildup of tension, Byatt shifts the point of view away from Penny before the reader knows what happens to her. This authorial decision lets the reader wonder what Penny’s fate will be: will she defeat the Thing, or will the Thing take her like it took Alys?
Meanwhile, Primrose is setting up for an Aunty Primrose reading at a mall. The clean, gleaming, man-made environment is a far cry from the dark forest Byatt leaves Penny in. In this sanctuary-like place, Primrose begins to tell the story of two girls who believe they see something in the forest. This denoument is significant for two reasons. On one hand, Primrose speaks the same line that opens “The Thing in the Forest,” giving the story a satisfying sense of circularity. It is also significant because it marks the first time Primrose tells anyone other than Penny about what she saw in the forest. Having made peace with her traumatic memory, Primrose translates the experience into a story that makes some sense of the unreal event. Like Penny, she has decided to confront the Thing in the forest.
