Summary Of The Thing In The Forest By A. S. Byatt

Fairy tales usually involve a happy princess who falls in love with a prince and they live happily ever after, the end. Typically, there isn’t a negative side to the story other than the occasional evil witch that the princess easily overcomes. These stories are almost always used as bedtime stories for children to give them a happy situation to sleep on and they usually do not have a deeper, underlying theme. “The Thing in the Forest” by A.S. Byatt is a different type of fairy tale with a much darker meaning then traditional stories. Two girls come across a “Thing” in the woods and are scarred by it for the rest of their lives. They never seem to be able to recover from whatever they experienced that night in the woods. Since the “Thing in …show more content…
At the mansion, the two girls grow bored of the house and venture out into the forest at night to explore the wilderness. Alys, a small girl who also lives in the house with the girls, follows them into the forest hoping to explore with them. However Penny and Primrose do not like Alys because of her youth and innocence to the events happening in the world around her. Alys is described as “having a smile made for loving parents and grandparents”, which only makes the disdain that Penny and Primrose have for her grow (Byatt 7). Penny and Primrose decide to leave Alys alone in the woods hoping that she will return to the Mansion and leave them alone. Alys is very persistent saying that she will be able to keep up. Primrose becoming very agitated says “We don’t want you, you see” (5). Primrose isn’t directly talking about Alys herself but the idea of innocence in the world. The girls are trying their hardest to get rid of this cheery girl that doesn’t understand the world around her. They don’t want to be cheered up, they only want to deny all the innocence in the world. The girls run from