Thing In The Forest Symbolism

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I feel that both Hawthorne and Byatt used a lot of the same symbols in their very different stories. In The Birth Mark Aylmer is disgusted by Georgiana’s mark on her face and even cringes at the site of it. Some symbols that I see in this story are: Love, fear, control, change and death. In the story The Thing in the Forest two girls Penny and Primrose are sent away from their home on a train. They meet a young girl names Alys and she wanted to tag along with them into the forest and they did not want her to go with them. When Penny and Primrose walk into the forest they see something “The Thing.” Some symbols that I see in this story are: Fear, control, change, terror, war and death. I think that the universal theme in these stories is: “Fearing …show more content…

“You have aimed loftily, you have done nobly. Do no repent that, with so high and pure a feeling, you have rejected the best the earth could offer. Aylmer, dearest Aylmer, I am dying!” (Pg. 301).
In the story The Thing in the Forest by A.S. Byatt, Penny and Primrose encounter something made of terror and destruction in the forest. What they saw that day in the forest changed their lives forever, nothing was or would be the same.
“Its head appeared to form, or first become visible in the distance, between the trees. Its face—which triangular—appeared like a rubbery or fleshy mask over a shapeless sprouting bulb of a head, like a monstrous turnip. Its color was the color of flayed flesh, pitted with wormholes, and its expression was neither wrath nor greed but pure misery. Its most defined feature was a vast mouth, pulled down and down at the corners, tight with a kind of pain. Its lips were thin, and raised, like welts from whip-strokes. It had blind, opaque white eyes, fringed with fleshy lashes and brows like the feelers of sea anemones. Its face was close to the ground and moved toward the children between its forearms, which were squat, thick, powerful, and akimbo, like a cross between a washer-woman’s and a primeval dragon’s. The flesh on these forearms was glistening and mottled” (Pg. 307). Just by seeing this thing, this creature, changed these girls