Forests

Into the woods, Shmoopers.

To paraphrase Sherlock's Jim Moriarty, every fairy tale needs a good, old-fashioned forest—whether it be treacherous and dismal like Tolkien's Mirkwood or safe and hospitable like Sherwood, the traditional home of Robin Hood and his men. British and European folk and fairy tales are bursting with forests, and Possession is no exception.

Possession introduces forest imagery in a big way when it describes the wooded areas of Seal Court. Here's Lady Joan Bailey on the subject:

"George's great-great-grandfather planted all this woodland, you know. Partly for timber, partly because he loved trees. He tried to get everything to grow that he could. The rarer the tree, the more of a challenge. George keeps it up. He keeps them alive. They're not fast conifers, they're mixed woodland, some of those rare trees are very old. Woods are diminishing in this part of the world. And hedges too. We've lost acres an acres of woodland to fast grain farming. George goes up and down protecting his trees. Like some old goblin. Somebody has to have a sense of the history of things." (5.106)

Later on, as Maud Bailey drives home to Lincoln after another day at Seal Court, our narrator tells us this:

Women, not trees, were Maud's true pastoral concern. Her idea of these primeval creatures included her generation's sense of their imminent withering and dying, under the drip of acid rain, or in the invisible polluted gusts of the wind. She was visited by a sudden vision of them dancing, golden-green, in a bright spring a hundred years ago, flexible saplings, tossed and resilient. This thickened forest, her own humming metal car, her prying curiosity about whatever had been Christabel's life, seemed suddenly to be the ghostly things, feeding on, living through, the vitality of the past. (8.43)

In each of these passages, Possession uses forest imagery to introduce reflections on the relationship between history and the present. The same ancient British forests that inspired the folk and fairy tales of the nation are, as Lady Joan Bailey says, slowly being destroyed. How will that destruction affect the public's sense of continuity between the present and the past?

There's an ecological dimension to Byatt's writing here, but these passages are also subtle commentaries on the history of British culture more generally. Possession seems to be asking: What happens to a nation's culture when its ancient landscapes—the landscapes that shaped its oral narratives and written literatures—are destroyed?