Three Girls Walk into a Forest, and . . . .

Girl Eaten by a Tree by Mark Ryden

What strikes you about this picture? What is the first thing that draws your attention?

The girls? The situation? The setting? The action? The conflict? The girls' motives?

Who are these girls? What are their backgrounds? Why do they share the same facial features? What are they doing? What is the tree doing? What time of day is it? In what forest are they? Where are the girls going? Why are they in the forest? Why did the tree attack one of the girls? Why don't the two girls help the one who has been attacked?

Envision several answers for as many of these questions as you can; write them out, each in a complete sentence.

You can start a story with an answer to any of these questions, but each answer must be interrelated with the one before and after it so that a chain of incidents develops which is based on cause-effect relationships throughout.

Next, as Aristotle suggests in Poetics, arrange the incidents in a pattern organized by the story's beginning, middle, and end. (Edgar Allan Poe gave good advice when he said to know the story's ending before you begin writing.)

Stories are hard to plot because, although they seem simple, they are, in fact, complex: all the parts (answers to the questions of who?, what?, when?, where?, how”, why”, and how many? or how much?, are interrelated. By identifying causes and effects among the incidents, they appear logically connected, unified, and coherent.

Let's try the exercise.

For me, the situation captures my immediate attention. Perhaps the painting's artist, Mark Ryden, anticipated that the situation would be most prominent, as he named the work Girl Eaten by a Tree.

Initially, therefore, maybe I should focus my attention on the situation: a girl being eaten by a tree.

Who is the girl? The sameness of the facial features and the similarities in the dress of the two sisters watching the third girl being eaten by the tree suggests that the two girls are sisters. Although we can't see the third girl's face, her clothing is similar to that of the other two girls, which could suggest that she is their sister; possibly, her appearance is identical to theirs—a triplet. For now, that will be my interpretation: The three girls are triplets.

Notice how, starting with the situation, I veered off to a consideration of the painting's figures, the characters of the story? That's likely to happen, and it's fine: the elements of the story are, after all, interrelated; one question is apt to suggest the answer to another.

But back to the situation: why is the girl being eaten by a tree? Perhaps she insulted the tree, and it is eating her to avenge itself. Maybe she happened to be walking closest to the tree, and the tree snatched her up because it is hungry. It could be that the tree is a sentinel, guarding the forest, and it is eating the girl because the tree perceived her (and possibly her sisters) as being in some way a threat. It's also possible that the two girls who are watching their sister being eaten by a tree are only imagining the situation. Maybe they discussed a scene in a fantasy in which a tree devoured one—or all—of them and the memory of this earlier conversation inspired one of the girls to imagine it happening as the sisters walk through the forest.

For now, I am going to say that the girl in the yellow dress is imagining the situation. Why? We'll come back to this question in a moment, as we envision the girls' background.

Why are they in the forest? They are taking a shortcut. From where to where? From their house to Grandma's house (allusions can exp[and the theme of a story; this one may even have suggested an ending to the story!)

Obviously, it's daytime, but the sky seems overcast; it is gray. Rain seems to be on its way: there's a storm coming, it seems, and it may be an emotional as well as a meteorological storm. (Symbolism is often highly effective in a narrative.)

Apart from the tree's grasping and devouring of the girl in blue, there is no overt action, other than the girl in the yellow dress's touching the shoulder of the girl in the pink dress while holding up her other hand, as if to ward off the tree, and the girl in the pink dress's folding her hands together, as if she is making a silent plea.

Why aren't the other girls helping the victim? Especially if they are sisters—and triplets, at that—one would expect that the other two would be seeking to free their sister from her attacker. Perhaps they are frozen with fear? Their shocked expressions suggest that thy may be. In addition, their hair (not a single one of which is out of place), their pressed dresses, the ribbons restraining their hair, and the attitudes they have adopted suggest that these girls are unaccustomed to the violence they've encountered. Not only are they terrified, but they are also at a loss to know how to react. They are helpless. Al they do, probably instinctively, is to watch, as one wards off the tree and the other pleads silently for deliverance.

And, now, what about the story's ending? The allusion to Little Red Riding Hood (the girls were going to Grandma's house when the tee attacked one of them) suggests that a hero will appear, rescue the girl, and, perhaps, chop down the tree (or, at least, the limbs with which it holds the girl). Obviously, the scene Ryden has depicted is fantastic, so the appearance of a woodsman fits the genre well.

Now, we need only break the story into its three divisions, beginning, middle, and end. (Notice that we have figured out our ending before writing the story.) In doing so, we can insert words that indicate CAUSE and EFFECT.

Beginning

On an overcast morning, BECAUSE they plan to spend the day with their Grandmother, three young girls, triplets, who are dressed in similar dresses, bows, socks, and shoes, travel together through a forest, BECAUSE it is a shortcut, chattering about their plans and about the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

Middle

BECAUSE the tree is hungry, it snatches one of the girls. (The tree has human features—eyes, nose, mouth, and arms—and characteristics—it is hungry, predatory, and conscious.) BECAUSE they are shocked and frightened by the tree's attack, the other girls, feeling helpless, look on in horror, BECAUSE they do not know what to do and are paralyzed with fear.

End

BECAUSE a woodsman, happening to be in the area, chances upon the scene, he cuts off the limbs (arms) of the tree, freeing the girl, who has not come to harm. The girls are unable to thank him BECAUSE he is gone before they can do so. The girl in yellow finds that she holds the woodsman's ax BECAUSE, as she realizes, it was she who vanquished the tree. She took strength from imagining herself to be a woodsman BECAUSE doing so made her feel strong and gave her courage. She thought of herself as a woodsman, she thinks, BECAUSE her talk with her sisters made her think of him when her sister was endangered. In fact, their talk and the creepy forest CAUSED her to imagine the whole incident—her sister was never attacked, except in her own mind. But, now, BECAUSE she has learned of her own strength and courage, the girl needs no surrogate hero: she herself is strong, courageous, and heroic.

Although this seems a simple story, whether it is or is not depends on how the story is written. Possibly, a writer could make profound statements about such matters as gender roles, sisterhood, fantasy as a means of personal empowerment, self-discovery, and self-realization. Before writing such a story, an author might do well to read Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment.

Although Bettelheim's scholarship has been tarnished by allegations of his misrepresentation of his credentials, by plagiarism, by abusive behavior toward his students, and other issues, his study of the therapeutic potential of fantastic literature is stimulating, indeed, and may suggest psychological and social directions for a narrative about a girl in a forest who imagines an assault upon her sister, especially when her sister, a triplet, is identical in appearance to herself.

Horror As Allegory

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Why do we need allegories? Why, instead of beating around the bush, don’t we just come right out with what we mean to say? Why don’t we just say it? One reason might be that allegories allow readers (and writers) to broach subjects that are not discussed openly in polite company. By suggesting that one thing (say, child abuse) is another (say, demonic oppression or possession), horror writers can bring up the issue in disguise, so to speak, making the matter palatable enough to consider without cognitive indigestion, so to speak, among men and women who, otherwise, might prefer not to entertain the topic at all.

In an interesting twist upon the Aristotelian notion of catharsis, Edward J. Ingebretsen, the author of Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King argues that the horror genre serves just such an allegorical function. In ‘Salem’s Lot, for example, Ingebretsen contends, the presence of the vampire Barlow supplies the scapegoat that both the townspeople and the reader need; they can blame the vampire for the wickedness that they themselves do, witness, or imagine--wickedness which is very wicked, indeed:

After about a hundred pages of King’s novel [‘Salem’s Lot], an alert reader asks, how do the predatory and brutal intimacies offered by Barlow the vampire differ from the brutalities exchanged between husband and wife (Bonnie and Reggie Sawyer); between boyfriend and girlfriend (Susan Norton and Floyd Tibbets); between mother and the child she beats (Sandy and Randy McDougal); or, finally, the brutalities implicitly exchanged between author and reader? There is little difference. People feed upon each other routinely for business (like Larry Crockett), and for perverse pleasures (like Dudley). The townspeople are vampiric in the most real of ways. . . consumption is intimacy, and power, rather than love, shapes human relations. . . .

Fantasy gives readers an excuse not to see what they will not face. For example, Reggie Sawyer’s vicious male-rape of Corey, the telephone installer he finds in dalliance with his wife--and then the subsequent brutalizing rape of his wife--is just
a diversion, after all. . . .

King’s readers. . . engage the text much the same way that the townspeople of 'Salem’s Lot engage each other--in vampiric, voyeuristic ways. . . . So long as Barlow could be identified as the vampire, the townspeople--and King’s readers--can consider themselves free of taint (182-184).

In Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim makes a similar claim, from a psychoanalytical point of view.

Those who outlawed traditional folk fairy tales decided that if there were monsters in a story told to children, these must all be friendly--but they missed the monster a child knows best and is most concerned with: the monster he feels or fears himself to be, and which also sometimes persecutes him. By keeping this monster within the child unspoken of, hidden in his unconscious, adults prevent the child from spinning fantasies around it in the image of the fairy tales he knows. Without such fantasies, the child fails to get to know his monster better, nor is he given suggestions as to how he may gain mastery over it (120).

Writers are important, even in--or, perhaps, especially in--an age of looming illiteracy, because it is they who find the words and the images in which and by which to convey the meaning, in human terms, of the perceptions and events that the society of their day experiences. Whether interpreted from a pagan, a Christian, an evolutionary, a materialistic and empirical, an existential, or some other perspective, facts do not speak for themselves. They are mute spectacles, as it were, until the poet, or, in our time, more often, the novelist or the screenwriter, gives them voice. Writers do so by suggesting that “this” can be understood as a new example of “that” (whether “that” turns out to be the world view of the pagan, the Christian, the evolutionist, the materialistic empiricist, the existentialist, or the adherent of some new model of reality).

The curse (and, perhaps, the blessing) of the human species is that we are unintelligible in terms of ourselves, for we are both part of nature and, at the same time, partly transcendent to nature. To attempt to explain ourselves in terms of ourselves would be tautological, not to mention solipsistic. Attempting to explain ourselves in terms of ourselves would be, in effect, to explain ourselves away.

Language is metaphorical; so is thought. We cannot grasp the meaning of a “this” without a contrasting “that” or of a “that” without a contrasting “this.” Therefore, to make sense of our experience, and of ourselves, we need people who can discern relationships among things, who can recognize relationships between things and ourselves, and who can help us to see such relationships. In horror fiction, the relationships are between the Self and the Other, between the hero (or the monster) within and the monster (or the hero) without. Experience changes, but the process of allegorizing what we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think, and feel remains the same, providing what unity we can wrest from the multiplicity of perceptions, sensations, thoughts, and feelings. Upon the basis of such a unity, we built--and forever rebuild--our world.