Wonderful Creatures and Liminality in A.S. Byatt's Short Fiction.

Abstract

This chapter departs from the anthropological concept of liminality as a fruitful theoretical framework to examine the recurrence of wonderful creatures in Byatt’s fiction, and particularly in her short stories. My contention is that, in its application to the exploration of wonderful creatures in Byatt’s short fiction, liminality operates on two main levels: ontological (as a state or condition) and phenomenological (as an experience or process). Firstly, from the ontological perspective, liminality becomes an apt critical tool to explore the in-between condition of characters immersed in a fluid state of metamorphosis. Secondly, from the point of view of phenomenology, the experience of a traumatic event is symbolically depicted as the encounter with wonderful creatures, and this encounter triggers a change in the character that places the experience as a liminal transition in the character’s evolution. In the light of this, the aim of the present chapter is to analyse the presence of wonderful creatures in Byatt’s short stories, exploring two types of supernatural beings from the point of view of liminality: those involving a process of female metamorphosis, in-between the human and the non-human (the lamia in “A Lamia in the Cévennes” and the troll woman in “A Stone Woman”), and those projecting the liminal passage through a traumatic or painful experience in the form of a terrifying monster (the creatures in “Dragons’ Breath” and “The Thing in the Forest”).