CHAPTER FOUR “ALL OLD STORIES (…) WILL BEAR TELLING AND TELLING AGAIN IN DIFFERENT WAYS”: LITERARY AND MYTHOLOGICAL MOTIFS IN “THE THRESHOLD” ALEXANDRA CHEIRA All old stories (…) will bear telling and telling again in different ways. What is required is to keep alive, to polish, the simple clean forms of the tale which must be there. (...) And yet to add something of yours, of the writer, which makes all these things seem new and first seen, without having been appropriated for private or personal ends. —A. S. Byatt, Possession Introduction: “My own fairy stories (…) are modern literary stories and they do play quite consciously with a postmodern creation and recreation of old forms” In her 1999 essay “Fairy Stories: The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”, Byatt describes Possession’s embedded wonder tale “The Threshold” as “a retelling of the story of the knight who must choose between three women and three gifts” (“Fairy Stories” para. 4), as well as “a [nineteenth-century] narrative within a narrative, [which] is part of that outer narrative” (“Fairy Stories” para. 9). In this light, Byatt’s description suggests that this tale is shaped by Victorian narrative aesthetics, explored through the discourses on the wonder tale as a privileged locus of the productive interplay between realism and fantasy. In addition, it also suggests the implied relationship between teller and tale, which is particularly symbiotic in this instance. Therefore, my reading of “The Threshold” will focus on both “the narrative