Grade: A

Michael Phelps

Mr. Lyons

English 3 AP

7 December 2009

On Death: The Pale Blue Moth

Virginia Woolf wrote a persistent feeling of ambivalence towards Death in her 1942 essay, “The
Death of the Moth”. The titular moth and our narrator act as empty vessels in which we place ourselves
and share in the fundamental peripeteia of death; the revaluation and reconciliation of this pervasive
force in each our lives. As the moth quickly succumbs to the magnitude of death the narrator’s feelings
towards the seemingly insignificant insect change, the parallels in which Woolf attempts to submerse
the reader becomes significantly deeper, and the scale in which the moth is described enlarges to
convey Woolf’s beliefs on the human experience. The narrative becomes more a revaluation of Death,
amounting to a subtle, but nonetheless grand moment of anagnorisis with only the largest of
antagonists himself.

The short piece begins with a scene of great activity and spectacle. “It was a pleasant morning,
mid-September, mild, benignant,” and while the weather itself seems docile this only serves to
juxtapose the vibrant actions of the rooks nesting and rising like locusts of some biblical plague amongst
the hurried activities of the farmhands and their stock. It is in this vision that the moth appears,
somehow conveying to the narrator the same great intensity of life within the fields compressed and
squeezed into the frail speck that is its body. At first this energy serves only to amuse however as the
moth begins to show signs of distress the author’s tone towards the lowly creature turns from
indifference to pity and finally marvel and mourning. Contrasting with works like Earthly Vanity and
Divine Salvation where death is merely a force and perhaps more significantly a reasonable punishment,
a tool, the Death of the Moth is a memento mori piece which personifies Death and makes its presence
equal to life, perhaps not in strength, but in strangeness. This moth which was just minutes ago living
with such vigor, indeed to the point where its struggle with Death was incomprehensible, died of a
cause unknown to the narrator and for no determinable purpose. The death of the moth is not one of
mourning and sadness, but of reverence towards the force of Death and its strangeness which directly
contrasts any beliefs of predestination that one likes to comfort themselves with; Death is indifferent,
should it had chosen to “submerge an entire city” it could. In this way Woolf resembles an absurdist as
she echoes the belief of death, and in turn the universe, to having no rational order.

The structure of the piece itself, if one is so inclined for such figurative language, resembles the
body of a moth; the first “wing” of the story is the life of the fields and the moth while the second
“wing” is the recognition of morality and death. Likewise, the story can be seen as being structured
after the life cycle, beginning with the great energy of youth, followed by the sickness and death of old
age across the five poignant paragraphs. Perceptions of the moth quickly change from the innocent
assumptions of youth, as the narrator assumes the moth will resume its motion as it surely should, to
 Grade: A

the mature resignation towards death in the belief of “...death is stronger than I am.” However the
moth’s submission is in no way treated with disdain; in fact Woolf glorifies the moth’s valiant struggle,
“against a power of such magnitude,” as it has died on its feet rather than its back.

Acting as an obvious analogy to human nature, the titular moth’s plight with death parallels our
own, but perhaps more significantly it is Woolf’s few sentences devoted to the great expanse of the
world in comparison with the moth that does the most to relate to the human existence. Even more
pervasive than the physical act of death is the reality of human insignificance. The moth lives in the tiny
world of the window pane and yet the “size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of
houses, and the romantic voice... of a steamer out at sea,” are forever out of reach. Woolf recognizes
and through her moth attempts to convey the remarkably tiny extent of the human experience; the
steam boat to the moth is an endless expanse away, something so foreign it can never hope to
understand, and in this humans share a similar disparity between themselves and the enormity of the
universe.

In 1990 the Voyage I probe captured a picture of earth against a backdrop of space aptly named
later by Carl Sagan the “Pale Blue Dot”. In the picture Earth and, “...every hero and coward...every king
and peasant...every ‘superstar’...every ‘supreme leader’...” are represented by a single blue pixel
amongst a vast expanse of black empty space. More important than the moth’s parallels to our own
mortality in “The Death of the Moth” is the moth’s parallels to our insignificance perhaps most aptly and
poignantly described in that single dot of light. Throughout the passage Wolf does not treat the moth
with disgust for its “pathetic” state inside a world outside its reach but with pity while its fight against
Death is portrayed not as futile but honorable. Ultimately, Woolf was trying to communicate through
her insect a sense of urgency; Death does not discriminate towards moth or man.