The Death of the Moth

The narrator—more or less Virginia Woolf herself—is imaginative, sensitive, and unconventional. She is fascinated by what most people would overlook or deem unworthy of such close attention, seeing value in even the day moth, a creature that, by her own admission, is unimpressive. She compares it to the night moth and the bounty of nature through her window, and finds it wanting—but cannot stop looking at it. She describes the day moth as a lesser moth and seeks to find a more proper classification for the creature, as if she wants it to belong more harmoniously within the natural order. At the beginning of the essay, the narrator employs a detached, scientific tone, but later invests the moth with pathos, or a sense of tragic emotion. Her interest is no longer scientific, but instead grounded in the creature’s symbolic nature, in the idea of mortality as a whole.

Woolf uses imagery and metaphor to anthropomorphize the natural world. Through her famed style and technique, she creatively explores her thought process as she observes the moth. She portrays the moth’s trivial dance with pathos: “One was indeed conscious of a queer feeling of pity for him” (Paragraph 1). Woolf as the narrator seeks to understand her own existence by organizing her observations into theories—and then, theories into greater understanding refined by emotion-heavy stream of consciousness.

The narrator is also easily distracted: “it was difficult to keep the eyes strictly turned upon the book” (Paragraph 1). As the essay progresses, she deconstructs traditional classification of nature, connecting some rooks’ movements with those of horses with ploughs. As the narrator considers the moth’s nature, accepting “What he could do, he did” (Paragraph 2), she arrives at an acceptable classification: The moth is simply life. Her emotions vacillate between admiration and pity for the moth, as “there was something marvelous as well as pathetic about him” (Paragraph 3). But upon dying, the moth no longer represents life and speaks to the narrator’s continued enthrallment with nature’s cycle.