Virginia Woolf’s The Death of the Moth

1. Virginia Woolf’s The Death of the Moth Irlanda Olave

2. In the form of a small seemingly insignificant moth, the speaker feels the thrill of life but also the overwhelming power of death, which even we are powerless to defeat.

3. Virginia Woolf wrote this piece just before she killed herself in the beginning of the summer of 1941. Being written so close to her suicide gives us a great deal of insight of how she must have felt just before her death.

4. The title immediately suggests that death was important to Woolf an that she was facing an inner struggle.

5. Exposition: Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths, they do not excite that pleasant sense of the dark autumn nights and ivy-blossoms which the commonest yellow-under wing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us.

6. Exposition: It was a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer months.

7. Rising Action: The same energy which inspired the rooks, the plowmen, the horses, and even, it seemed, the lean bare backed downs, sent the moth fluttering from side to side of his square of the window pane.

8. Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions have meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral or social significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas.

9. Allegory The writer is alone in her study, with the window open to the world, which indicates that she is observing the surrounding outside and the life that nature has, the moth is inside too, trapped in the window pane while outside life’s energy is revealed.

10. The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meager opportunities to the full pathetic.

11. Rising Action He flew vigorously to one corner of his compartment, and after waiting three a second, flew across to the other.

12. Symbol A symbol is something that represents some piece of information by association, resemblance, or convention. A window pane may be a symbol for…

13. 1. Narrowness If someone looks through a window, that person will only receive a narrow view of the outside world. That view will only go as far as the person can see out the window. Characters who look through windows in books are showing that they have a narrow view. These characters will watch the world go by from their window, but not do anything about it.

14. 2. Alienation The window symbolizes the separation between the viewer and the outside world. The window has glass so the person is left as a spectator, not as someone who actually has any kind of involvement with the world.

15. Virginia Woolf’s The Death of the Moth 3. Constraints of life Sometimes, the window represents the confines of our life on earth or the constraints of life in general.

16. Topic: There was something wonderful as well as pathetic about him. It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.

17. After perhaps a seventh attempt he slipped from the wooden ledge and fell, fluttering his wings, on to his back on the windowsill. The helplessness of his attitude roused me.

18. Climax But as I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, it came over me that the failure and awkwardness were the approach of death.

19. Falling Action I laid the pencil down again. The legs agitated themselves once more. I looked as if for the enemy against which he struggled.

20. Stillness and quiet had replaced the previous animation. The birds had taken themselves off the feed in the brooks. The horses stood still. Yet the power was there all the same, massed outside, indifferent, impersonal…

21. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves.

22. Virginia Woolf’s The Death of the Moth Resolution: The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant creature know knew death.

23. Resolution The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger that I am.