TOW #7 - The Death of the Moth

      "The Death of the Moth" is essentially a metaphor of Virginia Woolf herself. She writes of a moth that is lively and energetic until it is forced to face the ultimate enemy, death, and slowly gives in. The essay was published just one year after Woolf's suicide in 1941, after she wrote to her husband, "I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer." Through her recognizable stream-of-consciousness style, Woolf shares some insights with the world, and lets family members and admirers know what was going on in her head during her final days. Woolf's essay is clear enough for readers to realize there is a deeper meaning, and complex enough to require that readers actually think in order to truly understand.

      Woolf crafts the essay so that each statement reveals a new idea about herself or about life and death. She writes, "to have only a moth’s part in life, and a day moth’s at that, appeared a hard fate… What he could do he did" (par. 2). This parallels her struggle as a female writer and intellectual in a male-dominated environment, and her efforts to challenge that issue - she may not have been satisfied with those efforts, as hinted by the narrator's later view of the moth as pitiful. She also observes, "there was nobody to care or to know, this gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little moth, against a power of such magnitude" (par. 5). The contrast between the size of the creature, its effort, and its opponent highlights the seeming impossibility to overcome certain barriers. Despite Woolf's greatest efforts, she struggled in society, failed to battle her demons and gradually broke down in the grip of mental illness.

     Even so, there is a glimmer of hope in the statement, "The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed" (par. 5). Perhaps Woolf wrote this essay as a final "righting," as a way of revealing herself without worry of the public's reception. If so, she did it well.

"He was little or nothing but life." | "O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am."