Summary of Virginia Woolf's 'The Death of the Moth'

In ‘The Death of the Moth’, Virginia Woolf creates three clarifications to the story, where it’s the world outside the window, the moth trapped between the window panes, and her observing everything as it’s happening.

At the beginning of the story, she stated: “It was a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of summer months. The plough was already scoring the field opposite the window, and where the share had been, the earth was pressed flat and gleamed with moisture”. Was the moth a figment of her imagination or was the moth truly a representation of herself and how she felt about her own life? Her tone is observant, peaceful, and calm, and she began to feel a sense of serenity, which turned to pity and then admiration. She may have used the moth to symbolize her thoughts and emotions about herself and her own life. Throughout the story, Woolf recognizes the moth as a weak creature living its life to the fullest, stating “He was little or nothing but life”, as she drowned in her own thoughts and views of her own life. She considered the moth as herself and gave clues by switching between a personal narrative and the narrative of the moth’s struggle with death. She continues to relate back to herself adding emphasis of the moth’s size to her own yet both have the same energy.

She arbitrated the moth as a metaphor for life and a creature that will not make a change in the world. Woolf shares her fascination with life by describing her surroundings and the beauty behind them. She says, “Stillness and quiet had replaced the previous animation. The birds had taken themselves off to feed in the brooks. The horses stood still. Yet the power was there all the same, massed outside indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular. Somehow it was opposed to the little hay-colored moth. It was useless to try to do anything”. I feel that she is looking outside for an explanation of some sort but then continues to gaze at the moth in his time of weakness. She continued watching the moth as he moved from one side of the window to the other and was in awe by what she was watching. The willpower, determination, and strength of the moth, in her mind, were remarkable, as well as pathetic. Psychologically, Woolf may have suffered from depression because she expressed the desire to be free as the moth wanted freedom and struggled with the thought of death. She began to describe the moth’s fight in a more serious and less lively way, making the situation more miserable and discouraging by giving the moth human characteristics. She describes how the energy left behind by the surroundings could be the only force to make the moth fly again. She used a horse and the ploughmen as symbols of strength, comparing them to the moth because the energy and strength that they have to finish their tasks are the same as the moth’s to be freed from the window-sill. The concept of the moth and humans having the same energies may have been a hint of her fears of living a constant lethargic life and not knowing how to live a valuable life.

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As the moth is struggling to be freed, Woolf decides to help the moth using a pencil. Before helping the moth, she realizes that the moth is dying. She wants an understanding of life and death and the power it has by creating evidence of the moth’s dying. She adds her own thoughts and observations by using short expressions to describe the moth and its untimely death because she was dealing with her own inner struggles of life and suicidal thoughts. After watching the moth’s continuous efforts to be freed and his death, Woolf concluded that the moth’s struggle was over and that life is strange, but death is also as strange. She explains the nature of the universe and people and feels like no one cares about you when you’re struggling or how much you have to fight to win in life, yet everyone sympathizes with life. In other words, people do not value other people’s lives until their deaths. The ending of the story is sad because you can sense the feelings she portrayed of happiness in the beginning and then the sadness once the moth realized he could not free himself.

Woolf created a set of emotions from beginning to end which allowed me to identify that this story was more than about the moth’s death. She wanted the reader to understand that although death is inevitable, the process of dying can be beautiful. I feel that the author wanted to convince the reader to have respect for life, no matter how simple it is. She used the moth as a symbol to show the struggle to survive, how humans encounter death, and a symbol of the urgency humans should have to live to the fullest, no matter how insignificant our lives are at the moment. In her mind, there is nothing a person can do to stop the power of death. In the last sentences of the passage, she wanted to emphasize that nothing can stop death as she was speaking about her own life. She stated “Death is stronger than I am” to reflect that we all will die sooner or later. Her life was not colorful or interesting like what she viewed through her window and she could see the beauty in the world around her but couldn’t see how she fit into this world. With her mental illness, she viewed the world differently and understood her inner thoughts more than the average person. It is evident that she superficially wrote about the moth’s death, while actually writing about herself. The negative emotions she felt were displayed in the essay because she wanted to get the point across that death is a natural process and no one can escape death. She sympathizes with the moth throughout the essay but also switches between her personal struggles and the moth’s struggles by changing the tone when the different themes of life and death are visited.

I felt sympathetic towards life and grew an appreciation for life and was able to reflect on my own life experiences in an event where I felt that I couldn’t get back up but I still kept fighting. To me, her window symbolized the closing of a chapter in her own life and her inability to see her life beyond the window. The window was a barrier between her and the positive life she wanted. She wanted to express that she is falling miserably and cannot free herself from the harsh realities of her life viewed through this window. Her message in ‘The Death of the Moth’ gives the message of unhappiness and darkness of the human spirit, her own spirit. This essay was her way of expressing her true feelings about her own life without alerting anyone to any suicidal thoughts she had. Woolf wanted to express how the moth is capable of living a simple life, while she was still searching for happiness, living in her complicated and confused state of mind. She wanted to share her feelings of being weak and searching for a meaning to live, but not being able to see the enjoyment of her life and where she was at that point in her life. Woolf mixed her true feelings into her words, saying, “Yet, because he was so small, and so simple a form of the energy that was rolling in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and those of other human beings, there was something marvelous as well as pathetic about him”. This was how she was able to express her thoughts that people either achieve their goals then die, or die without achieving them, making their efforts pointless. She felt that life is full of rules and responsibilities and only death can free you from them because she viewed the world in a pessimistic way.