The Death Of A Moth By Virginia Woolf

1. “The Death of a Moth,” written by modernist Virginia Woolf, contemplates life and death through the struggles of a “day moth.” Woolf suffered from mental illnesses, like bipolar disorder, that contributed to her committing suicide in 1941 by drowning. This short essay was published in 1942, the year after her death, by Hogarth Press.

2. Woolf’s short essay demonstrates a different perspective on death and its inevitability. The audience would be those who could relate to the moth’s feelings of struggle. Woolf assumes the audience expects for one to help someone or something when he, she, or it is on the verge of death.

3. The author mainly argues that death is all too powerful to avoid or control. Woolf implies that those with little

Virginia Woolf automatically established her credibility before the audience would read the essay. Woolf is a public figure in the London literary society. She had written Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, and more before “The Death of a Moth.” Since she herself had several mental illnesses, the audience already familiarized themselves with her style of writing and personal connections between her pieces of writing and her bipolar disorder. Then, Woolf acknowledged the counter argument and refuted it in order to appeal to her logical reasoning. When she noticed the moth was having difficulties raising himself up, she “stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, [but] it came over [her] that the failure and awkwardness were the approach of death. [She] laid the pencil down again” (2). She stated that the counter argument in which one should help those during their weak states, but she refuted by stating that in the face of death, one cannot avoid the end result. She also employed the appeal to emotions in her short essay. The vivid description of the moth’s actions allow the readers to feel an emotional connection with it and Woolf. For example, Woolf mentioned that “after perhaps a seventh attempt [the moth] slipped from the wooden ledge and feel, fluttering his wings, on to his back on the window sill. The helplessness of his attitude roused [her]” (2). The audience will be able to also feel the emotions Woolf had towards

Virginia Woolf utilized metaphor frequently throughout the essay. The primary one used was when Woolf thought “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 zig-zagging to show the true nature of life” (1-2). The comparison between the moth and life contributes to Woolf’s central argument because someone’s life eventually leads to death that they can’t avoid. The repetition emphasizes the argument even more. There was also usage of parallelism when the moth was illustrated only being able to fly one corner of the window to the other. It states, “That was all he could do, in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea” (1). This sentence was highlighted from the rest of the essay to reiterate the contrast between the moth’s little power and the world’s openness. This would support his implied argument that the actions of one have little impact compared to and towards one that is larger in power. There’s also very vivid imagery employed. For example, Woolf presented the setting in which “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” (1). The descriptions engrosses the readers into the story and understand it better in the perspective of the narrator, in this case it’s Woolf.