The Death of the Moth

Virginia Woolf assigns human-like qualities to nature, especially the day moth whose life and death become the essay’s focal point. She refers to the moth as “he” and describes its pointless fluttering as an expression of excitement, a “queer spectacle” (Paragraph 3); his movement is compared to “dancing.” Woolf contemplates what the moth could have been “had he been born in any shape” other than his own (Paragraph 2). Humanizing the moth by imagining its potential implies that the moth is a failure of nature, but Woolf quickly dispels this idea by stating that its instinctual behavior represents “the true nature of life” (Paragraph 2). Woolf’s anthropomorphizing of the moth creates a sense of connection and sympathy for its eventual death. The moth’s demise dissolves any remaining boundaries between it and Woolf as she concludes that humans, too, are nothing against “a power of such magnitude” as death’s (Paragraph 5). Woolf uses “I” rather than “he” in the essay’s final sentence, anthropomorphizing the moth by giving it the power of language (Paragraph 5). In acknowledging that death befalls all living beings, Woolf’s technique serves her essay’s purpose, which is to explore the meaning of the moth’s life and thus, the meaning of human life.