Using the struggle of a moth to stay alive on her windowsill as a backdrop for her essay, Woolf wonders about the persistence of life against the inevitability of death.
From the beginning, the day moth that Woolf observes on her windowsill is an outsider to the grand scheme of life that Woolf paints. “They are hybrid creatures,” she writes. Moths take a liminal space between night moths and butterflies, neither beautiful like butterflies nor somber like night moths. The unnatural existence of the moth raises questions about fate and life. Why would God decide to create a creature like a day moth? They do not occupy a meaningful position in the world. However, despite its strangeness, the day moth is alive. Even a queer, unbelonging creature such as the day moth is filled with energy and “content with life.”
The essay begins with an inundation of life to highlight the vivacity of the day moth’s actions, moving back and forth across the windowsill with seemingly no direction. Woolf looks to the outside world: the fields are rich with produce, the birds rise up and down and up and down again, almost as if to represent the constant cycle of life. Even something as mundane as “settling down upon the treetops” is an immensely satisfying experience for the birds. Then, that poses the question: if the birds are satisfied with their ceaseless rise and fall, then why should we as humans look upon them with pity? Their actions are meaningless when we, from an “enlightened” perspective, impose our own definitions of meaning onto them. Similarly, Woolf portrays the moth in a simultaneously positive yet pitying light. She laments how after flying across the windowsill, the day moth has no choice but to “fly to a third corner and then a forth,” stuck in the endless rinse and repeat of its motions. It goes nowhere, and it achieves nothing. However, something is compelling in how the moth is “little or nothing but life.” There is a poetic element in the persistence of life everywhere, from the humans plowing the fields, to even a queer, insubstantial day moth.
However, the moth, like all other living beings, is not protected from the unyielding force of death. Woolf watches the moth turned over on its back, unable to fly. “His legs struggled vainly” as the moth attempts to rise again but fails. At this point, all the world seems to be arrayed against the moth. It becomes midday, and the air outside becomes stagnant, the workers no longer ploughing the fields. The essay is filled with the suggestion of doom and decay. The futility of the moth’s actions is exemplified by how its death is not the result of any malicious actions; the time has simply come for it to exit the world. Woolf further emphasizes the frightful power of death by describing how it is “massed outside indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular,” yet still exerting such a powerful force over the moth, “an oncoming doom” that “could have submerged an entire city. The moth continues to fight against the inexorable force of death, and in the very struggle to stay alive, the fly’s struggle becomes valiant despite its apparent meaninglessness. The moth succeeds after a long moment of fluttering in “at last righting himself.” It lays most “decently and uncomplainingly composed.” He dies with dignity, and doing so imparts a sense of meaning despite his exit.
The Death of a Moth is an entreaty from Woolf to notice life and cherish it. By magnifying the minute struggle of a day moth against its eventual death, Woolf displays an acute awareness of life and of the peculiar fact that we *exist*. By contrasting the abundance of life and ending her essay with the onset of death, Woolf emphasizes the transience of all existence. However, this only accentuates the value of life. The struggle of the queer, displaced moth against death is valiant, and he ends composed. Extrapolating this to make a statement about humanity, Woolf seems to say to us: Death is inevitable, but the struggle for life is wonderful nonetheless.