TOW #18: "The Death of the Moth" by Virginia Woolf

The cover alone depicts Virginia Woolf's struggle with mental illness in The Death of the Moth.

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/chapter1.html

In her post-mortem publication The Death of the Moth and other essays, Virginia Woolf begins by talking about a seemingly benign subject. Woolf’s book was written in 1941, the same year she committed suicide. The collection of essays was then published by Leonard Woolf, her husband, in 1942. In her first essay of her book, “The Death of the Moth,” Woolf describes an insignificant moth’s slow, hopeless death. Although only implied, the true purpose of “The Death of the Moth” is to describe her own struggle with mental illness, as shown by her suicide not even a year later. Virginia Woolf was an British essayist, novelist, and critic who was educated by her parents. Her childhood was fraught with illness and death, starting with her mother’s death when Woolf was only 13. As shown in her writing, the hardships and instability she dealt with have heavily influenced her thinking. The audience of Woolf’s work included those who were interested in the effects of mental illness and appreciated the same style of writing as her father, Leslie Stephen, who was a notable author and critic as well. In “The Death of the Moth,” Woolf employs various rhetorical devices and strategies to compare her own struggle with death to the physical struggle of the dying moth. She personifies death, saying “the insignificant little creature know knew death”. This tones down the intensity of death. Rather than saying “he died,” which sounds much more brutal, she eases into the idea by suggesting that death was just another person to be met. By downplaying death, she is possibly rationalizing to herself how suicide was insignificant – just another idea. Additionally, Woolf describes the moth’s death in excruciating detail to emphasize the struggle of living with a mental illness. She is drawing a connection between the slow and sure death by mental instability to the drawn-out death of the moth. Overall, Woolf provides interesting insight into the mind of a person with mental illness at a time when mental illnesses weren’t as widely recognized through her use of personification and excessive detail.