There are almost no similes in Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth.” To be precise, there is one asimile1 and two similes. That is not very many similes. These few similes all point into the frame, not out. None of them speak directly to the reader to explain anything that has just been described in the piece. At no point is that done. All the similes deepen the reader’s picture of the characters in the story.
So that’s what I learned. To get to that I had to first read the piece for the content, read the story. I did not expect to feel so much for a bug that had died over 80 years ago.2 It is exceptionally well written. I am not bothered at all that I read it approximately three times.
I read it to try and learn something about the craft of writing. The part that I am working on right now is what I call “sketches”. My drafts tend to drift into talking to the reader about what I am trying to say. It breaks the spell. My copy of the Norton Reader puts them in the rhetorical genre called Describing.
Woolf’s very short piece, just two facing pages, is a moving observation of herself, but universal, in the mode of description.
jg
footnotes
An asimile is something I just made up. It’s short for anti-simile. A simile is of the form “x is like y”, ergo an asimile is of the form “x is not like y.” ↩︎
I’m assuming here that Woolf wrote the piece in 1940 or ‘41, shortly before it was published. Also shortly before she died. I have no idea if that’s true, or if the piece is about a moth that died around the time that she wrote it and not 20 years earlier. Or if it’s even about any one particular moth that she witnessed passing at all. ↩︎
updates
- More on this in the grab bag vol. 3 post.
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this weekyesterday. I haven’t read it yet, I forgot about it while I was reading Virginia’s similes instead.leave a comment