Judging moths: Poppy Adams’s The Behaviour of Moths

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Title: The Behaviour of Moths
Author: Poppy Adams
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781844085125
Publication date: May 2008
Pages: 320

Lepidoptera appear in a surprising range of novels and essays. It’s easy to understand the literary imagination’s attraction to butterflies, which embody the idea of spectacular transformation: the voracious, tubular caterpillar emerges from its chrysalis into fragile, bright-winged beauty, an associate now of flowers.

Also the yield of metamorphosis, moths signify very differently in fiction and philosophical musings. They are crepuscular or nocturnal, creatures of shadow who are drawn to the flame but unaccustomed to life in the light. And unlike their diurnal cousins, they haven’t much colour to show for their emergence from silk into flight; they are what zoologists call “cryptic”, which means that they are suited for camouflage. They are unable to learn from mistakes and are repeatedly and mechanistically drawn to the same things (flames, light sources, certain chemicals) regardless of the potential perils.

The polymath Persian mystic al-Ghazali believed that the earliest stage through which man must pass in his evolution is that of the sensuous, which is characterised by the absence of memory. His symbol for this phase is the moth which sees the flame to which it is attracted but cannot, because it has no memory, learn self-protection from the experience of singeing itself.

In the Bible, moths not only imperil themselves repeatedly, but are the consumers of cloth and other treasures; they symbolise the fact that powerful destructive forces can be deceptively small.

Donne, Petrarch, Shelley and Shakespeare were all keen users of the moth as metaphor for our helpless attraction to things or people we cannot quite possess.

Among more contemporary writers who find moth metaphors and musings a rich trope are Virginia Woolf (in her essay “The Death of the Moth”), Annie Dillard (in hers: “The Death of a Moth”), Jane Fox, Ingrid Winterbach, and Margaret Drabble. We can add to this list Poppy Adams, the title of whose fine and riveting novel, The Behaviour of Moths, provides us with an important key to our understanding of the narrator-protagonist.

The Behaviour of Moths spans six days in the narrative’s present time, but the events of this tight frame reach backwards into a family’s slow history of unravelling. The narrator is Ginny, a retired lepidopterist who lives alone in the West Dorset countryside in her family’s crumbling mansion – “a vast Victorian folly,” she calls the house, which she has stripped of all its antique furniture so as to dispose of the weight of objects and history. As the novel opens, Ginny is waiting anxiously for the arrival of her sister, Vivien, whom she hasn’t seen for several decades. We are given no reasons at this stage for Vivien’s long absence, nor do we yet understand the extent of, or motivations for, Ginny’s isolation from the world. It is one of the novel’s great strengths that the these gaps are slowly filled in ways which surprise the reader and complicate her judgement.

This is a novel which very skilfully explores not only the contestation over truth and memory that is revealed by the juxtaposition of perspectives, but also the profound errors in understanding human relations and events that can result from pathological emotional detachment. We realise at the novel’s start that Ginny is a strange – and estranged – person. She declares that she wears a watch on each wrist and keeps various clocks in an otherwise empty house so that she can constantly feel confident of the exact time, for in the absence of this vigilance “you could easily end up living in a completely erroneous time frame”. But this need to know the time by which the world works has nothing to do with a way of being part of the world, because Ginny, we learn gradually, is in hiding from society: she never responds to knocks on her door; a long-time employee of the family serves as her only connection with society by bringing her supplies; she never ventures beyond the house, and even within the house, she keeps within certain quarters. Despite Ginny’s love of her younger sister, she has never questioned Vivien’s long absence or tried to find her. We discover that she never felt the sick fear of a loving sibling over her sister’s near-fatal fall from the bell tower when they were children scaling secret heights. It was an accident which left Vivien unable to conceive and carry a baby. We discover that upon marrying Arthur, Vivien had asked Ginny to bear their child – there is no sense of surprise, alarm or repressed objection in her acceptance of the task. The clandestine monthly meetings with her brother-in-law in her family home never made her feel uncomfortable or used. Indeed, Ginny never seems to interrogate events or to want to uncover the hidden meanings in things – this is because she never sees the multiple lives led by people and objects. Hers is a peculiarly one-dimensional world, although it is not a world that lacks complexity.

Evidence gathers as the novel proceeds for the distortedness of Ginny’s perspective. But hers is the perspective upon which the reader must rely. This presents us with an exercise in deduction and judgement that can never finally find validation because the corrective perspective offered by Vivien late in the novel is also flawed by her periods of absence from the scenes she claims to be able to explicate.

Vivien, too, is a damaged character, estranged from her mother, who became an abusive alcoholic, and her father, who was a brilliant lepidopterist but a neglectful family man ill-suited to the demands of the emotional or social life. It is the dramatic clash of the two sisters’ perspectives on what happened between their parents – and the viability of the meanings they have given their own life-paths in consequence – that leads to the sinister climax of the novel.

One of the questions with which we are left by the novel is that of how to judge Ginny, whose perspective has detained our own in misunderstanding and whose behaviour, despite its calmness and guise of logic, surely calls for condemnation. We have identified with her voice, enjoyed her facility with language and her capacious knowledge of the world of moths, and have felt sympathy with her efforts to protect her abusive mother from the scrutiny of others. And yet, we come to distrust Ginny, to question her sanity, and to wonder how to make sense of her understanding of the world which, taken alone, has its own compelling internal logic and coherence.

A key seems to be offered to us by the book’s title and the narrator’s own preoccupation with the behaviour of moths. Describing her father’s interest in moths, Ginny tells us that Clive was not a collector, interested in perfect specimens, but rather a scientist driven by the desire to discover and express a formula that would show precisely what makes a moth a moth. The reason the moth is attractive in this respect is its evolutionary simplicity; its inability to learn from experience and change its behaviour; its utter predictability. Clive is driven mad by his failure to produce the essence of the moth, but he does pass on to his daughter the notion that it is through nature’s imperfections rather than its precisions that the secret code of species can be glimpsed.

Being utterly incapable of self-reflexivity, Ginny does not see how she comes to represent to the reader just such an imperfect moth, a character who reveals much about the wounds and blockages that so often stand at the centre of what it is to be human. She is also, like moths perfect and imperfect alike, incapable of the sort of consciousness that corrects the behaviour or perceptions of the self; although, unlike moths, she has a remarkable capacity for memory, Ginny lacks the capacity to question her version of history or to entertain the possibility that others may have seen things differently. Like a moth, and despite her memories, we learn that Ginny lives in an unending present moment. She is obsessed with what time it is, with what sounds she can hear now, with her sister’s activities and whereabouts in the house at this precise minute, with what activities she can pursue each moment in order to spend down the burden of the present.

Unlike in the case of the butterfly, whose transformation signifies evolution and liberation, the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the moth is ambiguous: the moth’s colours are drab; the objects to which moths are attracted are frequently perilous; there is no possibility for the moth to change its behaviour in response to its experience. We might deduce that Ginny, although she has become a well-known scientist in her own right, an independent woman of sorts, is incapable of the sort of transformation that would bring her into a richer capacity for apprehension and understanding.

We might choose to judge Ginny harshly at the end of the novel, we might feel profoundly ambivalent, or we might choose to pity her. Whatever we do choose will be accompanied by a feeling of unease which Adams is skilful in eliciting from us – it is the unease inherent in recognising in the distorted mirror provided by Ginny how partisan and pathological our own sense of events and personal history might be. This is a novel which makes one productively uneasy at the same time that it provides a compelling, rich read.

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