A Summary OfThe Moths

In the short story, “The Moths”, the narrator, a fourteen year old girl, assumes the responsibility of taking care of her cancerous and dying Abuelita. Her Abuelita is the only person who understands the narrator and the only person she feels she can turn to. After having followed man’s rules for so many years, Abuelita passes away. All the moths that lived inside her are freed and the narrator learns some life lessons. Helena Maria Viramontes uses symbolism and setting to illustrate the oppression of women in “The Moths.”

A trickiest aspect regarding growing up is considering death. It's something individuals truly don't like to think about, but thinking about mortality is pretty much an inevitable part of coming of age. Everybody does it at some point—you know because we're all going to die someday, as are our loved ones. You know the drill: Our grandma show us, cherish, then they get super old and die, and after that we slither into the bathtub with their corpses. It's just the circle of life. What's that? You've never taken a bath with a dead person? Well then you might be a little surprised by how things unfurl in Helena Maria Viramontes' 1985 short story "The Moths," a story about a youthful Latina girl who feels at odds with pretty much everybody in her family except her cherished Abuelita.

The movements and struggle of the moth affect each of the authors differently. Dillard describes the moth's death as if it were glorious: "She burned for two hours without changing, without swaying or kneeling — only glowing within, like a fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hallow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brain in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet." She sees the moths death as a stage of life that is as important as any other stage. In her death, the moth enlightens and inspires Dillard. The light by which she read about Rimbaud was magnified. In a sense the moth sacrificed herself for Dillard. Woolf, however, sees the moth in her essay in a much different light. The moth is perceived as a creature that is struggling for a freedom that it will never receive. Woolf describes him as "pathetic," saying that he is an example of the "true nature of

In the short story “The Moths” by Helena Maria Viramontes, the author uses symbolism and characterization to paint the scene of a girl in a literary fiction that has lost her way and ends up finding herself within her Grandmother through the cycles of life. Through the eyes of an unnamed girl we relive a past that has both a traumatic ending and a new leash on life; however, we do not get there without first being shown the way, enter “The Moths”.

Watching the hopeless death of the vulnerable moth leaves Woolf contemplating her own life, as she compares the moth to herself, and the human race. The moth, caught in a windowsill, is compared to the outside world by Woolf; while the moth flutters and exhibits life,

Annie Dillard’s piece “The Death of the Moth”, is about Dillard being reminded of the death of a moth she observes and how it relates to herself, this piece is a great depiction of the impact of life and death. Dillard describes her surroundings living in a rural area and within her bathroom is a spider which Dillard reminds of a moth that she killed in her past when she sees the web that the spider has spun and how it has caught many bugs including two moths. She is intrigued by the dead moth’s bodies and givings a vivid description of the bodies While describing the moth’s dead torn body she relates it to a personal experience from her past where she watched a moth die with candle two years ago. Dillard described the burning moth in vivid

The Moths by Helena Maria Viramontes is a short story about a relationship between a teenage girl and her abuelita. Although, the title seems unfitting for a story about a loving relationship between family members the significance of the moths, in this story, has a much deeper meaning than one would think. Like many other aspects of the piece, the insects have a symbolic meaning in order to convey the author’s feelings during the time of her grandmother’s death. Throughout the story we see the use of multiple descriptions, settings, as well as dialogue in order to pass a message to the audience. The Moths is not only a story about death and brokenness, but a story about cures and peace. Upon further examination of this narrative, the story presents symbolic attributes about the main characters personalities, descriptions, and religious imagery that tell the story about a cure for brokenness, a rebirth of hope, and coming of age.

A Summer of Silk Moths the Author Manganet Willey there are 243 pages in this book. This book was Fiction and mystery. Nora she got sexually abused by her father and has had a really bad childhood growing up and it was rough for her. Pete was adopted and had a very rough childhood growing up as well. Paul was a small, town star but soon later he died in a car accident.

Life is a constant struggle against the ever present chill of death. Fear, betrayal, and cowardice all stems from life’s distaste of death. Human beings naturally rebuke the unknown, so it is only logical that people fight the inevitability of death. However, most people are ignorant of the reality of one day dying, prompting writer Virginia Woolf to write the essay, “The Death of the Moth”, in order to convey the frailty of life whilst also showing the awesome might of death. In the essay, her main purpose is to show that the moth embodies the human race, and that death is an inevitable fact of life no matter how much the human race struggles to stay alive. Woolf is able to get her purpose across by

“Undressing Aunt Frieda,” is a poem about the narrator’s remembrance of his Aunts life while visiting her on a death bed. The narrative is in first person, and takes place as the narrator and his daughter are about to leave the relative. The first half of the poem explores Frieda and her past. The second half is about how the narrator and daughter have grown and learned from the aunt. While undressing her aunt, the narrator feels emotions and remembers his past with Frieda. The poem describes these emotions and memories in a metaphor explaining unique characteristics of how Aunt Frieda undressed, and how she impacted the relatives.

In the short story, The Moths Helena Maria Viramontes uses characterization and symbols to shine light on gender roles and maturity especially for women in the Hispanic culture. This short story was published in 1985 and during this time gender roles were changing. The number of women obtaining a higher education increased, it became more common for women to resist the stay at home and watch the children lifestyle. Hispanics in the US during this time felt like they were losing self-identity due to harsh laws passed by the United States. Knowing this information while I read this story was meaningful because it gave me a better understanding on what the narrator and her family were going through.

From the very first page of Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate it is clear that the real world in which her characters inhabit shall be greatly exaggerated. When Esquivel's narrator describes Tita as being so sensitive to onions that “when she was still in my great-grandmother's belly her sobs were so loud that even Nacha, the cook, who was half deaf, could hear them easily.” (Esquivel, p. 5) the reader encounters something at once refreshing, as is always the case when one experiences the supernatural where least expected, and yet ancient at the same time. While Esquivel could have attempted to tell her story, really the tale of a (mostly) unrequited love, in a straightforward manner, the casual inclusion of the extraordinary places it immediately in the tradition of magical realism.

       As the tale begins we immediately can sympathize with the repressive plight of the protagonist.  Her romantic imagination is obvious as she describes the "hereditary estate" (Gilman, Wallpaper 170) or the "haunted house" (170) as she would like it to be.  She tells us of her husband, John, who "scoffs" (170) at her romantic sentiments and is "practical to the extreme" (170).  However, in a time

Woolf’s essay is based on the symbolic meaning of the moth which she explicitly identifies as “little or nothing but life” (Woolf 57). Therefore, this “tiny bead of pure life” exists to “show us the true nature of life” which begins animated, innocent, and energetic, but eventually dwindles because it is overcome by “an oncoming doom” known as death (57). Juxtaposition is used because the moth is portrayed as a “tiny” and “pure” form of life while death is an unavoidable “doom.” The figurative meaning of this literal situation is examined as she says, “When there was nobody to care or to know, this gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little moth, against a power of such magnitude, to retain what no one else valued or desired to keep, moved one strangely” (58). Here, Woolf is watching a small seemingly “insignificant” moth struggle to live while also observing the omnipotent

The tone of this story is one of fear, regret, and guilt. The story first leaves the reader with impression that it may be a recount of the life of a daughter who was lost due to neglect. Soon it is evident