ABSTRACT
Since Gillian Beer’s brilliant reading of evolution as a literary plot and of Victorian narratives as Darwinian plots, the link between Natural History and the novel has become topical. Using Georges Didi-Huberman’s recent book titled Phalènes, Essai sur l’apparition 2, where he defines all images as flickering moths, and Michel Serres’s concept of parasite, this chapter probes into Virginia Woolf’s interest in entomology and her portrayal of Victorian entomologist Eleanor Ormerod, an “obscure” spinster and pragmatic entomologist, famous in her day. This connects Woolf with her Victorian literary foremothers. Woolf expands on the way George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell used issues of contemporary science to dramatize the marginalization of women. Entomology, here, is a code not only for science but for masculine spheres of activity as well as for realist fiction, pinning down characters and dissecting their destinies. Woolf revisits Victorian entomology to engage with science and gender politics. Thus “Miss Ormerod” functions as a parasite in Michel Serres’s sense of the word, a biological and social parasite, introducing static, white noise in the system; infiltrating the fortress of science, she is an agent of (dis)order and redefinition, not so much of science as of womanhood. We shall see how entomology thus becomes a trope for writing itself, a metatextual motif which connects modernism and Victorian fiction in unsuspected ways. Like Darwinian taxonomy in Middlemarch, entomology functions as a topic, a metaphor, and a method. The chapter concludes with the politics of writing and the flickering images of butterflies and caterpillars in Woolf’s novels and essays.
