19 pages • 38 minutes read
Mary HowittThe Spider And The Fly
Fiction | Poem | Middle Grade | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
The Howitts’ work was central to the literary world in their day. However, they have since been more or less forgotten. Few biographies exist, and Mary’s poetry has disappeared from view with the exception of “The Spider and the Fly.”
Howitt fell out of favor due to the changing tide in children’s literature in the latter half of the Victorian era, when it moved from a didactic and prescriptive tone to a playful one. Lewis Carroll, who liked to claim his books did not have any morals, heralded this shift with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and poked fun at earlier verse like Howitt’s within his texts. After Carroll, books for children stayed within the imaginative vein with writers like Edith Nesbit, J. M. Barrie, and Kenneth Grahame creating fanciful worlds. Even more blatantly moral-minded fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen and British author Oscar Wilde relied on embedded morals rather than stated, explicit ones.
Still, “The Spider and the Fly” was considered timeless and its characters memorable. Lines and references continue to be seen in popular songs, film, novel titles and epigraphs, and in images of anthropomorphized insects. Writing for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Nicholas R. Jones notes that, in comparison to her husband, William, Mary Howitt “shaped her work with more focus and with a more muted tone; her poems of natural history for children, her literary ballads, and her wry and unassertive tales have an attractive sensitivity and insight, moralizing without heaviness or monotony” (See: Further Reading & Resources).
Biological Context
Many Victorian educators used “The Spider and the Fly” to discuss the biological behavior of spiders and flies with their students. Howitt’s descriptions mimic the behavior of garden orb-weavers, and the common green bottle fly, both of which are abundant in England. Lisa Hendry for England’s Natural History Museum explains that orb-weavers make webs “with radial threads that function as a scaffold” (See: Further Reading & Resources). This correlates with Spider’s “prettiest little parlour” (Line 3). Most orb-weavers remake their webs each night to get rid of the remains of what they’ve eaten, which may explain why Fly only has “heard” (Lines 11, 18) about Spider’s victims instead of seeing them herself. Orb-weavers also position themselves upside down to await their prey, which may account for the directional “up” (Lines 3, 5, 39) of the staircase and why the spider must “tur[n] [. . .] round about, [to go] into his den” (Line 25).
Certain types of orb-weavers finish their webs with a thicker line of thread, often formed in a meandering pattern, down the center. This looks like a “winding stair” (Line 6). Flying insects often see this extra band, called the stabilimentum. In avoiding it, they get stuck in the nearly invisible sticky threads surrounding it. As Hendry explains: “When an insect flies into the web the spider approaches the source of the vibrations, bites it and wraps it in silk, to feed on later.” This explains Spider’s deadly offer to “snugly tuck [Fly] in” (Line 10). The attractive “looking-glass” could be seen as a reflective drop of dew settling on the web. Common bottle flies have “green and purple” (Lines 31, 36) abdomens as well as clear, shiny wings. They have bristles on their head, which could form a sort of “crest” (Line 31) and emit a loud “buzzing” (Line 35) in flight. Part of the success of the poem rests in both its metaphor and its accurate entomological rendering.
