Hungry Caterpillar
A praying mantis crept up the frame of a photograph in the apartment. Her body was a deep, watery green, like tennis courts in the rain. As I trapped her in an empty peanut butter jar, I thought of the way female mantises sometimes feast on their partners after mating. For them, sex is consumptive and annihilating. Desire devours. The life of the praying mantis is not the only place in which sex and death are conflated. Body count can quantify either casualties or sexual partners, and to fuck someone is to screw them over or to screw them, another violent euphemism.
As I set the jarred mantis in the hallway to die, I thought, too, of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days, of the woman named Winnie buried up to her waist in a mound of scorched earth. In her captivity, her monologue is incessant but disjointed as she copes with her earthen prison through a series of absurd, repetitive tasks. In the second act, the dirt has all but swallowed her as she tells the story of a young girl and screams in tandem with the child, as if reliving a trauma she had sought to contain by telling it as someone else’s story. Instead, it is Winnie herself who is contained, entrapped in the mound that is the physical manifestation of her trauma. She oscillates between lamenting the loss of her body and articulating a desire for the earth to swallow her, as if it could erase her past. Here, transformation constrains rather than liberates, for only in the lives of insects is metamorphosis the gaining of wings.
The night went on. The mantis sat captive, suffocating, as I, on the other side of the wall, slipped slowly to the floor by the toilet, sobbing. I said I was afraid to vomit, but I was really terrified of the way the alcohol had taken me from myself. I felt suddenly defenseless to the world around me, soft, like the body of a caterpillar.
—
Nymph is the term for a baby praying mantis and for all insects undergoing incomplete metamorphosis, which, in contrast to the complete metamorphosis of the caterpillar, skips the pupa stage of utter transformation. The mantis that emerges from the egg is simply a miniature version of the adult, lacking only wings. Nymphs are also the female nature deities of Greek mythology, the victims in Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses whose bodies are trespassed and transformed. Metamorphosis is preceded by violence, and form varies. Some women find ways to tell their stories and are saved; others take on forms that are in ways freer than the human. Sometimes transformation saves the women from the violence; at other times, it is the violence made manifest.
When I was a child, my mother, sister, and I raised caterpillars inside a mesh cage to protect them from carnivorous wasps. White, black and yellow stripes straddled the ever-growing bodies of the monarch butterfly larvae. Their squishy bodies teemed with poison to the birds that would otherwise eat them, a consumption to kill both the consumer and the consumed. I fed them daily with leaves from the milkweed plant, a green feast oozing white sap. When they grew big enough, I could pet their smooth skin, gently, my index finger hovering. To cocoon they crawled upward. The chrysalis began a shade of bright green, dotted with gold on its seams, and darkened over the weeks into a death-like black. Not all the butterflies survived, some emerging with deformed wings like crumpled paper. Unable to fly, they crawled around frantically on their thin legs as if running from death itself.
My father told a different story of the caterpillars, one less tinged by the grief of caring for a mortal creature. Between the pages of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, transformation is predictable and never annihilative: one apple, two pears, three plums, four strawberries, five oranges. Rhythms, colors, sounds, holes in the pages of the board book with the caterpillar coming out the other side. To consume is to survive, and the ravenous caterpillar eats until he is sick.
On the spine of the book, a small nightingale sits above the word Philomel. This children’s story is published by a press named for a woman in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who is kidnapped and raped by her sister’s husband. Philomela’s tongue is cut out so that she cannot tell her story, but she weaves a tapestry to achieve revenge and is transformed into a nightingale by the gods. Between the hungry caterpillar and Philomel Press there are two stories of transformation at play: one is predictable and hopeful, while the other shows the violence and pain behind the metamorphosis. In nature, the female nightingale does not sing.
—
But he was still hungry.
I can only remember the dreams. Constellations of anthropomorphic creatures twitched across my vision in a dark world. I had not yet realized the nightmare, but I was running. A woman becomes a tree. A cow traces her name in the dust and is saved. I had dreamt of the Metamorphoses, and when I woke, I did not know whether I was in bed with a god or a monster.
I had felt all of the annihilation and none of the finality. When the pupa emerges as a butterfly, it has reached the imago, the last stage of the metamorphosis. But I stayed human. There is no final state, no imago, no form truer or more permanent than those that came before. The Hungry Caterpillar was not a story I could map onto, being more about consumption and predictability than the realities of transformation. Instead, Ovid’s women were a sudden map, and I wound their stories, violent and euphemistic, around my body like a cocoon, as if by healing these mythical women I could heal myself.
Emma was in the lobby watching a baseball game, a West Coast evening at 4 a.m. Paris time. She met me in the hallway where I stood half-dressed, sobbing, with the jarred mantis at my feet, a forgotten artifact of a distant past. I wanted to be like that mantis, devouring headfirst what had penetrated. Instead I was more like a woman in a Beckett play, watching the earth rise over my body in a mound, talking over the transformation as I curled inward. All metamorphosis is at first an erasure. Inside the chrysalis the caterpillar liquifies by digesting itself.
I picked up the jar. The mantis was still creeping inside a suddenly shrunken world, though her movements were slowed, as if moving through a thick fluid. I thought of the butterfly with the crumpled wings. Death is also a metamorphosis. I took the jar to the trash chute and dropped it, hearing the glass shatter as it hit the bottom.
Sophia Hammerle is a junior majoring in Narrative Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. When not writing or creating, Sophia is probably eating a mango, thinking about trees, or feeding a stray cat.