Disruption of the Cosmic Design
With its ominous black body and blood-red markings, the black widow spider emanates an air of evil. The widow, notorious for its excessively lethal bite and vicious, voracious nature, has mystified scientists for years. Inspired by a fascinating, frightening childhood encounter with a black widow, essayist Gordon Grice discusses his lifelong fascination with the spider and explores the enigma surrounding it in his work “Caught in the Widow’s Web.” With a tone of malice and abhorrence, Grice focuses on the widow’s unnecessarily potent venom, a physical trait that seems to defy reason, evolution, and even the cosmic design. Through his use of the process and narrative modes of writing, diction with a tone of malice,
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and metaphors, Grice reveals the purposelessness of evil in the world. To reveal his overarching message, Grice employs the narrative mode of writing by illustrating the unwanted, unneeded presence of the black widow.
Grice recounts a time when his mother demonstrated the proper way to kill a widow, which involved an intense, momentous ceremony. In describing this ceremony, the author claims that the black widow is “worthy of ritual disposition, like an enemy whose death is not sufficient but must be followed by the murder of his children” (para. 8). In other words, Grice’s childhood experiences with black widows convinced him of the malevolence of the black widow and its embodiment of evil. By emphasizing the unwanted presence of the spider, a symbolic evil, Grice convinces his audience of the needlessness of …show more content…
evil. In addition to the narrative mode of writing, Grice uses the process mode to portray the black widow and its venom as evolutionarily pointless. He outlines the process of natural selection, explaining that the biological adaptation of a species to its environment suggests the idea that “every bit of an animal’s anatomy and behavior has a functional explanation” (para. 14). However, Grice denies this widely-believed scientific assumption using the example of the black widow, claiming that the widow’s venom is “thousands of times more virulent than necessary” for the creature’s survival (para. 12). In other words, the black widow’s venom is considered utterly pointless from an evolutionary standpoint (para. 14). This useless trait, an indication of the purely malevolent nature of the widow, has no purpose in the natural world, which implies evil’s lack of purpose. Grice’s specific word choices express a tone of malice towards the black widow that characterizes the spider as a symbol of needless evil.
For instance, after his initial encounter with a black widow as a child, Grice darkly describes the arachnid as “actively malevolent,” an “enemy” who “wait[s] in dark places to ambush” its prey (para. 8). Furthermore, the author depicts the widow’s ominous physique as having a black body covered with “red markings [that] suggest blood” (para. 10). Grice even claims that “women with bouffant hairdos have died of widow infestation” (para. 9). To the audience, these carefully crafted words and phrases connote a sense of unwelcome malignance; the reader associates the black widow with the concept of evil. By specifically choosing words that show the evil, inimical presence of the black widow, Grice demonstrates the pointlessness of evil in the world; the widow has no purpose to mankind, a parallel to the purposeless nature of
evil. Besides using diction with a tone of malice, Grice utilizes a metaphor to express his theme of the unnecessity of evil. In the conclusion of his essay, Grice compares the world to “an ordered room,” and “in a corner of that room there hangs an untidy web” (para. 15). The spider’s disorderly web disrupts the arrangement of the room. In terms of Grice’s overarching theme, this scene represents the incongruence of evil with the cosmic design. Evil, “an irreducible mystery,” lurks in the corner, although its ominous presence has no place in the universe (para. 15). By ending his essay with this unsettling, portentous metaphor, Grice leaves his readers with a sense of unrest and fear of the evil skulking in the background. Through the use of the process and narrative modes, diction with a tone of malice, and a metaphor, black widow enthusiast Gordon Grice effectively achieves his purpose of revealing the needless nature of evil. Throughout his essay, Grice clearly establishes himself as an expert on the creature and its characteristics. However, he does not suggest a possible explanation for the spider’s unnecessarily strong venom; rather, he simply agrees with scientists’ belief that the trait is truly an unsolvable mystery. Grice offers the reader no sense of hope in a world disrupted by evil, even suggesting that a benevolent God could not possibly exist amongst such disorder. Perhaps beyond humans’ parochial perspective lies a cosmic design that transcends human reason, a design in which evil exists as an indispensable counterpart to benevolence.
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Grice uses symbolism to show how the black widow spider represents evil in our world. “The widow’s venom is, of course, a sound reason for fear . . . It produces sweats, vomiting, swelling, convulsions” (para. 11). This quote shows evil through the widows poisonous venom, which is deadly. Grice also states in the essay that “the female’s habit of eating her lovers invites a strangely sexual discomfort; the widow becomes an emblem for a man’s fear of extending himself into the blood and darkness of a woman” (para. 10). Grice uses imagery throughout the essay to convey to readers his view of the black widow spider. Grice also uses metaphors in his essay to explain the life of a black widow spider “performing a gustatory act of that magnitude, but I have seen them eat scarab beetles heavy as pecans” (para. 4). This metaphor explains the black widows capabilities in comparison with something everyone
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