The Beauty of Fireflies: Transience, Myth, Bioluminescence, and Wonder

Abstract

The beauty of fireflies captivated the imagination of Victorian poets, naturalists, short-story writers, and travel writers alike. Like their earthbound relatives, glow-worms, these unremarkable brown insects in daytime became otherworldly sparks of light by night. This article explores their evocative potential — not least for John Ruskin — to capture the magic of an Italian summer’s evening. It shows how their metaphorical potential was readily exploited: fireflies were seen across cultures as synonymous with the soul; glow-worms as humble creatures whose special qualities would nonetheless shine out. Both fireflies and glow-worms were imaginatively linked to the fairy world, as we see in paintings as well as in writing. I move from these imaginative representations to consider how bioluminescence was understood by Victorians, and how the language of their investigations borrowed from a register of fantasy. Even when the phenomenon of firefly illumination was better understood, the sense of wonder that these creatures can create persisted. Yet today, the numbers of these insects are currently diminishing, due to habitat loss and light pollution. Although their magical beauty can be alluded to, and recreated artificially — as in Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms, experiencing these light shows functions as an analogy, not a substitution. Fireflies and glow-worms are a reminder of wonder’s powerful motivating force when it comes to taking action against environmental precarity: to experience them is to be affected emotionally by them, and they represent the extraordinary beauty, yet fragility, that we encounter in the natural world. They contain a paradox that was well recognized in the nineteenth century: that the small, dull-coloured, and apparently insignificant can contain the sublime.

Keywords

• Yayoi Kusama
• Victorian painting
• bioluminescence
• ecological criticism
• fairies
• fireflies