http://www.theguardian.com/books/vladimirnabokov
Wings of desire: how butterflies have captivated artists
15 Mar 2015, Patrick Barkham.
From Bruegel to Nabokov and “The Silence of the Lambs,” butterflies have flitted through our imaginations and into our culture. Patrick Barkham pins up the choice specimens – and finds out why new film “The Duke of Burgundy” is awash with them.
“Signifying sunshine, beauty and freedom, butterflies are ubiquitous in our culture, ever-present on greeting cards and used to sell everything from oven chips to SUVs. For artists, novelists and film-makers, however, butterflies and moths have often taken on darker meanings. In John Fowles’s “The Collector,” the protagonist (played by Terence Stamp in the film adaptation) is a butterfly obsessive who decides to collect young women. In “The Silence of the Lambs,” a sinister-looking moth (actually the death’s-head hawkmoth) is a serial killer’s signature. And in The Duke of Burgundy, a new film by Peter Strickland, the story of an S&M relationship is told through butterflies and moths. How have these insects come to symbolise sexual deviancy?
Artists have been seeing the human spirit in lepidoptera for centuries. The earliest-known depictions are of the eyed hawkmoth and the peacock butterfly in Pyrenees cave paintings. According to Peter Marren, author of new book Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies, they appear on Minoan artefacts from Crete around 4,000 years ago, but it was the ancient Greeks who really shaped their use in culture, by explicitly linking them to the human soul. The Greek word for a butterfly and a soul is the same: psyche.
[clip] In Hieronymus Bosch’s best known work, The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted at the start of the 16th century, there are two little devils with the wings of the small tortoiseshell and the meadow brown. In 1562, Pieter Bruegel the Elder gave his ringleader the wings of a swallowtail in The Fall of the Rebel Angels. And Marren points out the long history of the red admiral butterfly as a symbol of “evil”: red represents danger in nature, and the superstitious saw its blood-red wings as a sign of foreboding when vast numbers of them appeared across Russia in 1881, when Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. Some believe that the date “1881” can be deciphered on the red admiral’s hind wings. Vladimir Nabokov, a brilliant lepidopterist as well as author, used the red admiral to sinister effect in his novel Pale Fire.
[clip]Having an on-set entomologist helped deepen meanings in the film, and Strickland was particularly struck by the rich, strange language of lepidoptera. His lovers’ safe word is pinastri, the scientific name for the pine hawkmoth. “It sounded like ‘be nasty’. I love the idea of words having this incantatory quality – they become a kind of chant.”
Other species are used very precisely in the film. The moth that Evelyn holds at the end is an old lady; and, given the bondage theme, it seems appropriate the true lover’s knot moth should appear. Characters’ names are similarly chosen: Cynthia is the scientific name of the painted lady, while Dr Viridana is named after the green oak moth (Tortix viridana).[clip]
