Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Virginia Woolf recorded the following observation in her reading notebook: ‘The point of view of any individual is bound to be not a birds eye view but an insects eye view [sic], the view of an insect too on a green blade, which oscillates violently with local gusts of wind.’ Woolf's curious analogy hints at a fundamental shift in perspective, in which the subject's point of view is aligned not with the sweeping aerial vantage point of a bird in flight, but with a helpless bug clinging on to some frail support. A panoptic model of vision is here replaced by a state of optical precariousness, as the avian elevation descends to a position scarcely above ground level. That the author had recent world events in mind when she made these remarks is hinted at by the rest of the entry, which consists of her reading notes from Sigmund Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) and includes references to the herd instinct, Hitlerism and the relation of women ‘to war and society’ Faced with a new outbreak of military aggression, Woolf saw in Freud’s writing an image of the modern subject as an imperilled organism caught up in the violent oscillations of history, politics and mass society – whose frame of vision trembles with the intensity of these turbulent ‘gusts’.

Like many of her fellow modernists, Woolf turned to the insect world in order to express the plight of the modern subject. In 1922, Ezra Pound warned that in his ‘entanglement in machines, in utility, man rounds the circle almost into insect life’. T. S. Eliot would echo these sentiments in a 1926 lecture, declaring that it was the task of modern poets to rescue society from its descent into ‘a highly perfected race of insects’. For writers and thinkers during this period, insects provided an image of the transformation of human society by socio-political, technological and economic forces, lending a kind of definition to the dehumanising effects of industrial capitalism on the individual.