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 themSignifying 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. Continue reading...
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