page_title: Human interactions with insects
section_title: In literature and film
hierarchical_section_title: Human interactions with insects / Symbolic uses / In literature and film
caption_attribution_description: English: Poster for the film The Deadly Mantis (1957).
context_page_description: Human interactions with insects include both a wide variety of uses, whether practical such as for food, textiles, and dyestuffs, or symbolic, as in art, music, and literature, and negative interactions including serious damage to crops and extensive efforts to eliminate insect pests.
  Academically, the interaction of insects and society has been treated in part as cultural entomology, dealing mostly with "advanced" societies, and in part as ethnoentomology, dealing mostly with "primitive" societies, though the distinction is weak and not based on theory. Both academic disciplines explore the parallels, connections and influence of insects on human populations, and vice versa. They are rooted in anthropology and natural history, as well as entomology, the study of insects. Other cultural uses of insects, such as biomimicry, do not necessarily lie within these academic disciplines.
  More generally, people make a wide range of uses of insects, both practical and symbolic. On the other hand, attitudes to insects are often negative, and extensive efforts are made to kill them.
context_section_description: The Ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus has a gadfly pursue and torment Io, a maiden associated with the moon, watched constantly by the eyes of the herdsman Argus, associated with all the stars: "Io: Ah! Hah! Again the prick, the stab of gadfly-sting! O earth, earth, hide, the hollow shape—Argus—that evil thing—the hundred-eyed." William Shakespeare, inspired by Aeschylus, has Tom o'Bedlam in King Lear, "Whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, o'er bog and quagmire", driven mad by the constant pursuit. In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare similarly likens Cleopatra's hasty departure from the Actium battlefield to that of a cow chased by a gadfly.H. G. Wells introduced giant wasps in his 1904 novel The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, making use of the newly discovered growth hormones to lend plausibility to his science fiction.Lafcadio Hearn's essay Butterflies analyses the treatment of the butterfly in Japanese literature, both prose and poetry. He notes that these often allude to Chinese tales, such as of the young woman that the butterflies took to be a flower. He translates 22 Japanese haiku poems about butterflies, including one by the haiku master Matsuo Bashō, said to suggest happiness in springtime: "Wake up! Wake up!—I will make thee my comrade, thou sleeping butterfly."
  The novelist Vladimir Nabokov was the son of a professional lepidopterist, and was interested in butterflies himself. He wrote his novel Lolita while travelling on his annual butterfly-collection trips in the western United States. He eventually became a leading lepidopterist. This is reflected in his fiction, where for example The Gift devotes two whole chapters (of five) to the tale of a father and son on a butterfly expedition.
  Horror films involving insects, sometimes called "big bug movies", include the pioneering 1954 Them!, featuring giant ants mutated by radiation, and the 1957 The Deadly Mantis.
  The Far Side, a newspaper cartoon, has been used by professor of Michael Burgett as a teaching tool in his entomology class; The Far Side and its author Gary Larson have been acknowledged by biologist Dale H. Clayton his colleague for "the enormous contribution" Larson has made to their field through his cartoons.
caption: Poster for the 1957 film The Deadly Mantis
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