The Gratitude of Wasps

Today I'm writing briefly on the title of this blog, "The Gratitude of Wasps." It's an odd name for a blog, I'll admit. but it’s been this phrase that has kept repeating itself in my mind. It comes from one of my favorite novels, Middlemarch, by George Eliot. In the book, referring to our heroine Dorothea Brooke, the narrator reveals that,

“No nature could be less suspicious than hers: when she was a child she believed in the gratitude of wasps and the honourable susceptibility of sparrows and was proportionately indignant when their baseness was made manifest” (Middlemarch, chapter 22).

What I love about Eliot is how she uses excruciatingly specific metaphors and examples, seemingly unconcerned with whether or not they are clear to her audience. Or at least, I don’t have an immediately obvious picture in my mind on what she means by “the gratitude of wasps.” And from the commentaries I’ve read and google searches I’ve made, the rest of the world is equally bewildered at this image. But as good art so often offers, I get a glimmer of what it’s trying to communicate even without understanding it fully.

And when I read this quotation, and moreover as I read this novel, I'm presented with a picture of a girl stubbornly set on seeing the good in the world. Dorothea refuses to let cynicism take root in her life, despite her many trials. And though frequently naive to the nuances of human nature, and often too idealistic, she relentlessly considers the interests of others over her own. So there is something about believing in the gratitude of wasps that invites me to see a world that is too often speckled with cynicism with the eyes of a curious, wide-eyed child.