The Unworthy

The Unworthy opens with a passage describing the narrator’s fascination with cockroaches. She likes to experiment with them, admiring how “they can flatten themselves and fit through tiny spaces, live without heads for days, survive underwater for a long time” (1). They, along with the many other insects that populate the novel, are symbols of the resilience of the natural world. Even though ecological collapse has made the planet largely inhospitable and human society has collapsed, cockroaches remain prolific, crickets sustain the unworthy’s entire diet, and wasps populate the woods around the House of the Sacred Sisterhood. Some insects, like the butterflies, have adapted to the toxicity of the outside world by becoming toxic themselves, burning the skin of anyone they land on. Like the outside world itself, they are dangerous but also beautiful and volatile. They indicate that there is still diversity and life in the natural world.

Cockroaches, crickets, wasps, and the poisonous butterflies are commonplace, but other insects, like the dragonfly and a bee, suggest that the natural world is more resilient than the narrator knows. When she sees a dragonfly in the forest, the narrator has to stifle a cry of happiness. With its wings like a “fragile cathedral,” the insect is like holy relic of the healing world. The narrator has a similar reaction to the fireflies she sees the first time she has sex with Lucía; witnessing the insect is “a sacred moment” that brings the narrator to tears (114). These sightings suggest the natural world’s ability to survive and rebalance, even after catastrophic collapse.

In The Unworthy, the woods are a key symbol of the narrator’s trauma, as well as her healing and work to reclaim her own narrative.

For much of the novel, the narrator refuses to write the word “woods.” When describing the trees around the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, she always crosses the word out and replaces it with something else. Eventually, her memories of life before the Sisterhood come back and she remembers the trauma of being raped and losing her companion Circe in the “metallic woods” before coming to the Sisterhood. The metallic woods represent the narrator’s trauma at the hands of men and the inadequacy of manmade substitutions for the natural world. She describes how the metallic woods “tried […] to imitate the beauty of real trees,” but “all that had resulted was crude structures, painted in colors that had faded over time” (139). It was a “useless space” of “infertile earth and false trees” (139). The woods by the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, however, are a place of love, wonder, and magic. It “is not just trees” but a complex world “that reverberates with the splendor of a living cathedral” (171). In this sense, the woods also become a symbol of the novel’s critique of organized religion; anything manmade is a poor imitation of the divinity inherent in nature.

By spending time in the woods with Lucía, the narrator is able to find healing, reclaiming the once banished word and finding beauty in a place that was once associated only with pain and loss.