Mr. Emerson's lecture on spiders at Hale House

Mr. Emerson's lecture on spiders at Hale House stands as a turning point in Mary Antin's American life, the evening when a girl who had once shaken a spider from her sleeve in terror sat transfixed while a lecturer wove a giant web across a doorway and, in doing so, wove a new passion into her. The event is the hinge of what Mary herself calls the second transformation of her life, as truly as her coming to America was the first. It is the moment the bookworm, who had always preferred arithmetic to nature study, discovers that the natural world is not a schoolroom chore but a drama of struggle, wiles, and laws, and it sets her on the path toward the Natural History Club's outdoor expeditions and a lifelong intimacy with her animal neighbors.

The Setting and the Reluctant Audience

The lecture took place on a Friday evening at Hale House, in the reception room of the Natural History Club, where the members sat in a ring facing the broad doorway of the adjoining room. Mrs. Black introduced Mary, and she went around the circle saying "Glad to meet you" before settling into a kindergarten chair beside the piano. She had the sense of leisure that pervades a school-girl's consciousness when there is to be no school on the morrow, and she liked the pleasant room, which was pleasanter than any at home, and the faces of the company. She was prepared to have an agreeable evening, even if she was a little bored. The tall, lean gentleman with the frank blue eyes who got up to read the minutes of the last meeting was Mr. Winthrop, and he had greeted her as if he had been waiting for her coming all his life. Mary did not understand what he read, but she noticed that it gave him great satisfaction, and she liked him for looking and speaking as if he were happy to be alive.

The Terror of Spiders

Mary's attention was arrested when Mr. Winthrop, having finished the minutes, introduced the speaker of the evening with the words, "We are very fortunate in having with us Mr. Emerson, whom we all know as an authority on spiders." The word "spiders" struck her like a blow. Mr. Winthrop pronounced it with unmistakable relish, as if he doted on the horrid creatures, but Mary's nerves contracted into a tight knot. She gripped the arms of her little chair, determined not to run with all those strangers looking on, and watched Mr. Emerson to see when he would open a box of spiders. The fear was rooted in a hideous experience of long ago, when, putting on a dress that had hung on the wall for weeks, she had felt a thing with a hundred legs crawling down her bare arm and had shaken a spider out of her sleeve. It was too bad, she thought, that Mrs. Black had not warned her.

The Web Across the Doorway

Mary soon realized that the lecturer had no menagerie in his pockets. Mr. Emerson talked in a familiar way about different kinds of spiders and their ways, and as he talked, he wove across the doorway where he stood a gigantic spider's web, unwinding a ball of twine in his hand and looping various lengths on invisible tacks he had ready in the door frame. Mary was fascinated by the progress of the web. She forgot her terrors and began to follow the discourse. She was surprised to hear how much there was to know about a dusty little spider besides that he could spin his webs as fast as her broom could sweep them away. The drama of the spider's daily life became very real to her as the lecturer went on: his struggle for existence, his wars with his enemies, his wiles, his traps, his patient labors, the intricate safeguards of his simple existence, the fitness of his body for his surroundings, of his instincts for his vital needs. The whole picture of the spider's pursuit of life under the direction of definite laws filled her with a great wonder and left no room in her mind for repugnance or fear. It was the first time the natural history of a living creature had been presented to her under such circumstances that she could not avoid hearing and seeing, and she was surprised at her dulness in the past when she had rejected books on natural history.

The Birth of a Naturalist

Mary did not become an enthusiastic amateur naturalist at once; she did not at once begin to collect worms and bugs. But on the next sweeping-day she stood on a chair, craning her neck, to study the spider webs she discovered in the corners of the ceiling, and one or two webs of more than ordinary perfection she suffered to remain undisturbed for weeks, although it was her duty, as a house-cleaner, to sweep the ceiling clean. She began to watch for the mice that were wont to scurry across the floor when the house slept and she alone waked. She even placed a crust for them on the threshold of her room and cultivated a breathless intimacy with them, when the little gray beasts acknowledged her hospitality by nibbling her crust in full sight. And so by degrees she came to a better understanding of her animal neighbors on all sides, and she began to look forward to the meetings of the Natural History Club.

The Second Transformation

Mary frames this evening as the beginning of what she calls the second transformation of her life, as truly as her coming to America was the first great transformation. She confesses, with a feeling of shame akin to the lover's remorse that Robert Louis Stevenson credits to the contemplation of the part of his life lived without his beloved, how late in her life nature took the first place in her affections. Looking back on her bookworm days, she feels that same remorse. The lecture is thus not merely an entertaining evening but the moment her affections are reordered, when the natural world displaces the printed page as the primary object of her devotion. It is the seed of the Natural History Club's later excursion to Nahant, where the members spent the day studying marine life in the tide pools, scrambling up and down the cliffs with no thought for decorum, bent only on securing starfish, limpets, sea-urchins, and other trophies of the chase, with a merry luncheon on the rocks and the tide rushing in to steal away their seaweed cushions.

The Significance of the Conversion

The conversion matters because it completes a pattern in Mary's American education. Her earlier raptures had been directed at the patriotic story of George Washington, whose name she could not pronounce without a pause and whose portraits she gazed at with adoration till she could see them with her eyes shut. That was a worship of human greatness, of an inimitable and irreproachable hero. The spider lecture redirects her wonder toward the humble and the ordinary, toward a dusty little spider whose daily life is a drama of struggle and law. It is a democratization of her reverence, a recognition that wonder is not reserved for the Great but is available in the corners of the ceiling and the threshold of her room. The girl who had once accepted ill-usage from the Gentiles as one accepts the weather, and who had feared that baptism would be worse than death by torture, now learns to cultivate a breathless intimacy with the mice that nibble her crust. The lecture is thus a quiet but decisive step in her Americanization, the moment the naturalist's eye replaces the victim's fear, and the world becomes a place of patient labors and definite laws rather than of arbitrary persecution.