The Spider Lecture at Hale House

The Spider Lecture at Hale House stands as the hinge on which Mary Antin's American girlhood turns. It is the evening when a young immigrant girl, who had spent her life in terror of spiders, sits rigid in a kindergarten chair and is slowly, almost against her will, converted into a fascinated student of nature. Mary herself marks this as the second transformation of her life, as truly as her coming to America was the first. The lecture does not merely teach her about spiders; it opens a door onto an entirely new way of seeing the world, one governed by definite laws and intricate purposes, and it draws her into the warm circle of the Natural History Club, where she will find her first true intellectual home in America.

The Setting and the Fearful Arrival

The lecture takes place on a Friday evening at Hale House, in the reception room of the Natural History Club. Mary arrives with the sense of leisure that pervades a school-girl's consciousness when there is to be no school on the morrow. Mrs. Black introduces her, and she says "Glad to meet you" all around the circle before sitting down in a kindergarten chair beside the piano. She likes the pleasant room, pleasanter than any at home, and she likes the faces of the company. She is prepared to have an agreeable evening, even if she is a little bored. The tall, lean gentleman with the frank blue eyes who gets up to read the minutes of the last meeting is Mr. Winthrop, and he greets her as if he had been waiting for her coming all his life. Mary lets her thoughts wander around the circle, trying to read the characters of her new friends in their faces, until a single word arrests her attention. Mr. Winthrop, having finished the minutes, introduces the speaker of the evening with unmistakable relish: "We are very fortunate in having with us Mr. Emerson, whom we all know as an authority on spiders."

The Terror of Spiders

The word "spiders" hits Mary like a blow. Her nerves contract into a tight knot, and she grips the arms of her little chair, determined not to run with all those strangers looking on. She watches Mr. Emerson, waiting for him to open a box of spiders. The fear is not abstract; it is rooted in a hideous experience of long ago, when, putting on a dress that had hung on the wall for weeks, she felt a thing with a hundred legs crawling down her bare arm and shook a spider out of her sleeve. This terror is part of a larger pattern of fear that has shaped her young life. As a child in Polotzk, she learned to accept ill-usage from the Gentiles as one accepts the weather, and she knew that the worst thing the Gentiles might do to her was worse than burning or rending: they might baptize her, and she would rather drown in the Dvina than let a drop of baptismal water touch her forehead. The fear of spiders is a smaller, more private dread, but it is real enough that she is furious Mrs. Black did not warn her.

The Web and the Revelation

Then something unexpected happens. Mary realizes that the lecturer has no menagerie in his pockets. Mr. Emerson talks, in a familiar way, about different kinds of spiders and their ways, and as he talks, he weaves across the doorway a gigantic spider's web, unwinding a ball of twine in his hand and looping various lengths on invisible tacks he has ready in the door frame. Mary is fascinated by the progress of the web. She forgets her terrors and begins to follow the discourse. She is surprised to hear how much there is to know about a dusty little spider, besides that he can spin his webs as fast as her broom could sweep them away. The drama of the spider's daily life becomes very real to her: 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 fills her with a great wonder and leaves no room in her mind for repugnance or fear. It is the first time the natural history of a living creature has been presented to her under such circumstances that she cannot avoid hearing and seeing, and she is surprised at her dulness in the past when she had rejected books on natural history.

The Birth of a Naturalist

Mary does not become an enthusiastic amateur naturalist at once; she does not at once begin to collect worms and bugs. But the change is immediate and concrete. On the next sweeping-day she stands on a chair, craning her neck, to study the spider webs she discovers in the corners of the ceiling, and one or two webs of more than ordinary perfection she suffers to remain undisturbed for weeks, although it is her duty, as a house-cleaner, to sweep the ceiling clean. She begins to watch for the mice that are wont to scurry across the floor when the house sleeps and she alone waked. She even places a crust for them on the threshold of her room and cultivates a breathless intimacy with them, when the little gray beasts acknowledge her hospitality by nibbling her crust in full sight. By degrees she comes to a better understanding of her animal neighbors on all sides, and she begins to look forward to the meetings of the Natural History Club. This new passion stands in sharp contrast to her earlier indifference, when her teacher in the Chelsea grammar school encouraged the class to look for different kinds of grasses in the empty lots near home, and she brought the samples but was content when nature study was over and the arithmetic lesson began.

A New Place in the Club

The club has frequent field excursions in addition to the regular meetings, at the seashore, in the woods, in the fields, at high tide and low tide, in summer and winter, by sunlight and by moonlight. Some of the members are school-teachers, accustomed to answering questions; all of them are patient; some of them take special pains with her. But nobody takes her seriously as a member of the club. They call her the club mascot and appoint her curator of the club museum, which is not in existence, at a salary of ten cents a year, which is never paid. Mary is well pleased with her unique position, delighted with her new friends, enraptured with her new study. The club's excursions become a central joy of her life, as when the club spends a day at Nahant studying marine life in the tide pools, scrambling up and down the cliffs with no thought for decorum, bent only on securing the 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 Second Transformation

Mary frames the lecture as the beginning of her second transformation, as truly as her coming to America was the first great transformation. She confesses, with a feeling of shame akin to a lover's remorse, how late in her life nature took the first place in her affections. Looking back on her bookworm days, before she began the study of natural history outdoors, she feels the same regret that Robert Louis Stevenson credits to the lover contemplating the part of his life lived without his beloved. The lecture at Hale House is the moment when the natural world, which had once been merely a source of fear or indifference, becomes a source of wonder and study. It is a conversion scene, and like her earlier spiritual awakenings, it is marked by a profound shift in how she understands her place in the world. The girl who had once tested God Himself with a Sabbath handkerchief experiment, who had stood in the schoolyard trembling with the audacity of her freethought, and who had grown humble all at once before the greatness of George Washington, now finds a new object of reverence in the orderly laws of nature. The spider's web, woven across a doorway with a ball of twine, becomes the emblem of a universe that is intricate, purposeful, and knowable, and Mary Antin, the club mascot, steps through it into a new life.