'The Fly' by Katherine Mansfield: Text and Analysis

 

Short Story:

‘The Fly’ by Katherine Mansfield

 

Image: Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield 

Introduction

 Katherine Mansfield was a key figure in the Modernist movement best known for her modernist short stories. Her works focused on psychological depth and character perception. She was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on October 14, 1888.  She was educated in Wellington and later attended Queen's College in London. She returned to New Zealand but felt stifled and was determined to become a writer, eventually moving back to London in 1908. Her life was marked by personal struggles, including a brief marriage, and a long battle with tuberculosis, which ultimately led to her death in 1923 at the age of 34.

 Literary Career

 Mansfield is celebrated for pioneering the modern short story with a distinctive prose style that was psychologically acute and emotionally subtle. Her work is often compared to that of Anton Chekhov. She explored the inner lives of her characters and the gap between internal and external realities, often using moments of epiphany or psychological realization that lead to devastation rather than happiness. Her major short story collections include Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922). Her first book, In a German Pension (1911), was a collection of satirical sketches based on her experiences in Germany. 

 About ‘The Fly’

 Mansfield wrote ‘The Fly’ in Paris, and it was first published in March, 1922.  It is a classic example of Mansfield’s modernist fiction. ‘The Fly’ is about loss, grief, war, and death. The story draws on Mansfield’s own life and family experiences for its inspiration. Her younger brother, Leslie Beauchamp, aged just 21, had been killed in 1915 during a grenade training drill while serving with the British Expeditionary Force. Like the sons mentioned in ‘The Fly’, Leslie died in Belgium, and like the boss’s son, he had been working at his father’s firm before the outbreak of the war.

‘The Fly’ is an example of modernist fiction, and this modernism is evinced in the story in several ways. First of all, Mansfield reveals the working of the mind her characters, particularly the mind of the boss here. She is concerned with depicting his thought process and psychology. She uses the symbolic encounter with the fly to suggest the deep grief the boss feels, but is unable to control his emotions even six years after his son’s death.

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Summary of ‘The Fly’

 Mr. Woodifield is a retired man who has recently suffered a stroke. The story starts at the office of his former employer who is simply referred to  as the boss. We are told that Mr. Woodifield’s wife and daughters keep him home most of the time because they are concerned for his health, but every Tuesday he is allowed to go out into the city. Mr. Woodifield chooses to spend this time visiting his friend and former employer, the boss. Woodifield admires the boss’s office, commenting on how snug it is. The boss enjoys the admiration and points out various recent activities undertaken by him to update his office. This list includes the carpet, the bookcases, and the brand-new heating. However, he avoids mentioning a photograph of his son in uniform. The photograph was taken six years ago, and it is not new like the rest of the office. Mr. Woodifield says that there is something he’d like to tell the boss, but he’s having difficulty remembering. 

Feeling bad for Mr. Woodifield’s struggle to recall what he wanted to say, the boss jokingly tells Woodifield he has the right medicine for him. The boss pulls out a bottle of whiskey and generously offers it to Woodifield. Because he isn’t allowed to drink at home, Mr. Woodifield happily accepts the offer. Drinking helps Mr. Woodifield recall what he wanted to say. He informs his former boss that his daughters visited the grave of his son Reggie while they were on a trip to Belgium. Further Mr. Woodifield says that his daughters also visited the grave of the boss’s son. He says that the new graveyard is beautiful and asks if the boss has visited his son’s grave, to which the boss responds that he has not. He also doesn’t respond to Mr. Woodifield’s comments about the flowers and the nice paths in the graveyard.

After Woodifield has gone, the boss finds himself taken over by grief for his dead son, who was killed in the war six years ago.  He is nostalgic about his dead son and reminisces about how much promise the boy had shown, and how well-liked he was at the company. He reminisces about the training that he had been imparting to his son so that his son would take over his business and the boss would take his retirement. But then the war broke out and his son had gone off to fight, but he never came back. The thought of his son’s death mentally disturbs him and he is overtaken by saddens and grief. He tells Macey, his office messenger, not to allow anyone to disturb him for half an hour.

Once he’s alone, the boss sits down and puts his head into his hands, expecting to cry. He was mentally disturbed by the comment about his son’s grave, and he imagines him lying in his grave, unchanged. Despite this he finds that he doesn’t cry. He had worked hard all his life to pass the business on to his son, and now that was all gone. The boss thinks about the compliments he received about his son, his son’s popularity, and his son’s bright personality. Finally, he thinks about the day that he received the telegram informing him of his son’s death. That was six years ago, and he feels as if it could have happened yesterday. 

Now, the boss looks at his son’s photograph. While looking at the photograph, he notices that a fly has fallen into his inkpot and is struggling to get out. He uses his pen to lift it out of the ink and sets it on a piece of blotting-paper. He admires the way that it cleans its legs, and then its wings, and then its face to get ready to fly again. The boss sees that the fly has overcome its ordeal and is again ready for life. Inspired, the boss drops a second drop of ink on the fly to watch it repeat this process. The fly is stunned, but it repeats the task of cleaning itself a second time, a little slower. The boss feels a greater admiration for the spirit and courage of the fly. 

He drops a third drop of ink on the fly, whose movements are weaker each time. He is relieved when it starts to move for a third time, and he even considers blowing on it to help its progress. At this point, he talks to the fly, complimenting it. He decides that the fourth time will be the last. However, the fourth time that the boss drops ink on the fly, it stops moving. The fly is dead, its legs stuck in the ink. The boss attempts to stir the fly back to life with his pen, shouting some encouragement, but nothing happens. He throws the fly’s corpse into the waste paper basket and then finds he cannot remember what he was thinking about beforehand. He has forgotten about his son.

 Themes

The main themes in Katherine Mansfield's "The Fly" are grief, loss, and memory, explored through the boss's attempt to suppress the pain of his son's death in World War I. The story uses the boss's torturing of a fly as a powerful metaphor for his internal struggle, showing his attempt to control something in the face of overwhelming loss, only to fail and be left with an emptiness that he cannot comprehend. 

 

·    Grief and loss: Both the boss and his visitor, Mr. Woodifield, are grieving the loss of their sons in the war. The boss, however, actively tries to ignore and suppress his grief, which manifests as a sense of emotional numbness and an inability to truly cry.

 

·         Memory: The boss's memories of his son are painful and jarring. He is disturbed by a photograph of his son, finding the expression unnatural and cold. He is also haunted by the six-year anniversary of his son's death, which Woodifield's visit brings to the forefront.

 

·         The struggle for control: The boss's meticulous and cruel act of dripping ink on the fly symbolizes his desperate attempt to regain control over his life and his emotions in the face of a devastating, uncontrollable loss. When the fly is finally defeated, the boss feels no sense of victory, only a profound emptiness and a return to the same confusion he felt before the torment began.