CAPTURING MANSFIELD'S "FLY"
Author(s): JOHN T. HAGOPIAN
Source: Modern Fiction Studies , Winter 1963-1964, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Winter 1963-1964), pp.
385-390
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26278733
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NOTES AND DISCUSSION
CAPTURING MANSFIELD'S "FLY"
Late in 1915 when Katherine Mansfield received the news that her brother
had been killed fighting in France, she wrote in her journal:
The present and the future mean nothing to me. I am no longer "curious"
about people; I do not wish to go anywhere; and the only possible value that
anything can have for me is that it should put me in mind of something that
happened or was when we were alive. . . . Supposing I were to die as I sit at
this table, playing with my Indian paper-knife, what would be the difference?
No difference. Then why don't I commit suicide? Because I feel I have a duty
to perform to the lovely time when we were both alive. I want to write about it,
and he wanted me to.i
When her mother died in 1919, she described her banker-father's reaction
thus: "Of course he has money, but it makes no difference to him. He falls
into absolute pits of depression and loneliness."2 Then, in February, 1922,
six years after the death of her brother, Katherine Mansfield wrote "The
Fly"; she was prematurely exhausted by disease, neglected by her indifferent
father, and in the last year of her life. The autobiographical sources are
obvious.
Yet if there ever was a case where biographical details failed—and even
obscured—attempts to explicate a work of fiction, this is it. Although "The
Fly" is generally praised, frequently anthologized, and even listed by Eliza
beth Bowen among the author's dozen masterpieces, a critical guerilla war
fare has been going on over the symbolism of the story and its meaning.
After earlier critics had attempted to establish certain apparent equations
as fly-boss and fly-Katherine Mansfield, Sylvia Berkman unequivocally de
clared the story to be a failure on the ground that "the central symbolism is
confused." The boss, she says, obviously equals a "capricious and impersonal"
God-figure in his treatment of the fly, and she cites the lines from King Lear
which Katherine Mansfield had read only a few weeks before writing the
story: "As flies to wanton boys, are we the gods. They kill us for their
sport." But, says Miss Berkman, as the boss "has himself received the blows
of this superior power through the death of his only son in the war," the
1 As quoted by Elizabeth Bowen in her Introduction to Katherine Mansfield's 34 Short
Stories (London, 1957), pp. 21-22. I have not cited page references to the text of "The
Fly" because the story is rather short and available in a wide variety of sources.
'J. Middleton Murry, ed., The Letters of Katherine Mansfield (New York, 1929), I,
265.
385
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allegorical equation seems blurred.3 However, Celeste Turner Wright, after
tracing in Katherine Mansfield's letters, journals, and scrapbooks a lifetime
of references to herself as a fly and noting that in one of her letters she had
specifically identified the boss as a "Bank Manager," asserts that the author
of this story "would not have been confused by the symbolism . . . , by
the fact that the boss (Jehovah), who destroys the fly (Katherine), has him
self been the victim of fate in losing his boy. Both God and her father
had given an only-begotten son; neither, it seemed to her, had learned from
that sorrow to be merciful."*
More recently, Stanley B. Greenfield has countered with the view that
"the fly is not to be equated with any person, but with the boss's grief. The
theme of the story is that "Time and Life Conquer Grief." Therefore, "the
boss's wretchedness when he kills the fly is his subconscious awareness that
the life in him has killed his sorrow, even as the drops of ink-time have
ended the fly's struggles."» But Clinton W. Olesen believes that the boss
has never experienced any genuine sorrow to be conquered by time and life.
"Except for an occasional half-hour of sentimental self-indulgence . . . ,
he had gone on eagerly with business as usual, refusing to think of his son
as dead." And from Olesen's point of view, the story "should be read as
the depiction of the boss's escape from facing the reality of death and the
sterility of his own existence."«
It would seem, as is so often hearteningly the case, that the critical history
of "The Fly" has brought us closer and closer to a proper reading. In the
light of all this commentary, a re-examination might lead us further toward
a definitive interpretation. The tightly-structured rendering of a critical hour
in the life of the boss can be divided into two main parts, each of which
has two sub-divisions, with the whole embodying a pendulum swing of time
from the present into the past and back into the present again:
I. During Woodifield's stay in the office, there is
(a) a conversation about the snugness, furnishings, and good whisky—
the Present, and
(b) when Woodifield remembers, a report of his daughters' visit to the
military cemetery in Belgium where they had discovered the grave
of the boss's son—the Past.
II. After Woodifield leaves,
(a) the boss reminisces over his son and recalls his inconsolable grief
upon hearing of his son's death—the Past,
(b) but he is distracted by a fly in the inkwell and conducts a micro
cosmic experiment with life and death—the Present.
'Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study (London, 1952). p. 195.
4 "Genesi» of a Short Story," Philological Quarterly, XXXIV (January, 1955), 95.
' Explicator, XVII (1958), Item 2.
* " 'The Fly* Rescued," College English, XXII (May, 1961), 585.
386 MODERN FICTION STUDIES
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Subtle parallelisms of characterization, gesture, and symbolic detail link
all parts of the story together into a single, seamless whole. Woodifield
serves not only to provoke a shock of recognition in the boss by forcing
him to realize for the first time that his son is really dead and in his grave
("Although over six years had passed away, the boss never thought of the
boy except as lying unchanged, unblemished in his uniform, asleep for
ever"), but also to define by contrast the boss's character.
Six years before, upon hearing of the death of his son Reggie, old
Woodifield had apparently suffered a stroke, causing his retirement and pre
mature lapse into the childhood of senility. Now his wife and daughters
keep him "boxed up" at home, except on Tuesdays when they dress and
brush him and permit him to go to the City to make a "nuisance of him
self to his friends." His is the sterile existence. Despite the fact that he is
five years younger than the boss, he is old and feeble, his hands shake, and
his "chill brain" must be warmed into memory with alcohol. He has never
been able to visit his son's grave, and with the passage of time has become
reconciled to death and thinks of it with images of order and beauty:
. . all as neat as a garden. Flowers growing on all the graves. Nice
broad paths." He can quite casually turn from it to considerations of low
finance and express indignation that the Belgian hotel charged his daughters
ten francs for a pot of jam.
On the other hand, the boss had contained his first response to his son's
death within the conventional clichés of grief ("nothing short of a violent
fit of weeping could relieve him. Time . . . could make no difference")
and after six years was "stout, rosy, . . . and still going strong." A power
in high finance, he deftly flips the pages of The Financial Times with a
paper-knife and takes a "deep solid satisfaction" in displaying the new
furnishings of his snug office. He has never chosen to visit his son's grave,
and his terrible shock upon hearing of it is not at all mitigated by the
image of a well-kept cemetery. Until the episode with the fly, he can control
his memory, can avoid or face his son's photograph at will, and is confident
that he can arrange a conventional half-hour of weeping.
The story reaches its crises with two significant attempts at memory. In
the beginning, old Woodifield "on his last pins" quavers with pleasure
at being able to remember his son's grave; but at the end of the story, the
boss "for the life of him . . . could not remember." In the beginning the
boss, after tossing off a generous finger of whisky, "pulled out his handker
chief [and] hastily wiped his moustaches; after the episode with the fly,
"he took out his handkerchief and passed it inside his collar." What pre
cisely happened between these two gestures, and what is the emotional and
symbolic significance of these events? The boss has ironically been rewarded
for his patronizing kindness to Woodifield by having the irresponsible,
senile old fellow strike him on his most vulnerable psychic wound: "It was
exactly as though the earth had opened and he had seen the boy lying
there with Woodifield's girls staring down at him." Now he can no longer
hide the fact of his son's death behind the conventional masks of grief;
NOTES AND DISCUSSION 387
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no longer can the windy suspiration of forced breath and the fruitful river
in the eye denote him truly. "Something seemed to be wrong with him.
He wasn't feeling as he wanted to feel." For six years he had looked at the
photograph of the "grave-looking boy in uniform standing in one of those
spectral photographer's parks with photographer's storm-clouds behind him"
and had not faced the reality of his death. He had remembered only "his
bright, natural self, with the right word for everybody, with that boyish
look and his habit of saying, 'Simply splendid!' " But now the boss observes
that the expression in the photograph, taken after his son had been in the
war and had seen death, "was unnatural. It was cold, even stern-looking."
It was no longer the image of a boy who could say "Simply splendid" to
life.
The internal emotional struggle provoked by this insight is magnificently
embodied in the episode of the fly. The most important thing to observe
here is that the boss does not want the fly to die! He does not want to con
front the ugly fact of death, which here—in contrast with the pleasant cem
etery-garden described by old Woodifield—is expressed in the ugly and messy
image of "The dark patch that oozed round" the fly. In a sense, the fly in
the ink-pot is an analogue of the boss's son in his grave. After the boss has
rescued the fly from the ink-pot, its cleansing process is rendered in terms
of two opposed similes: a leg went along a wing "as the stone goes over and
under the scythe," and the fly cleaned its face "like a minute cat." The
scythe evokes the grim reaper Death, while the traditional nine lives of a
cat evoke Survival. When the fly first recovers, the boss is delighted; he
observes "that the little front legs rubbed against each other lightly, joyfully
. . . it had escaped; it was ready for life again." [Contemplating the senility
of old Woodifield in Part I, the boss had observed, "we cling to our last
pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves"—just as here the fly clings to its
last vestiges of life.] The boss then performs his desperate experiment on
Death and Survival. "What would it make of that?" he asks himself as
he sends a great blob of ink down on the fly. The second recovery arouses
the boss's admiration; "That was the way to tackle things; that was the right
spirit. Never say die." The boss sends down another dark drop—"What about
it this time?"—and feels a rush of relief when survival again proves possible.
But the last drop kills the fly; it no longer responds as old Macey does to
the boss's command, "Look sharp!" and he flings its ugly "corpse" into a
waste-basket grave.
In his experiment with the fly the boss tests the image of death that old
Woodifield had tendered him, and upon discovering that death is an inescap
able fact "such a grinding feeling of wretchedness seized him that he felt
positively frightened." Although Woodifield can now bear the tamed image
of his son's death, the boss simply cannot; "For the life of him he could not
remember . . . what it was he had been thinking about before." His final
amnesia is desperately self-protective, and it brings his experience to a sym
pathetically-drawn and poignant close.
388 MODERN FICTION STUDIES
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Most critics have assumed that the boss is the cruel and unsympathetic
man that Katherine Mansfield considered her own father to be. Celeste
Turner Wright is perhaps the most generous: "The boss in "The Fly" is not
wicked. Like the father in all the other portraits, he is only self-absorbed;
from his youth up he has focused on financial ambition." But if one limits
oneself strictly to the evidence of the story, even this description seems more
negative than is warranted by the facts. Sympathy for the underdog might
lead some readers to resent the boss's self-satisfaction and patronizing air to
old Woodifield, but it should be noted that both men derive a certain satis
faction from their relationship, and that even though the boss engages in it
for selfish reasons he extends every courtesy to his old friend in making his
Tuesday visit pleasurable. The boss wants Woodifield warm and comfort
able, just as later he wants the fly to dry its wings and survive. And even
though it is obvious that the two men are not equals, the boss creates an
atmosphere of good-fellowship: "Ah, that's where we know a bit more than
the ladies." When Woodifield insensitively blunders into a discussion of the
grave of the boss's son, the boss controls himself and responds with only
a "quiver of the eyelids."
It is only when the boss deliberately prepares to weep that we can legiti
mately begin to suspect that he may be an unsympathetic character. The
clichés about his having built up the business only for the sake of his son
may strike some readers as false or hypocritical, but there is no objective
evidence that he did not actually feel that way at the time. Only three
elements of the narrative show the boss in a possibly unsympathetic light:
(1) the inconsistency between his "deep, solid satisfaction" with his present
affluence and his earlier insistence that his business "had no other meaning
if it was not for the boy. Life itself had come to have no other meaning."
But surely his earlier exaggerated sense of loss was by no means unusual and
does not necessarily suggest that he is a hypocrite. On the other hand, even
though his outward circumstances might suggest that he has recovered, his
inner shock makes it clear that even old Woodifield's emotional recovery
has been more complete than his. (2) The boss's experiment with the fly
may strike some readers as revealing a streak of gratuitous cruelty in him,
but this is clearly a unique occasion explained by the symbolic significance
of the fly in this specific context. It is especially important to observe that
he is neither a "wanton boy" carelessly destroying the fly for sport, nor one
of the gods grandly exerting his power with full knowledge of and indiffer
ence toward the consequences. The Lear citation is absolutely misleading.
The boss is obviously seeking to discover or confirm some knowledge—and
in doing so is fearful of the consequences of that knowledge. When the
experiment is completed, he is deeply shaken and so unable to bear the
implications of the fly's death that he drives the new knowledge deep into
his subconscious. (3) The boss's abruptness in ordering the old dog Macey
to "look sharp" about bringing some fresh blotting paper at the close of the
story may appear to be an expression of arrogance, but again there is no
evidence that it is habitual, and the emotional crisis through which the boss
NOTES AND DISCUSSION 389
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has just passed makes it not only understandable, but perhaps even poignant,
for him to gruffly exert some little control over the forces of life. In fact, it
is safe to assume that he will now no longer be able hypocritically to enjoy
the fruits of his business and that his new knowledge will fester in his sub
conscious mind making the rest of his life miserable. Only a heavy weight
of extra-textual evidence would definitely tip the scales against the boss.
Within the story he is neither a monster nor a saint—merely a poor suffer
ing mortal, whose wealth and social power cannot protect him from the
anguish of loss through death.
Despite the obvious autobiographical sources, to link the meaning of the
story to Katherine Mansfield's private life or to other stories is to deny that
she has created a self-sufficient work of art. In any conflict between intrinsic
and extrinsic interpretations that equally exhaust the details of a story, it is
the latter that must yield. Katherine Mansfield was not an allegorist, and
although she drew upon her own life experiences for the material of her
fiction she transfigured them into art. "The Fly" is an embodiment in lan
guage of an emotionally-charged, powerfully poignant human experience; it
is perceivable as an entity in itself and not as an equation with something
else. It is, as Elizabeth Bowen observed, a masterpiece and deserves to rank
with the finest inter-war fiction in England.
JOHN T. HAGOPIAN
CRITICAL CONFUSION AND CONRAD'S
"THE END OF THE TETHER"
William Moynihan's essay on "The End of the Tether" (Mod
Studies, Summer, 1958) offers a useful corrective to traditional
Conrad's long story. Quite properly austere, Mr. Moynihan sees
a vulnerable hero, humiliated and destroyed by his own profoun
well as by the crush of circumstance. Since 1958, new eviden
published which proves conclusively that in intention, at le
meant to convey exactly this impression. Yet two puzzling questio
why have most readers held the opposite opinion so passionately
many years; and is there something in the fabric of Conrad's stor
added in part to the confusion?
The early reviewers, for instance, went wrong almost at once.
the "vivid, deeply moving" quality of Whalley's dilemma, they fo
man himself poignant, heroic, and genuinely inspirational. Conr
first sight of the reviews, rushed off an exasperated letter to Edw
with this memorable comment: "Touching, tender, noble, movin
us spit."1 Yet in 1913, when he was in a position to correct Rich
critical monograph, Conrad let the offending words stand; and,
moment on, "beautiful," "touching," "tender," and "moving"
extricably linked with the fate of Captain Whalley. Curie's r
1 Garnett, Letters from Joseph Conrad (Indianapolis, 1928), p. 184.
390 MODERN FICTION STUDIES
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