24 pages • 48 minutes read
Katherine MansfieldThe Fly
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1922A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Katherine Mansfield
“The Fly” was included in the collection The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories, which was published posthumously by Mansfield’s husband in 1922. It is one of her most anthologized stories. In a republished review from July 5, 1922, New Republic author Robert Littell praises Mansfield’s anthology and her abilities:
She is a connoisseur of the ripples that mean so much more than waves, a collector of little emotions caught on the wing, never pinned or bottled in her pages, but kept alive there in all their fragile iridescent colours (Littell, Robert. “Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ Proves She Was a Genuis.” The New Republic, 9 Jan. 2014).
“The Fly” contains examples of her signature style: subtle, indirect explorations of the psychology of people. Like many of the characters in Mansfield’s other short stories, the characters in “The Fly” are isolated and thwarted individuals. The endings of her stories are often abrupt, leaving the characters with unanswered questions or unexplored revelations. Her stories tend to focus on character development rather than on plot points, and the conflicts are mostly internal rather than external.
Mansfield draws on many personal experiences in “The Fly.” In 1915, Mansfield’s 21-year-old brother was killed in Belgium during World War I after working for his father’s business for a year, just like the boss’s son. After her brother’s death, she wrote in her journal: “The present and the future mean nothing to me” (qtd. by Elizabeth Bowen’s 34 Short stories, 1957, Page 21). Then her mother died in 1919, and Mansfield watched as her father became depressed. Three years later, in 1922, Mansfield wrote “The Fly” while at the end of a long battle with tuberculosis, which ended her life in 1923. There are obvious parallels between the boss’s son and Mansfield’s brother. In addition, both Mansfield’s reaction to her brother’s death and her father’s reaction to his wife’s death are reflected in the boss’s character.
Literary Context: Modernism
Modernism was a 20th-century literary movement characterized by a sense of disillusionment with the traditional values and beliefs of the past, in part fueled by the experiences people had with two world wars. In “The Fly,” Mansfield depicts the boss as an elderly man still trying to hold on to a sense of how the world ought to work, despite World War I abruptly ending his plans. After losing his son, he struggles to find meaning and purpose. He spent his career building up a business to be inherited by his son because that was how things worked, but the war obliterated his plans, creating a disillusioned man.
Modernists value this disillusioned antihero, someone who is flawed and expresses the alienation and fragmentation of the modern world. The boss never leaves his office and, after a brief visit with Woodifield, asks his office manager to make sure no one will bother him. His alienation is self-inflicted; unlike Woodifield, he has the freedom and health to move about the city freely, but he is trapped in the one room that reminds him of the past. Fragmentation is seen in his speech patterns, particularly when he is overwhelmed by emotions: “He wanted, he intended, he had arranged to weep….” (Paragraph 79) and “Six years ago, six years….” (Paragraph 81). Even his memory becomes fragmented at the end when he struggles to remember his train of thought.
Modernism, arriving at a time when the field of psychology was just beginning to be established, was also interested in the inner workings of the mind. Mansfield spends the second half of the story prioritizing the boss’s memories and emotional struggles over the more traditional narrative techniques, like dialogue, used in the first half.
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