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July 2, 2004 Catherine Mansfield’s “The Fly” is a well- executed and literate short-story that offers an interesting set of insights into the nature of human kindness. In the story, a man known only as the boss is the central character, and his relationships form the main part of the story’s focus. The only other significant human character present, Mr. Woodifield, acts as almost a prop to activate a hidden part of the boss’ psyche, and does little else, fading out of the story as it reaches its surprising conclusion. The overweening theme of the story appears to be that it is awful to do things for other people that are motivated only by self-interest. The boss character is generally less and less sympathetic as the story progresses, so that by the end he appears quite sadistic. He has organized his life around superficial principles that often offer the direct opposite of what he speaks about: his words are a calculated façade. Many critics have commented on “The Fly” along these and other lines of defining or negating a common theme that unites the story and gives it its essential message. The fact that many of these critics disagree with each other quite polemically goes far to show the essential mutability and general interest of Mansfield’s story. In the story itself, the reader is introduced to Mr. Woodifield and the boss as they sit in an office. The office is not very busy, and both characters appear to be very advanced in age. The reader sees that Mr. Woodifield is jealous of the boss’ good health, and he appears to be frustrated by his home life and acts obsequiously towards the boss, who treats his compliments as if they were expected. The boss’ communication is brusque and cliché-ridden. He is very proud of his material possessions in the office. Woodifield allows that he was going to tell the boss something, but forgets what it was. The boss is suddenly magnanimous and offers Woodifield some whisky he had been saving to jog his memory. His benevolent action is fucking suspiciously due to the internal thought that Woodifield is going to die soon: this makes the boss feel kindly towards him. The omniscient narrator seems very interested in the boss’ thoughts and at the same time a bit repelled by them. The whiskey reminds Woodifield of what he was going to say: his daughters have seen the boss’ son’s grave in Europe, and have reported that it is neat and well-maintained. This news does not directly impact the boss superficially in terms of his showing any sort of emotion, but it throws off his communication patterns, so that he isn’t really listening to Woodifield anymore and then escorts him out of the office. The boss then tells his sales manager not to disturb him and shuts himself in his office, trying to weep. He finds he is unable to do this, as he had been expecting to and was prepared to. “The boss took his hands from his face; he was puzzled. Something seemed to be wrong with him. He wasn’t feeling as he wanted to feel” (Mansfield, p. 601). At this point, the boss notices that a fly has fallen into his inkwell and is struggling, but unable, to get out. He helps the fly out of the ink and watches, fascinated, as it cleans its wings and face and prepares to fly again. He attributes many human attributes to the fly during this process and seems to superficially admire it greatly before he loads up his pen and drops a drip of ink onto the fly again. The fly cleans itself off again, and the boss again drips ink onto the fly. The process is repeated again before the fly is dead, and the boss calls nervously for a new ink blotter. Then he realizes that he can’t remember what he was thinking about before. The story is quite short and is told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. As mentioned, the protagonist does not have a proper name. There is a great deal of dialogue in the first part of the story, and this switches to mainly narrative description in the second part. The only characters with direct action are the boss, Woodifield, the old sales manager, and the fly. br> In terms of themes, many critics have detected many different underlying themes in the work, and many of these critics seem to be involved in a polemical diatribe against one another regarding the respective merits and demerits of their respective criticisms. I do not believe that literary scholarship should necessarily assume this tone of superior self- annihilation, and would offer themes that were not advanced and then destroyed in the extant literature to which I was a party. I hope that what I provide is not counter-productive, but if it is, I also hope that it is able to use its being counter-productive to some other advantage than to attack another critic, which, to me, sort of spoils the story being discussed by making it a scrap that people are fighting over, trying to claim their own meanings and the right to have the only superior and accessible reading of the essentially mutable story, to which different readers are naturally going to bring different perspectives. From my own god-damned perspective, the short-story has several overweening themes that are related to the effects of doing things for other people in a self-serving and selfish manner. It is implied in the work that true communication and true benevolence can become very complicated when one’s own self-regard remains the most important consideration. A sort of dangerous superficiality is built up by this process. The boss suffers the most from this thematic condition of the story, since he is the one who is most likely to do things for other people in a selfish and self-serving manner. He shares his good whiskey with Woodifield, which is superficially a benevolent act of sharing, but the act becomes complicated by many other factors. First of all, the whiskey is not going to be good for Woodifield’s health: he remarks that he is forbidden to drink it at home, assumedly for heath reasons. But more concretely, the boss’ act of sharing the whiskey does not instigate social contact and the reduction of inhibitions or barriers: he drinks the whiskey, and is more guarded than ever, even going so far as to mask his reaction to Woodifield’s news about the grave. There is no social contact, and in the end, the boss is not even paying attention to Woodifield, and ushers him out of the office. As the story becomes more narrative, it becomes clear that the boss tried to organize and rule his son’s life before he died. His organized weeping fails, and then he tortures the fly, controlling its little destiny. Most indicative of the theme of selfish benevolence, the boss offers the fly a sort of pep-talk as he is killing it. Various critics have differing opinions about the thematic concerns of Mansfield’s story. In one interpretation, a critic focuses on the boss’ final actions to show that they represent that the boss is becoming increasingly callous due to temporal concerns. “This second stage in the experiment reveals the disparity between them: the Fly survives his grief, but the Boss no longer has any grief to conquer—his sensibility for grief has been blotted up by Time” (Stallman, p. 201). Years later, other critics approached this interpretation, which seems valid enough, with great scorn and derision, and were in turn scorned by other critics. “Some earlier critics of ‘The Fly’ have gone astray by ignoring the story’s technical limitations, and various abstract ‘themes’ have been read into it, like ‘time’, ‘cruelty’, and ‘life’” (Bateson and Shahevitch, p. 209). To say that any reader has gone astray in taking meaning from a text seems to be rather presumptuous and short-sighted, but it does allow the critic to draw attention to the superiority of their own arguments. Bateson and Shahevitch concentrate on the details of the story, and also highlight the curious anonymity of its protagonist. “He is always referred to as ‘the boss,’ twenty-five times to be precise, or approximately once every eighty words” (Bateson and Shahevitch, p. 210). Other critics have examined the theme of hopelessness in the story as a constant rather than a sudden revelation. “The boss is the sorry ‘hero’ of this story and his ‘grinding and frightening feeling of wretchedness’ had set in long before the fly’s death” (Copland, p. 213). Human communication provokes an infinite number of reactions. In summary, Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly” tells the story of a boss who drinks with his co-worker, receives some disturbing news, dismisses the worker, tries and fails to weep about the news, and then tortures and kills a fly in his office. The theme of the work appears to be that superficial benevolence is self-serving, and harms its recipient. Other critics have a variety of equally valid readings. WORKS CITED Bateson, F.W., and B. Shahevitch. “Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Fly’: A Critical Exercise.” Essays in Criticism, 12(1), January 1962. Copland, R.A. “Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Fly.’” Essays in Criticism, 12(3), July 1962. Mansfield, Katherine. “The Fly.” The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980. Stallman, Robert Wooster. “Mansfield’s ‘The Fly.’” The Explicator, 3(6), April 1945. “The Fly.” 29 April 2003. http://www.ivcc.edu/rambo/eng1001/mansfield_the_fly.htm. ------------ About the author: Daniel Brenner's poetry will be in the upcoming 2004 issue of "Spinning Jenny." He used to teach English and be an accountant at Berlitz Language Centers in Ridgewood, NJ, but now is an independent contractor in Jersey City. Email: brennerdan@hotmail.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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