Well done those of you who have already commented... the rest of you, get to it--I expect to see some more comments and responses please!
Here is some further food for thought. How do these critical snippets affect your reading of the story?
The experiment with the Fly by the Boss, so named because he appears to
be the boss of his little world and of the little life of the Fly who has
fallen into his inkpot, the boss as well over his employees Woodifield and
Macey and over his dead son (all are as flies to him), dramatizes both the plot
(the conflict between time and grief) and the theme (time conquers grief). At
the first stage of the experiment the Boss is to be equated with the Fly. He
is, ironically then, at once both boss and fly.
Robert Wooster Stallman “Mansfield's ‘The Fly,’” in The
Explicator, Vol. 3, No. 6, April, 1945, item 49
On January 11, 1918, after a wartime train trip to the South of France for
her health, Katherine Mansfield wrote her husband, John Middleton Murry, that
she felt “like a fly who has been dropped into the milk-jug and fished out
again, but is still too milky and drowned to start cleaning up yet.”
1
As early as 1913 her story “Violet”
2 had idealized a “tender and
brooding woman” lifting a small green fly from a milk glass and talking about
Saint Francis. These passages prefigure one of her best-known stories, “The
Fly,” wherein the Boss rescues a fly from the inkwell
Celeste Turner Wright “Genesis of a Short Story,” in Philological
Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1, January, 1955, pp. 91-6.
The difficulties Miss Mansfield's excellent story “The Fly” have occasioned
interpreters stem from their eagerness to make one of two obvious equations:
(1) within the story itself, to see the fly symbolizing the boss (Stallman,
EXP.,
April, 1945, III, 49; Berkman,
K. M.: A Critical Study, p. 195); (2)
biographically interpreting, to see the fly as K. M. herself (Jacobs,
EXP.,
Feb. 1947, v, 32; Bledsoe,
EXP., May, 1947, v, 53; Wright,
EXP.,
Feb., 1954, XII, 27).
Stanley B. Greenfield “Mansfield's ‘The Fly,’” in The
Explicator, Vol. 17, No. 1, October, 1958, item 2.
“The Fly” seems to me to be unified by one predominant theme: death, its
inevitability, and man's resistance to it. The most significant single sentence
in the story occurs in the opening paragraph: “All the same, we cling to our
last pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves.”
Pauline P. Bell “Mansfield's ‘The Fly’,” in The Explicator,
Vol. 19, No. 3, December, 1960, item 20.
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
John T. Hagopian “Capturing Mansfield's ‘Fly,’” in Modern
Fiction Studies, Vol. 9, No. 4, Winter, 1963-1964, pp. 385-90.
The chief characteristic of the boss in Katherine Mansfield's “The Fly”
(see EXP., April, 1945, III, 49; Feb., 1947, v, 32; May, 1947, v, 33;
Feb., 1954, XII, 27; Nov., 1955, XIV, 10; Oct., 1958, XVII, 2; and Dec., 1960,
XIX, 20) is, I think, his inability to recognize that others have a breaking
point. This is shown in his attitude toward the fly, toward Macey, toward Mr.
Woodifield, and toward his son. He does not intend to kill the fly; he only
admires its courage and its ability to free itself of ink. After the fly's
fourth soaking, he does not see that the fly has suffered all that it can, and
he encourages it with: “Come on. … Look sharp”
J. Rea “Mansfield's ‘The Fly,’” in The
Explicator, Vol. 23, No. 9, May, 1965, item 68.
Obviously
the boss stands for a superior controlling power—God, destiny, or fate—which in
capricious and impersonal cruelty tortures the little creature struggling under
this hand until it lies still in death. At the same time the boss is presented
as one who has himself received the blows of this superior power through the
death of his only son in the war.
Sylvia Berkman, from Katherine
Mansfield: A Critical Study, cited in Mary Rohrberger “Katherine Mansfield: ‘The
Fly,’” in Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story, Mouton and Company,
1966, pp. 68-74.
No other story of Katherine Mansfield has prompted such a critical
controversy.1 Many critics have proposed interesting
interpretations; yet the more one reads of the criticism, the more one realises
that the answer to the problem the story raises is not in fact found in just
one or another sentence, symbol or parallel inside or outside the story.
Critics seem to have been obsessed by the necessity to equate the fly with
either the boss, Woodifield, the boss's son, or the boss's grief.
Paulette Michel-Michot “Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Fly’:
An Attempt to Capture the Boss,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 11,
No. 1, Winter, 1974, pp. 85-92.
This much-explicated1 story is deservedly famous. It was
completed on 20th February, 1922 and published in ‘The Nation’ on 18th March in
the same year. Exceptionally short in length, it tells by implication much more
than what it states explicitly. The result is not only an extraordinary depth
and suggestiveness but also a puzzling obscurity. For, with many of the
suggestions left deliberately vague, the story becomes an enchanting, but
baffling riddle which lends itself to many conflicting and, sometimes, fanciful
interpretations.
Atul Chandra Chatterjee “1918-23; The Final Phase,” in The
Art of Katherine Mansfield, S. Chand & Company, 1980, pp. 234-321.
