Coursework title for 'The Fly'

To what extent does Katherine Mansfield's use of symbolism in 'The Fly' conform to David Lodge's description of 'a shimmering surface of suggested meanings without a denotative core'?

More on The Fly

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.

The Fly

Dear year 13, as promised, some ideas on 'The Fly' for you to ponder.


First of all, I'm going to give you two literary sources, and I would like you to comment on how these illuminate the text for you... Mansfield would have been familiar with both.


SOURCE 1, from King Lear:

Enter GLOUCESTER, led by an Old Man

EDGAR: My father, poorly led? World, world, O world!
But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,
Lie would not yield to age.

Old Man: O, my good lord, I have been your tenant, and
your father's tenant, these fourscore years.

GLOUCESTER : Away, get thee away; good friend, be gone:
Thy comforts can do me no good at all;
Thee they may hurt.

Old Man: Alack, sir, you cannot see your way.

GLOUCESTER: I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;
I stumbled when I saw: full oft 'tis seen,
Our means secure us, and our mere defects
Prove our commodities. O dear son Edgar,
The food of thy abused father's wrath!
Might I but live to see thee in my touch,
I'ld say I had eyes again!

Old Man: How now! Who's there?

EDGAR : [Aside] O gods! Who is't can say 'I am at the worst'?
I am worse than e'er I was.

Old Man: 'Tis poor mad Tom.

EDGAR : [Aside] And worse I may be yet: the worst is not
So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'

Old Man: Fellow, where goest?

GLOUCESTER : Is it a beggar-man?

Old Man: Madman and beggar too.

GLOUCESTER : He has some reason, else he could not beg.
I' the last night's storm I such a fellow saw;
Which made me think a man a worm: my son
Came then into my mind; and yet my mind
Was then scarce friends with him: I have heard more since.
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.

EDGAR : [Aside] How should this be?
Bad is the trade that must play fool to sorrow,
Angering itself and others.--Bless thee, master!

King Lear Act 4, scene 1, 32–37

Source 2: William Blake, The Fly

Little fly, Thy summer’s play My thoughtless hand Has brushed away. Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me? For I dance And drink and sing, Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing. If thought is life And strength and breath, And the want Of thought is death, Then am I A happy fly, If I live, Or if I die.

William Blake (1757-1827)       P. 1793 I look forward to your insights! More tomorrow.

Ode to Autumn

Here are the questions for this week. Remember that you need to use the critical ideas we discussed and looked at if you are to write this essay really well.

Choose ONE of these titles, and write a fluent and clear critical response to the question, using close evidence from the poem throughout to back up your ideas, and reinforcing your ideas with critical reference where appropriate:


1. It can be argued that 'To Autumn' is an intellectual response to the season rather than an emotional one. How far do you agree with this statement?

2. Does the use of metaphor allow the reader to share Keats’ intense enjoyment of the season in 'To Autumn' or does it obscure his celebration? Discuss how far you agree with each proposition and why.

3. Is 'To Autumn' a celebration of nature and autumn or is it an acknowledgement that the scene portrayed is an idealised vision of the past?

4. Knowles and Moon comment that ‘it is typical that metaphors use concrete images to convey something abstract, helping to communicate what is hard to explain’. To what extent do you think that the metaphors in 'To Autumn' are there to communicate abstract ideas, and how far are they used by Keats as simple aids to description?

5. ‘Knowles and Moon describe the functions of metaphor as ‘explaining, clarifying, describing, expressing, evaluating, entertaining’. How do you think Keats employs metaphor in ''To Autumn', and which of these functions does he prioritise?

Some useful critical terminology for your essay

Valediction: a farewell speech. To Autumn is in the valedictory mode.


Apostrophe: A feature of an ode. A figure of speech or rhetorical term in the form of an address in which someone is absent, dead or non-human and is addressed as if it were alive and present and able to reply. The speech can be addressed to a person, idea or thing.

Ode: (from the Greek – to sing) A lyric poem with a dignified theme phrased in a formal, elevated style. Its purpose is to praise and glorify. Odes describe nature intellectually rather than emotionally. An ode has a succession of stanzas in lines of varying length and metre. Its tone is formal, its style is elevated; it is lofty and has noble sentiments. It is characterised by its length, intricate stanza forms, grandeur of style and seriousness of purpose. The form was established by the Greek poet Pindar.

Caesura: a pause within a line of verse. In this example from To Autumn there are caesuras in both lines ‘Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,’
‘Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft’

End-stopped: The end of a line of verse coincides with an essential grammatical pause usually signalled by punctuation.
‘Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head...’

In this example from 'To Autumn', the first line is end-stopped, the second uses enjambment (see below)

Enjambment: The running over of the sense and grammatical structure from one verse line or couplet to the next without a punctuated pause.

Lyric: A poem, usually short, expressing in a personal manner the feelings and thoughts of an individual speaker (not necessarily those of the poet). Keats’ sonnets and odes are in the lyric form.

Synaesthesia: The description of a sense impression in terms more appropriate to a different sense; the mixing of sense impressions in order to create a particular kind of metaphor. As Keats likes to dwell on sense impressions, he uses synaesthesia.

In his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, he describes the taste of wine in terms of colour, action, song, sensation and feeling.

‘O, for a draught of vintage...
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!’