Katherine Mansfield’s short story The Fly
Loss of the loved ones
Loss of loved ones is one emotion which is very difficult to articulate, express. It is very personal, subjective. Every person is a world in themselves and when such a person is lost a complete world is lost. Now the memories, moments associated with that person is the only real link which remains. It is this sad emotion created where most of us are clueless as to how to fill this void. People express these complex emotions of loss in many ways. Expression, communication is one important part of how we interact with each other and help, support each other during such difficult times. Even though other person’s sadness due to loss of their beloved is difficult to comprehend we know when to support them by understanding their behavior and expression, the way they communicate this grief, the way they behave.
But what about the people who very skillfully hide such sadness of loss of their beloved ones? If a person who is deeply hurt by the loss of their loved ones is not even crying or showing any signs of misery, anguish, hatred how would people console them, how would you console them? Superficially it looks completely non-human behavior as emotions and human are two inseparable words. People having such deep inexpressible grief have different way of coping mechanism which eats them from inside and may also affect the world and people around them negatively unknowingly.
Katherine Mansfield’s short story called “The Fly” focuses on an age-old father’s strong grieving emotion of loss of his beloved son in World War 1. The story is very symbolic and different readers have different takes on the central idea of the story hence the story has become highly important short story in modern times. People attribute the fly to the story of war, death, loss of young generation and the demonstration of cruelty which lead to the loss of innocent young people pushed in such wars who actually had nothing to do with it directly. What this short story delivers in the end is very poignant.
The Fly – The story
The story shows two old friends discussing general events in their life over a whisky. Mr. Woodifield is a person who has suffered a stroke and is retired – delicate health-wise. The Boss – 5 years older than Mr. Woodifield is a rich person handling a big business. The Boss is bragging about the renovation of his office to his friend Mr. Woodifield. Mr. Woodifield is happy that he got to drink the whisky as his wife and daughters would not have allowed him to do so. The Boss is showing him all new carpet, furniture, electric heating system and decoration. While showing this, the Boss has made sure that Mr. Woodifield’s attention would not linger over the photograph of a boy in the uniform. (Later readers understand that the it is the photograph of the Boss’s son who died in a war six years ago) Feels like even the Boss is purposefully ignoring his late son’s photo.
In the heat of discussions and drinks Mr. Woodifield brings the topic of his daughters’ visit to the World war soldiers’ cemetery in Belgium. He tells the Boss that his son and the Boss’s son both are buried quite closer to each other. Mr. Woodifield expresses a happiness of relief as expressed by his girls that at least the places where these sons are buried are well maintained, full of flowers and have broad path. It is way of saying that they were resting in peace.
The readers are made aware that the Boss had planned and made every effort to handover his big business to his son. He was very proud of how his son was capable to continue his legacy and his son was also appreciated among his business people. But the war snatched his son away and all his dreams shattered.
The moment the Boss hears the information about his son’s burial place he gets disturbed internally, as if he has lost the track of his surroundings. And before coming back to the reality Mr. Woodifield has already left the office. Now the Boss is alone in his cabin, he tries to express his grief which he had dumped deep below but is surprised that he couldn’t shed single tear.
In this moment the Boss sees a fly trying to escape from the pond of ink bottle kept on his table. The fly is trying hard to escape from the slippery bottle but is failing repeatedly. The Boss picked up the struggling fly with a pen and put it in the blotting paper. He sees the fly making efforts to dry itself to fly away and at this exact moment he becomes curious about the fly’s attempt to remain alive. He drops an ink-drop on the fly just to see what the fly does next. The fly doesn’t stop its efforts and tries to dry itself and fly away. As the boss goes to drop the third ink-drop while ordering the fly like a military officer to “Look sharp!” the fly gives up and dies.
The moment boss throws away this dead fly out of window he feels a deep void in himself but soon overcomes that feeling and orders his assistant to bring more blotting paper like a military general. The old assistant is confused about this extreme change in the behavior of the Boss.
Things War Offers
Katherine Mansfield – the writer of this short story lost her brother in World War 1. This loss of her brother is supposed to be the main inspiration behind her short story ‘The Fly’. The readers will notice that Mr. Woodifield’s stroke can be attributed to the shock due to loss of his son in the war. He is not shown openly verbal about his loss but the internal grief became so dark that it took toll over his physical condition. The highly ambitious Boss looking forward to introduce his son to his business also lost his son. Katherine has incorporated the characters in story very consciously. There are no young characters who are alive in the story except Mr. Woodifield’s daughters. Even the assistant to the Boss – the office messenger – Mr. Macey is portrayed as a grey-haired old person.
Thus, it is a way to show what was left after the World War ended. The youth was lost. Only helpless mothers and daughters, sisters and age-old fathers were left grieving for the loss of their love sons, brothers.
The war may offer the victory and pride to the nation but it snatches the youth of the nation and the hope for the better future. It also takes away the meaning from the lives of its age-old population.
Readers will notice that Mr. Woodifield describes the grave of the soldiers in Belgian war cemetery having graves lines in “miles”. It shows the scale on which World war wiped out the youth.
The Struggles of The Fly – How Wars Destroy Invaluable Lives
Many readers and analyzers of the story attribute the struggle of the fly to escape from the ink-pot and ink-drop to the struggle of the Boss’s son in the world war. The Boss’s perspective for how his son suffered is representative of all the young soldiers died in the war. War leaders lifted these soldiers from one slippery pit and threw them to another one, while the bombs were continuously bombarded on them until they eventually died on the battlefields. The struggles of the fly to dry itself and escape are the struggle of the young soldiers on the battlefield.
Real Men Don’t Cry – How Men Cope with Melancholy and Deep Feelings of Grief
On a first reading, everyone will understand that Katherine Mansfield tried to convey the concepts of friendship, loss of loved ones, dangers of wars through the short story The Fly.
Another most important and least noticed dimension of this story is how men handle their emotions of sadness. Trust me the Fly is not just about the dangers of the War. It is also about how men always suppress their sad emotions just to portray their masculinity to the outside world and how these suppressed emotions get transferred onto the next person, object or entity as a completely cruel and oppressive behavior.
If your read the story twice, thrice and notice the gaps in the conversations between Mr. Woodifield and the Boss and the actions, expressions they are portraying in these gaps, then you will start to perceive the inner turmoil these two people carry in themselves for their deep melancholy.
Mr. Woodifield has already suffered a stroke which is the effect of him being unable to share his grief from the loss of his son. As the only remaining man of the family now, he should demonstrate strength to the society and his family. Crying out loud is not the solution, thus his is getting eaten from inside with his old age.
To portray that he has come out the grief of the loss of his son Reggie, Mr. Woodifield explains the visit of his girls to the Belgian War Cemetery like it was just a simple visit to some normal location in foreign. As if there was nothing special about it. Furthermore, to mask his grief he describes this graveyard as full of flowers and spacious. He is trying to tell the Boss that at least in afterlife their sons are in good place and closer to each other, but he is actually trying to console himself unknowingly. It is his mind that he wants to assure that his son is resting in peace.
You will notice the depth of his grief when Mr. Woodifield immediately changes this topic of War cemetery to the topic of high costs for a pot of jam in Belgium where his girls were staying during their visit.
Many men use same technique of instantly changing topic in the fear that the grief will break out in some way which others may take as a weakness. Trust me, men are masters of such drifts in their conversation especially in a man to man or friend to friend-to-friend conversations. Very rarely male friends will share the problems or feelings of grief with each other. They will talk about the whole world but not explicitly about their sadness. I think Katherine succeeded in portraying these minuscule yet significantly impactful but unnoticed behavior of men. A tornado is always building up in such grievous men but they are masters of hiding that too. No wonder people are surprised when they hear a lively and happy man taking his own life, who is later revealed to be very depressed.
The Boss’s handles his grief in totally opposite way. We see him as more powerful and influential than Mr. Woodifield and he thinks the same about himself too. You should notice that the event when he is showing the renovation of his office to Mr. Woodifield is the moment which he had planned for his son actually. The carpet, the furniture and the electric heater were all for his son. He purposefully ignored his dead son’s photograph during conversations. He was trying to hide the reality that his son died and renovating the office was one way to get closer to this illusion that his son lives. The illusion that at any moment his son will return to this renovated office and take over his father’s business. This breaks my heart. In a corner of his heart, the Boss knew that his son will never return but he still renovated the place in a hope of return. No wonder they say that hope is a dangerous thing.
The boss is so used to hiding his feeling and vent it out through crying. You can see this in the moment just after Mr. Woodifield leaves the office, when the Boss tries to cry but is unable to shed a tear.
The use of exclusively accessible whisky for enjoyment with his friend Mr. Woodifield is also a masking mechanism, a distraction cleverly used by the Boss to portray that nothing has affected him. Men will resort to infinitely many distractions than to explicitly express their sadness just to show that they are manly men.
The Brewing of the Inner Dark Storm
As the name of the story is ‘The Fly’ many think that the pivot of the story is how the Fly underwent death as the representation of how young people died in war and how their relatives got badly affected because of that. I have additional input on this point. The pivot of the story is the Boss. The death of the fly is just what he wants to happen with the other people around him as a helpless revenge for the loss of his son. What Katherine showed in the closing encounters between the Boss and the Fly are actually the depictions of how the suppressed and hidden grief, melancholy, depression in men actually gets projected out as a behavior of inhumane cruelty and unjustified- unending anger, anguish. They will never cry and release this grief but would choose cruelty to channel this anguish. That is how every war in history created new generation full of people hating each other. People especially men are really bad about sharing their sadness, feelings of grief and in many such cases they choose violence to channel out these feelings.
The way the Boss orders the fly like a military officer like “Look Sharp” or “Come on” is not addressed to the fly or not even as the reminiscence of how his son was ordered to fight in war while death dropping on him; actually, it is addressed to himself to remain composed while hiding his pain. The death of the fly here is not the representation of how his son died, it is actually how a part of the Boss himself has died – it is the death of the emotional and humane side of the Boss.
When men find it difficult to channel their grief into an emotional outburst, history has examples where we have seen them choosing the side of anger, cruelty and oppression.
Please understand that there are three different destinations where such grievous men end into. The first are already helpless so the grief eat them from inside, the second one and the majority choose the cruelty for expression and the third but very few succeed in expressing such emotions without guilt and receive help from the outside world.
Melancholy in Men
Sadness is one important aspect of human emotions. In very crude way, sadness is an emotion expressed when things are not working according to one’s expectations. The word simply goes as ‘sad’ but the emotions which it represents are not that simple, crude actually. There are many reasons for a person to be sad and I see two different types of this emotion. When things are not happening up to your expectations, you become sad; you are sad that its not happening for you – I will call it “a selfish sadness”. You are sad because you didn’t win, you are sad because you lost that train and now, you’ll be late to your destination.
The second type is the sadness you have when the things don’t happen for the people you love, when the people you love are sad. You are sad because your people are sad. You want them to be happy. This sadness I would call as “a selfless sadness”.
A selfish sadness starts and ends with you so it is always in your control to get over this sadness. But, for selfless sadness the situation is tricky. It starts from you and it is always connected to the people you love, outside of you. When things are not in your control in such cases this type of sadness is deepest and the darkest one. Exposure to such selfless sadness in addition to the grief from the loss of loved one is a dangerous combination.
Katherine Mansfield, despite being a woman portrayed the details of how ‘manly’ men try to cope with the loss of their loved ones. They either succumb to the dark feeling and give up or they channel this extreme sadness into aggression and oppression of the weaklings, very few men successfully share their feelings and come out of it.
For me the condition of the fly is exactly how the world will be – oppressed and full of hatred if men won’t cry when they are grieving.
Source for reading:
Parts Per Billion 