Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly” (originally published in 1922) is “the subject of considerable, often heated, critical debate” (Barnard 2000: 199). Indeed, “none of her stories have come in for so much commentary as ‘The Fly’” (O’Sullivan 2011: 21). As mentioned in the introduction, the narrative has a simple plot: Mr. Woodifield, who retired after having a stroke, makes his weekly visit to his old boss in the office. He tells the boss about the graves of his son and the boss’s son, who were both killed in the war. After Woodifield leaves, the boss recalls his son in pain but finds himself unable to shed tears. Then he notices that a fly has fallen into his inkpot and is struggling to get free. The boss first draws the fly out of the inkpot, then he changes his mind and keeps dropping blots of ink on the fly until it is killed, which leaves the boss wretched, frightened, and forgetful. As F. W. Bateson and B. Shahevitch (1962) observe, this plot development may be divided into three Acts. Act 1 is the Woodifield episode, Act 2 is the re-enactment of the son’s death, and Act 3 is the killing of the fly, with “a mounting intensity, a transition from the near-comic to the near-tragic” (52).1
As various critics have indicated, this plot development has rich symbolic and biographical associations. The title “The Fly” and the way the fly suffers death at the boss’s hand remind us of the well-known lines in Act 4, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, / They kill us for their sport” (2007a: 131). That is to say, the narrative may be taken as “a chilling commentary on divine indifference” (Woods 2008). The narrative also recalls Mansfield’s journal on December 31, 1918, entitled “The Fly”:
Oh, the times when she had walked upside down on the ceiling, run up glittering panes, floated on a lake of light, flashed through a shining beam!
And God looked upon the fly fallen into the jug of milk and saw that it was good. And the smallest Cherubim and Seraphim of all, who delight in misfortune, struck their silver harps and shrilled: ‘How is the fly fallen, fallen!’ (Murry 1954: 153)
On January 11, 1918, Mansfield sent a letter to her husband, John Middleton Murry. There she writes, after an exhausting wartime train trip, “I feel 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” (Murry 1929: 86). Since the narrative was created just a few months before Mansfield died of tuberculosis, many critics treat the fly as a symbol of the dying and helpless Mansfield herself, who struggled against the tuberculosis “which was beating her, blow by blow, into the grave” (Jacobs 1947; see also Bledsoe 1947, Coroneos 1997). In a recent essay, Vincent O’Sullivan (2011: 22) says: “It is difficult not to read ‘The Fly’ biographically, regardless of how earnestly Theory advises against such old humanist practice; hard not to see the Boss as God, as Harold Beauchamp [Mansfield’s father], as Fate, as the stopping and starting of disease…. Whatever, it is a story of unrelenting grimness, a story that supposes, ‘What if nothing can be done?’ While somewhere in the background frolic the ‘wanton boys’ from King Lear, and Hardy’s President of the Immortals.”
Although critics tend to agree that “The Fly” is a symbolic story, they differ as to how well Mansfield uses her symbol. Robert Wooster Stallman (1945) finds that Mansfield very “cleverly” “inverts her symbol”: the boss is the boss of the other human characters in “his little world” (“all are as flies to him”) and “of the little life of the Fly who has fallen into his inkpot,” but “at the first stage of the experiment [on the fly] the Boss is to be equated with the Fly. He is, ironically then, at once both boss and fly.” Sylvia Berkman (1951: 195) however, finds the symbolism in “The Fly” confused,
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. Thus the functional role which the boss plays in the story does not fuse with the symbolic role.
Mary Rohrberger (1966: 69) challenges this view and argues that Berkman “fails to perceive the symbolic relationship between microcosm and macrocosm which makes the boss part in relation to whole and shows him acting both as father figure and God figure.” Rohrberger (71) asserts that the fly “must be recognized as a symbol for all the characters in the story. The boss, the boss’s son, and old Woodifield are all flies in relation to a controlling force,” since the boss has lost his son, who is killed in the war, and Woodifield “has suffered a stroke which has brought him to premature senility” (see also Bledsoe 1947). As for the boss, “who had lived for his son,” in “finally recognizing the boy’s death” he is “at the moment of his own symbolic death” (72).
Moreover, although critics tend to agree on the symbolic nature of the narrative, they have come up with conflicting interpretations of the thematic meaning of the plot development. Stallman (1945) takes the plot development as being marked by “the conflict between time and grief” and its theme as “time conquer[ing] grief.” To Thomas Bledsoe (1947), however, “the whole movement of the story” centers on the cruelty and indifference of the boss (mankind) and fate (the gods), and the boss’s cruel treatment of the fly is to divert his own grief. J. D. Thomas (1961: 261) sees the theme of the plot development as “the recovery or escape of the protagonist from his grief; if the death of the fly stands for the death of the grief, then the ink is the agency of that very recovery.” In contrast, Clinton W. Oleson (1961: 585) argues that the narrative “should be read as the depiction of the boss’s escape from facing the reality of death and the sterility of his own existence.” Paulette Michel-Michot (1974) divides the narrative into three parts (similar to the division made by Bateson and Shahevitch) and carefully analyzes them one by one in an attempt to “capture” the characteristics of the boss. She says in conclusion, “Here, as in many of her stories, Katherine Mansfield opposes the hard, the cruel, the possessive, the egotistical and the life-killers to the sensitive in a tightly-structured story rendering a critical hour in the life of the boss” (91).
Further, challenging previous critics who regard the narrative as Mans-field’s best creation, Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr (1981: 95–135) argue that the story’s crucial symbolist patterning is flawed because it is too inflexible. To Sydney Janet Kaplan, this narrative “demonstrates how power corrupts, how patriarchal dominance victimizes” the fly as a small and powerless “other” (1991: 189). Even though the boss’s “sadistic behavior” results from what he has suffered, Mansfield “does not condone it” (ibid.). Viewing the plot development more in narratological terms, Patrick Morrow (1993: 15) observes that the sequence of events “constitutes a process, and a process to [Mieke] Bal may be either one of improvement or deterioration,” but he finds that “Mansfield’s story confounds easy classification” along such lines. “If we see the boss’s inability to call up his son’s memory as proof that time heals all wounds, the process seems one of improvement; but if we interpret the events as evidence that the boss has forgotten his son rather quickly and thus, in spite of his protests, never really cared for the boy, the process shows deterioration.” And he concludes that since “the boss’s torturing and killing of the fly leads readers to an unsympathetic reading of his character, the process is most likely one of deterioration” (ibid.).
Again, Con Coroneos (1997), calling into question the earlier assumption that “the story is a complex rendering of grief, memory and loss,” argues that part of the ambiguity of the text “arises from its ideological containment of actions which sit uneasily between sadism and sentimentality” and that its element of sadism “excuses itself through the idea of a ‘truth to psychology,’” which enables the reader “to participate in the spectacle of suffering without the anxiety of guilt” (quoted in Barnard 2000: 230–32). By contrast, Kathleen Jones (2010: 441) finds the plot development not ambiguous or ambivalent but entirely “cruel and cynical, without sentiment or romance.” In a concentrated attempt to apply Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to this narrative, Clare Hanson (2011: 125–26) finds “The Fly” “perhaps the most uncanny of Mansfield’s stories,” and the plot development “dramatizes the incursion of death into the private sphere.” In the process of killing the fly, “the boss plays with death, keeps coming up to its frontier, re-enacting his son’s death in ways which reflect his ambivalent feelings about it” (126). To Hanson, the end of the plot development where the boss cannot remember what he was thinking earlier marks the completion of repression and disavowal (ibid.).
A fuller picture of existing criticism may be gained by taking a look at the summary of the major themes of the plot development of “The Fly” offered by Anja Barnard (2000: 200). The story
is frequently seen as an indictment of the brutal horror of World War I, along with the hopelessness and despair left in its wake. Many scholars have remarked that the timetable that the story sets for the death of the two sons coincides with the 1915 death of Mansfield’s brother, a victim of wartime fighting. The war dead, it is claimed are likened to flies innocently slaughtered by cruel forces over which they have no control. Some critics have pointed to references Mansfield made in her journals and letters about flies to show that the fly represents herself, struggling to fight the ravages of her tuberculosis, only to be crushed in the end by a selfish and cruel father much like the boss in her story. Other critics have resisted such autobiographical interpretations, insisting they detract from a more universally compelling existential message concerning the inevitability of death and man’s unwillingness to accept its truth. These scholars see the story as essentially about the boss’s brief realization of his own pitiful ambitions and mortality before he subconsciously tries to suppress this horrible knowledge.
As all this shows, generations of critics have tried to offer interpretations of the plot development of “The Fly,” often probing into the depths of its thematic import from diverse angles. I will not offer judgments on which interpretations are better than others, since the aim of this essay is not to try to come up with a more valid interpretation of the plot, but to reveal a covert progression behind the plot development which has eluded existing critical attention. While the plot development centers on war, death, existence, grief, memory, helplessness, suffering, loss, control, cruelty, indifference, victimization, and so forth, the covert progression has a different thematic concern, namely, to direct a silent and continuous irony against the boss’s own vanity. Given the two parallel movements with their different—yet not conflicting—thematic concerns, overlooking the covert progression may result in the failure to understand certain textual elements when mapping them unto the plot development. In what follows, I will first concentrate on revealing the covert progression itself, and then I will discuss some misunderstandings that arise from missing it.
Since the covert progression is an undercurrent that runs throughout the narrative, the analysis will trace it step by step, and we now begin with the first paragraph of the text:
“Y’are very snug in here,” piped old Mr. Woodifield, and he peered out of the great, green-leather armchair by his friend the boss’s desk as a baby peers out of its pram. His talk was over; it was time for him to be off. But he did not want to go. Since he had retired, since his … stroke, the wife and the girls kept him boxed up in the house every day of the week except Tuesday. On Tuesday he was dressed and brushed and allowed to cut back to the City for the day. Though what he did there the wife and girls couldn’t imagine. Made a nuisance of himself to his friends, they supposed…. Well, perhaps so. All the same, we cling to our last pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves. So there sat old Woodifield, smoking a cigar and staring almost greedily at the boss, who rolled in his office chair, stout, rosy, five years older than he, and still going strong, still at the helm. It did one good to see him.
Wistfully, admiringly, the old voice added, “It’s snug in here, upon my word!”
“Yes, it’s comfortable enough,” agreed the boss, and he flipped the Financial Times with a paper-knife. As a matter of fact he was proud of his room; he liked to have it admired, especially by old Woodifield. It gave him a feeling of deep, solid satisfaction to be planted there in the midst of it in full view of that frail old figure in the muffler. (422–23)
The narrative begins abruptly in the middle with the direct quotation of old Mr. Woodifield’s words “Y’are very snug in here.” Semantically, this foregrounded direct speech somewhat clashes, at least in surface meaning, with old Woodifield’s later exclamation “It’s snug in here, upon my word!” in that the former only has to do with the snugness of “you,” but the latter is concerned with that of both “you” and Woodifield himself. Given the fact that old Woodifield feels snug himself, the opening direct speech exclusively concerned with the snugness of the boss appears to be odd. The oddity helps foreground old Woodifield’s admiration for the boss, an admiration that is reinforced by the adjunct “almost greedily” and then “Wistfully, admiringly,” the latter even markedly occupying the initial thematic position in the clause. These stylistic choices interact to change implicitly the sense of the exclamation “It’s snug in here,” making it newly convey Woodifield’s admiration for the boss rather than his own snugness.
The boss’s agreement, “Yes, it’s comfortable enough,” likewise conveys more than the boss’s feeling of comfort: the following narratorial comment, “As a matter of fact he was proud of his room; he liked to have it admired, especially by old Woodifield,” exposes the boss’s self-satisfaction and vanity. The next sentence regarding his “feeling of deep, solid satisfaction to be planted there in the midst of it in full view of that frail old figure in the muffler” further indicates that the vanity goes with selfishness. In what precedes, Woodifield’s frailty is emphatically conveyed through the contrast between his age (“old”) and his state (“as a baby peers out of its pram”). Readers will surely feel sympathetic towards the pitiable “frail old figure in the muffler,” forming a contrast with the boss’s selfish feeling. The narratorial commentary led by “as a matter of fact,” in particular the adjunct “especially” and the epithets “deep, solid,” convey the implied author’s implicit irony against the boss’s selfish vanity, inviting the authorial audience to make negative ethical judgment on the boss in this aspect.
Given old Woodifield’s deplorably frail state, his wife and daughters believe that he “ma[kes] a nuisance of himself” when visiting his friends. Actually, Woodifield’s weekly visit to the boss’s office is most welcome, for his very frailty intensifies the self-satisfaction of the boss. The clash between the supposition of Woodifield’s family and the real fact gives rise to irony, but it is not so much dramatic irony at the family’s supposition (which is normal and sensible) as ethical irony against the boss’s selfish vanity.
From the viewpoint of the plot development centering on war, death, existence, grief, and so forth, the various textual details in the opening passage as analyzed above appear unimportant and even somewhat irrelevant. But in terms of the ironic covert progression directed against the boss’s moral nature, starting from the abrupt direct speech at the very opening sentence, the trivial details interact to form the first stage of the implicit textual movement. Even at this initial stage, the perception of the covert irony starts to establish a secret communication between the implied author and us at the expense of the central character. We start to take pleasure in perceiving the ethical significance and aesthetic value of what appears to be trivial and digressive to the thematic concerns of the plot development, pleasure that will gradually increase with the progression of the undercurrent. The following passage reads:
“I’ve had it done up lately,” he explained, as he had explained for the past—how many?—weeks. “New carpet,” and he pointed to the bright red carpet with a pattern of large white rings. “New furniture,” and he nodded towards the massive bookcase and the table with legs like twisted treacle. “Electric heating!” He waved almost exultantly towards the five transparent, pearly sausages glowing so softly in the tilted copper pan.
But he did not draw old Woodifield’s attention to the photograph over the table of a grave-looking boy in uniform standing in one of those spectral photographers’ parks with photographers’ storm-clouds behind him. It was not new. It had been there for over six years. (423)
The first paragraph of this passage continues to direct implicit irony at the boss’s vanity. He keeps showing off his newly furnished office to old Woodifield, flaunting one by one the new furnishings in the room. The detailed and somewhat mocking description of “the bright red carpet with a pattern of large white rings […] the table with legs like twisted treacle […] the five transparent, pearly sausages glowing so softly in the tilted copper pan” brings out the ludicrous pettiness of the boss’s attention, which is incongruous with his social identity as a “boss” conventionally expected to concentrate on bigger things. But the very incongruity of the petty perception effectively highlights and ironizes the boss’s vanity. The description here also echoes the preceding one, where old Woodifield “peered out of the great, green-leather armchair by his friend the boss’s desk as a baby peers out of its pram.” The boss offers his guest a “great” armchair to reflect his own importance and somehow to “belittle” the other, at least in his own perception.
Interestingly, although the narrator is omniscient, a question mark appears in the parenthesis “as he had explained for the past—how many?— weeks.” The feigned narratorial uncertainty (suggesting the unusual length of time), coupled with the adjunct “almost exultantly,” foregrounds the boss’s repetitively and enthusiastically showing off his office to his visitors. It is true that the death of the boss’s son six years ago is a crucial event in the plot development, and this requires dramatic contrast between the newly equipped office and the old “photograph over the table”; but for that contrastive purpose it is only necessary to mention the new appearance of the office. The boss’s repetitive, enthusiastic parading and petty perception of the new things therefore appear to be unimportant or even redundant in terms of the plot development. But these redundant details are significant constituents of the undercurrent Mansfield has artistically produced. Through such artful stylistic and structural choices, Mansfield guides the reader’s interpretive effort in an ethical direction different from that of the plot development, as well as inviting the reader to appreciate a different layer of the subtle artistry of the text. This ethical-aesthetic undercurrent, as we will see, runs throughout the text.
In what follows, Woodifield tries to tell the boss something but cannot remember what. After drinking the whisky offered by the boss, he remembers that when his daughters went to Belgium to visit the tomb of his son, they came across that of the boss’s son. After seeing Woodifield off, the boss says he does not want to be disturbed for half an hour. He shuts the door and sits down in his spring chair:
leaning forward, the boss covered his face with his hands. He wanted, he intended, he had arranged to weep….
It had been a terrible shock to him when old Woodifield sprang that remark upon him about the boy’s grave. It was exactly as though the earth had opened and he had seen the boy lying there with Woodifield’s girls staring down at him. For it was strange. Although over six years had passed away, the boss never thought of the boy except as lying unchanged, unblemished in his uniform, asleep for ever. “My son!” groaned the boss. But no tears came yet. In the past, in the first few months and even years after the boy’s death, he had only to say those words to be overcome by such grief that nothing short of a violent fit of weeping could relieve him. Time, he had declared then, he had told everybody, could make no difference. Other men perhaps might recover, might live their loss down, but not he. How was it possible? His boy was an only son. Ever since his birth the boss had worked at building up this business for him; it had no other meaning if it was not for the boy. Life itself had come to have no other meaning. How on earth could he have slaved, denied himself, kept going all those years without the promise for ever before him of the boy’s stepping into his shoes and carrying on where he left off?
And that promise had been so near being fulfilled. The boy had been in the office learning the ropes for a year before the war. Every morning they had started off together; they had come back by the same train. And what congratulations he had received as the boy’s father! No wonder; he had taken to it marvellously. As to his popularity with the staff, every man jack of them down to old Macey couldn’t make enough of the boy. And he wasn’t the least spoilt. No, he was just his bright natural self, with the right word for everybody, with that boyish look and his habit of saying, “Simply splendid!”
But all that was over and done with as though it never had been. The day had come when Macey had handed him the telegram that brought the whole place crashing about his head. “Deeply regret to inform you …” And he had left the office a broken man, with his life in ruins.
Six years ago, six years…. How quickly time passed! It might have happened yesterday. 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. He decided to get up and have a look at the boy’s photograph. But it wasn’t a favourite photograph of his; the expression was unnatural. It was cold, even stern-looking. The boy had never looked like that. (425–26; italics added)
If the only son falls in battle, the father cannot as a rule help shedding tears in a situation like this. But from Mansfield’s ironic pen, shedding tears for his dead son becomes for the boss a task impossible to carry out at present. Mansfield uses three parallel clauses—“He wanted, he intended, he had arranged to weep”—to convey the abnormality of the boss’s feeling. Normally, “wanting to weep” in such a situation means having the spontaneous urge to weep out of grief, but the reader’s conventional expectation is somewhat defeated by the second clause, “he intended to weep”—instead of being spontaneous, weeping becomes something the boss plans to do. The oddity is reinforced and the reader’s expectation further defeated by the third clause, “he had arranged to weep,” which further highlights the lack of spontaneous grief. The adjunct “yet” in the sentence below (“But no tears came yet.”) leads the reader to expect the boss’s tears at a later point in time, but this expectation is again frustrated. And in the last paragraph of the above quote, the boss’s own reflection, “he was puzzled. Something seemed to be wrong with him. He wasn’t feeling as he wanted to feel,” demonstrates even further and more explicitly that the boss no longer has real grief.
In the passage quoted, moreover, we see not only the contrast between the boss’s “violent fit of weeping” in the past and the vain effort to weep at present but also the contrast between his past prediction that time “could make no difference” to him and the fact that time has actually made a big difference to him. These contrasts also explain another one between the narratorial comment “he had left the office a broken man, with his life in ruins” and the boss’s pride and self-satisfaction as shown at the beginning of the narrative. Besides, his son’s present expression on the photo appears to the boss, as never in the past, “cold, even stern-looking,” against his expectation.
What, then, are the reasons underlying these contrasts between present and past? The heart of the contrasts lies in the relationship between the boss and his son, one that is only depicted in the quoted passage. In the interpretive process, the boss at first appears to be selflessly working for his son, but when we reach the sentence, “How on earth could he have slaved, denied himself, kept going all those years without the promise for ever before him of the boy’s stepping into his shoes and carrying on where he left off?,” it turns out that he is only working for the succession of his own business. The boss’s reminiscence centers on his hope that his son will step into his shoes and the smashing of that hope by war, as clearly indicated by the two topic sentences of the two paragraphs that follow (“And that promise had been so near being fulfilled.” “But all that was over and done with as though it never had been”). Significantly, there is no mention of their family life and family affection in the whole narrative. This helps to show that to the boss his son is only a means to carry on his business and to bring him honor and glory in his lifetime and after his death. The boss’s brief reminiscence puts emphasis on the inseparability or even the identity of the father and son in business (“Every morning they had started off [for the office] together; they had come back by the same train”) and on the glory his son has brought him (“And what congratulations he had received as the boy’s father!”). The boss’s deep grief at his son’s death is in essence a matter of his business continuity and his personal vanity.
At this point, let us recall the beginning of the narrative, where, we have seen, the boss has already found other means to regain his sense of self-importance, such as doing up and showing off his office, a self-flattering comparison between his own health and the frailty of Woodifield, and the flattery of his friends. These means have replaced his son’s role in satisfying his vanity, enabling him to live a proud life instead of one “in ruins.” This is a fundamental reason underlying his present inability to shed tears for his son. We can now understand why “the boss never thought of the boy except as lying unchanged, unblemished in his uniform, asleep for ever”: unable to accept his son’s death because of his vanity, he always self-deceivingly thinks of his dead son in that peculiar way. The narratorial comment that introduces the boss’s peculiar mental attitude, “For it was strange,” takes on an ironic ring which becomes more intense in the words: “the [boy’s] expression was unnatural. It was cold, even stern-looking. The boy had never looked like that.” As we all know, a person’s expression on a photo never changes. Rather, the change observed in the boy’s look indicates the change of the boss’s own state of mind—he has found other means to satisfy his vanity and no longer feels grief for the loss of his son. Arguably, the term “cold” is used by Mansfield to convey implicit irony against the boss’s treating his son only as a means of carrying on his business and the term “stern” seems to go further in conveying implicit authorial criticism against the boss’s selfish vanity, which subtly invites readers’ negative ethical judgment on the boss.
Now we come to the last passage of the text—the title scene of the boss killing the fly, which, as the crucial ending of the narrative, is of much importance to the covert progression centering on the boss’s vanity as well as to the plot development centering on death, control, victimization, and so forth. I will discuss the thematic implications of the passage for these two contexts in turn.
At that moment the boss noticed that a fly had fallen into his broad inkpot, and was trying feebly but desperately to clamber out again. Help! help! said those struggling legs. But the sides of the inkpot were wet and slippery; it fell back again and began to swim. The boss took up a pen, picked the fly out of the ink, and shook it on to a piece of blotting-paper. For a fraction of a second it lay still on the dark patch that oozed round it. Then the front legs waved, took hold, and, pulling its small, sodden body up, it began the immense task of cleaning the ink from its wings. […] The horrible danger was over; it had escaped; it was ready for life again.
But just then the boss had an idea. He plunged his pen back into the ink, leaned his thick wrist on the blotting-paper, and as the fly tried its wings down came a great heavy blot. What would it make of that? What indeed! The little beggar seemed absolutely cowed, stunned, and afraid to move because of what would happen next. But then, as if painfully, it dragged itself forward. The front legs waved, caught hold, and, more slowly this time, the task began from the beginning.
He’s a plucky little devil, thought the boss, and he felt a real admiration for the fly’s courage. That was the way to tackle things; that was the right spirit. Never say die; it was only a question of … But the fly had again finished its laborious task, and the boss had just time to refill his pen, to shake fair and square on the new-cleaned body yet another dark drop. What about it this time? A painful moment of suspense followed. But behold, the front legs were again waving; the boss felt a rush of relief. He leaned over the fly and said to it tenderly, “You artful little b …” And he actually had the brilliant notion of breathing on it to help the drying process. All the same, there was something timid and weak about its efforts now, and the boss decided that this time should be the last, as he dipped the pen deep into the inkpot.
It was. The last blot fell on the soaked blotting-paper, and the draggled fly lay in it and did not stir. The back legs were stuck to the body; the front legs were not to be seen.
“Come on,” said the boss. “Look sharp!” And he stirred it with his pen—in vain. Nothing happened or was likely to happen. The fly was dead.
The boss lifted the corpse on the end of the paper-knife and flung it into the waste-paper basket. But such a grinding feeling of wretchedness seized him that he felt positively frightened. He started forward and pressed the bell for Macey.
“Bring me some fresh blotting-paper,” he said sternly, “and look sharp about it.” And while the old dog padded away he fell to wondering what it was he had been thinking about before. What was it? It was…. He took out his handkerchief and passed it inside his collar. For the life of him he could not remember. (426–28; italics added)
Critics tend to take this final scene as showing the boss’s sadistic cruelty (see, for instance, Berkman 1951: 195; Jones 2010: 441), but in terms of narrative progression, the boss at first actually takes action to save the fly’s life out of pity. The personifying expression “Help! help! said those struggling legs” conveys the boss’s empathetic point of view. Only when the fly is ready to fly away does the boss suddenly have an “idea” which leads to the death of the fly. The text never explicitly mentions what the “idea” is. But a careful examination of the stylistic choices made here will enable us to discover that the boss is trying to test through the fly his own ability to survive under pressure, and that the boss increasingly identifies with the fly. After dropping the first blot of ink on the fly, there is presented the inner thought of the boss in free indirect discourse “What would it make of that? What indeed!” When the boss sees that the fly is making a strenuous effort to clear its wings from the ink, he feels “a real admiration for the fly’s courage.” We are again given direct access to his inner thoughts in free indirect discourse: “That was the way [for us] to tackle things; that was the right spirit [for us]. Never say die; it was only a question of …” The inclusive referring expression “things,” the absence of qualification of “right spirit,” and the categorical adverb “never” interact to suggest that the boss is conducting an experiment to test the ability to survive in difficult circumstances in general and his own ability in particular. If the fly fails to survive, it will be a heavy blow to his own confidence, pride, and vanity.
Then the boss further tests the fly’s representative ability to survive by dropping another blot of ink on it. “A painful moment of suspense follow[s],” and when the front legs of the fly are again waving, the boss “[feels] a rush of relief.” We have good reason to infer that because of his identification with the fly, the boss feels “painful suspense” and “a rush of relief”: he is feeling anxious not so much about the fly as about himself—about his own ability to survive. Precisely because of his anxiety about his own chances of survival, he wants to breathe on the fly “to help the drying process.” Having then noticed that “there [is] something timid and weak about [the fly’s] efforts” at this stage, he decides to try the fly for the last time, thinking that the fly may still survive it (after all, there is only “something” timid and week about the fly’s efforts). But contrary to the boss’s expectation, after the “last blot [falls] on the soaked blotting-paper,” the fly does not stir. “‘Come on,’ [says] the boss. ‘Look sharp!’ And he stir[s] it with his pen—in vain”: the dash highlights “in vain,” implicitly casting irony on the boss’s overestimating the ability of the fly’s (and his own) power of survival. The curt two-word sentence “It was [the last time]” is the narrator’s comment, referring to the fly’s inability to survive. This forms a contrast with the boss’s wish when dropping the last blot of ink, a contrast that implicitly generates irony at the boss’s overconfidence and his urging and stirring the fly “in vain.” This ironic dissonance between the viewpoint of the narrator and that of the boss has eluded critical attention.
In the past the boss identified himself with his son, on whom he placed his own confidence and pride; and when his son was killed, he was totally “broken.” Similarly, at this moment, the boss identifies himself with the fly, on which he places his confidence and his hope to survive under pressure; so when the fly dies instead, his confidence and hope are destroyed and he is seized by “such a grinding feeling of wretchedness,” feeling “positively frightened.” It is meaningful that Mansfield chooses the epithet “grinding” to modify the boss’s feeling. Apart from referring to the state of being oppressive or tedious, this word also has the sense “seemingly without end” (Pearsall 1998: 808). When his son died, the boss thought he would remain wretched all his life, but he soon regained his pride and self-importance through other means. Similarly, after the fly’s death the boss may overcome the “grinding feeling of wretchedness” and regain his pride and self-importance through other means, as soon emerges from his “stern” command to old Macey and his treating the old clerk as an “old dog” (a referring expression that indicates the narrator’s ironic mimicking of the boss’s contemptuous point of view).
In terms of the boss’s attitude towards the old clerk, let us take a look at a relevant preceding description: When old Woodifield had left, “for a long moment the boss stayed, staring at nothing, while the grey-haired office messenger, watching him, dodged in and out of his cubby-hole like a dog that expects to be taken for a run. Then: ‘I’ll see nobody for half an hour, Macey,’ said the boss. ‘Understand? Nobody at all.’ ‘Very good, sir’” (425). Macey’s dog-like obsequiousness and servility in the boss’s presence (“watching him”) indicate the kind of behavior the boss expects from his “grey-haired” clerk as a means to satisfy his vanity and sense of self-importance.
Now we come to the last paragraph of the narrative, which focuses on the boss’s forgetfulness. This ending seems quite irrelevant to the title “The Fly” and to the plot’s themes of war, death, and victimization. But it has a key role to play in the ironic covert progression since it implicitly conveys most powerful and penetrating irony against the boss’s vanity. Compare:
(a) “There was something I wanted to tell you,” said old Woodifield, and his eyes grew dim remembering. “Now what was it? I had it in my mind when I started out this morning.” His hands began to tremble, and patches of red showed above his beard. Poor old chap, he’s on his last pins, thought the boss. (423)
(b) And while the old dog padded away he fell to wondering what it was he had been thinking about before. What was it? It was…. He took out his handkerchief and passed it inside his collar. For the life of him he could not remember. (428)
As the page numbers indicate, the two passages are widely apart, but they are near-symmetrical. In passage (a), Woodifield wants to tell the boss about their sons’ graves, but he temporarily forgets his intention. At the beginning of the narrative, the boss gains “a feeling of deep, solid satisfaction” at the frailty of Woodifield, and at this moment, viewing the deplorable state of Woodifield in his forgetfulness, the boss’s sense of superiority reaches its climax as shown by his condescending thought, vividly presented in free indirect discourse: “Poor old chap, he’s on his last pins.”
However, in passage (b), the boss himself ironically turns out to be as forgetful as Woodifield. Notice the striking points of similarity between the two characters in their forgetfulness: The boss’s “What was it?” directly echoes Woodifield’s “Now what was it?” Moreover, in their respective anxious efforts to remember, Woodifield’s “hands beg[in] to tremble, and patches of red [show] above his beard,” while the boss perspires and he has to take out his handkerchief and pass it “inside his collar” to wipe off his sweat. Without any explicit comment, just by such unobtrusive similarities between different parts of the textual sequence, Mansfield ironically reveals that there is in fact no “deep, solid” ground for the boss to feel self-complacent and condescending at the forgetfulness of Woodifield. Mansfield uses “for the life of him” to put emphasis on the boss’s own forgetfulness. The narrative ends very abruptly with the sentence, “For the life of him he could not remember,” which occupies the end-focus position of the whole text and which in the reading process is psychologically very prominent, thus ironically highlighting the boss’s own forgetfulness. It is at once the climax and the denouement of the narrative’s covert progression.
As we have seen, starting from the very beginning of the narrative, behind the plot development centering on war, death, existence, victimization, helplessness, and so forth, Mansfield has created another covert textual movement going in a contrastive, yet not conflicting, thematic direction— continuously directing subtle irony against the boss’s own vanity and implicitly inviting the reader’s negative judgment on this ethical defect of the boss. In the covert progression, various existents are used as vehicles to convey the ethical irony: Woodifield, the boss’s snug office, the new furnishings, the office messenger, the boss’s son (including the son’s photo and dead body), and the fly. It should be noted that female characters, though very minor, also play the role of vehicle in this ironic covert progression. This fictional world focuses on men, but there is one place that touches on the boss’s relation to women. In order to help Woodifield recall what he wants to tell, the boss offers him whisky, and Woodifield accepts, observing that his wife and daughters do not allow him to drink whisky at home. The boss then makes a contemptuous comment on them: “‘Ah, that’s where we know a bit more than the ladies,’ cried the boss, swooping across for two tumblers that stood on the table with the water-bottle, and pouring a generous finger into each” (424). In fact, it is common knowledge shared by men and women that a person who has had a stroke should not drink spirits (and “a generous finger” in this context takes on irony—the more generous, the worse). That is to say, the boss actually knows less than the ladies, not “more,” and certainly cares less. The boss is sitting very near Woodifield (whose armchair is just by the boss’s desk) and there is therefore no need for the boss to “cry” out his response. By making the boss negate the commonsensical knowledge and cry out his negation in a self-complacent and self-glorifying way, Mansfield subtly directs irony against the boss.
As mentioned earlier, irony in the covert progression differs from more local kinds of irony, since it characteristically relies on the interaction among elements in different parts of the textual sequence. In the last paragraph of “The Fly,” the description that “[the boss] took out his handkerchief and passed it inside his collar” is by no means ironic in itself, but when considered in relation to the preceding “[Woodifield’s] hands began to tremble, and patches of red showed above his beard,” it implicitly takes on irony against the boss’s sense of superiority at Woodifield’s forgetfulness and his condescending generally.2 Similarly, the last sentence, “For the life of him he could not remember,” does not convey irony when viewed locally by itself, but it assumes an ironic ring against the boss’s complacence in relation to the boss’s earlier sense of superiority to Woodifield’s forgetfulness. Moreover, it reinforces in retrospect the irony aimed at the beginning of the narrative against the boss’s “deep, solid satisfaction” at the sight of Woodifield’s frailty. In this final paragraph, the referring expression “old dog” also becomes ironic, or at least more ironic, when interacting with the earlier detailed description of the aged clerk’s obsequiousness in the boss’s presence.
To say that in the covert progression later textual elements take on, or intensify, ironic effects in relation to earlier textual elements and vice versa is to say that the uncovering of the ironic undercurrent calls for reading the text forward and backward and that careful attention is required to see the complicated interaction among subtle stylistic and structural choices in different parts of the textual sequence.
As to the ethical weakness ironized, it is worth mentioning that in daily life, Mansfield—the “real author” (see Shen 2011a, 2013)—was strongly against vanity as an ethical defect. In a letter in 1920 to her husband Murry, Mansfield writes: “How I do scorn all that horrible old twisted existence I mean really the weekends at Garsington—the paralysis of everybody the vanity and ugliness of so much” (O’Sullivan and Scott 1993, 3: 240). Here Mansfield couples “vanity” with “ugliness” and places both in apposition to “paralysis,” making the former explain and illustrate the latter. “Paralysis” in turn is used to explain “that horrible old twisted existence.” Clearly, then, “vanity” (like “ugliness,” or the more general “paralysis” and “horrible old twisted existence”) is an object of Mansfield’s “scorn.” In a letter of 1921 to her friend Richard Murry describing how she wrote “Miss Brill,” Mansfield hastens to add: “Don’t think I’m vain about the little sketch. It’s only the method I wanted to explain” (O’Sullivan and Scott 1993, 4:165). It would thus appear that she was on her guard against the ethical weakness of being vain, which she despised and condemned.
Not surprisingly, in “The Fly,” Mansfield creates a covert textual progression to wage a continuous, subtle, yet scathing attack on this specific weakness. And once alerted to this covert progression, we also gain a fuller, rounder picture of the boss as protagonist and a more comprehensive view of the textual dynamics: It consists not of the plot development alone but of two parallel textual movements which together drive and shape the thematic concerns of the whole narrative.
Although the covert progression and the plot development are two parallel textual movements with distinct concerns, unraveling the former may enable us to understand better various textual elements in relation to the latter sequence. With the interaction in mind, let us examine some previous readings of the story. Since the covert progression centers on the boss, we start with a summary of previous interpretations on him as offered by Anja Barnard:
Much attention has been paid to the central character of the boss. He has been seen as [1] a symbol of malignant forces that are base and motiveless, a representative of the generation that sent its sons to their slaughter in a cruel war, and [2] a god-like figure who, in the words of King Lear, toys with the lives of human beings for sport. Most critics agree that the reader’s early good impression of the boss is continuously undermined as the story unfolds. In the end, some have claimed, [3] he can be viewed as a sadomasochist who likely cowed his son as he does Woodifield and his clerk. [4] He is a bully who torments the fly for boyish pleasure, and his sense of loss is no more than self-pity. However, some commentators claim that [5] the boss should not be viewed as an unsympathetic character, but simply as a man whose experiments on a common housefly are manifestations of an unconscious metaphysical questioning about the meaning of life. The answer comes to him briefly, but he becomes frightened and quickly pushes it out of his mind. [6] Other critics have seen the boss as a man coming to terms with his own selfishness and heartlessness, who recognizes briefly that his grief for his son has been based on a kind of self-deception. As a result, when the fly dies the boss suffers a spiritual death. (2000: 200; brackets added)
Against interpretation [1], the covert progression helps us see and explain that the boss is not “a representative of the generation that sent its sons to their slaughter in a cruel war”: instead, the boss would like his son to step into his shoes in the family business as a way to satisfy his vanity. Interpretation [2] is at once sensible and problematic. On the one hand, the title “The Fly” and the way the fly suffers death at the boss’s hand do remind us of the well-known lines in King Lear about the fate of the flies, but the picture is more complicated than it appears. We have noticed that the boss first empathizes with the fly and rescues it, and he starts to drop ink on it only when he wants to test through the fly his own ability to survive; and moreover, he wants the fly (with which he identifies) to survive even the last drop of ink. The killing, that is to say, is not as “motiveless,” “sadistic,” or “capricious and impersonal” as many critics have believed. Rather, through depicting the boss’s increasing identification with the fly and his “grinding feeling of wretchedness” and, moreover, his feeling “positively frightened” at the death of the fly, Mansfield seems to suggest that the boss is like a fly himself—unable to control his own fate, liable to destruction by external forces, like his son and Woodifield’s son who are killed in the war as flies killed by wanton boys (cf. Bell 1960).
As already indicated, some previous critics have pointed out that the fly symbolizes the boss himself, but the reasons they give for it tend to be partial or somewhat far-fetched. Stallman (1945) maps the climactic scene to the theme of “time conquering grief” and offers this interpretation of how the boss relates to the fly: “At the first stage of the experiment the Boss is to be equated with the Fly” in that “like the Fly, [the boss] conquers the first drop of ink—the grief he suffers”; but when the boss drops the second drop of ink, “the Fly and the Boss can no longer be equated,” since “the Fly survives his grief,” while the boss “no longer has any grief to conquer.” This interpretation goes counter to the textual fact that the boss increasingly identifies with the fly when dropping ink on it. Bledsoe (1947) takes the boss as a fly because “an inexorable fate has already broken his own life and his son’s,” likewise missing the increasing identification of the boss with the fly in the climactic final scene (see a similar interpretation in Rohrberger 1966: 71).
Significantly, the boss’s increasing identification with the fly in the climactic scene has different thematic implications for the plot development and the covert progression. Within the former, Mansfield depicts the boss’s increasing identification with the fly, which fails to survive the test of ink (thus representing the victims of war and humankind at large in echoing the “flies” of King Lear). She thereby intensifies our sense of the boss as a helpless fly-like entity subject to external uncontrollable forces (his losing his son in the war is an earlier manifestation). This interpretation may find support in the testimony of Mansfield’s husband Murry: “The profound and ineradicable impression made upon her [Mansfield] by the War … found perfect utterance in the last year of her life in the story ‘The Fly’” (1954: 107; cf. Bell 1960). But this thematic association with the war is quite irrelevant to the covert progression, where, as we have seen, the climactic final scene plays a very different thematic role: the death of the fly (with which the boss identifies) ironically deals a heavy blow to the boss’s own vanity and confidence. In the preceding analysis I emphasized that textual elements that appear peripheral or irrelevant to the thematic concerns of the plot may be central to the covert progression. Here we see another basic possibility: the same textual elements are important to both the plot development and the covert progression but in different ways and to different thematic effects.
When it comes to interpretation [3], tracing the covert progression helps show that it is ill grounded. To satisfy his vanity, the boss wants his son to be as capable and confident as himself, and by contrast he wants “Woodifield and his clerk” to be as frail and humble as possible. This difference in the boss’s attitude has eluded existing critical attention, so much so that interpretation [3] finds a similarity, instead. An important reason for the neglect is that this difference in attitude (associated with the boss’s vanity) mainly pertains to the thematic concern of the covert progression. And unless we trace the covert progression, we will be hard put to see its thematic significance and, what is worse, we are liable to misinterpret the textual facts in question when mapping them onto the themes of the plot development.
Interpretation [4] is quite similar to interpretation [2], and we have found that the boss drops ink on the fly in order to test his own ability to survive rather than “for boyish pleasure.”
In terms of interpretation [5], we cannot view the boss “simply” as a sympathetic character experimenting on a fly. He is indeed sympathetic as a fly-like victim of external forces, such as the war, but otherwise ironized and so a more complicated personality. Concerning the “unconscious metaphysical questioning,” notice that the experiment on the fly is actually the result of a conscious “idea” and that to say that the boss “quickly pushes [the answer] out of his mind” contradicts the textual fact that the boss tries very hard to remember. This obvious misreading is quite understandable, since the boss’s pitiable state of endeavoring to remember can only gain a satisfactory thematic explanation in the covert progression (its ironic similarity to Woodifield’s earlier pitiable lapse of memory). Critics who overlook this progression tend either to leave unmentioned the boss’s effort to remember or, as in interpretation [5], to misinterpret it when mapping it onto the plot development. The latter is also the case for Bledsoe (1947), who takes the boss’s killing the fly as a way to divert his “sorrow Woodifield has unwittingly aroused.” In the end, Bledsoe claims, the boss’s “Sport” having proved good, the boss forgets “his grief” (ibid.). But, in fact, there is no need for the boss to divert his grief; rather, he wants to feel grieved without success (“He wanted, he intended, he had arranged to weep … But no tears came yet … He wasn’t feeling as he wanted to feel”).
As regards interpretation [6], there is no evidence in the text that the boss comes to terms with his selfishness and heartlessness. Being unaware of them, he simply cannot understand why his son’s expression becomes cold and stern and why he is no longer able to weep for his son. At the ending, moreover, he still regards the “grey-haired” clerk contemptuously as a “dog,” which indicates that he remains selfish and conceited. Most of the details here are more relevant to the boss’s ethical defects as ironized in the covert progression, than to the themes of the plot development. Tracing the covert progression, therefore, enables us to provide a much more convincing explanation for Mansfield’s stylistic and structural choices in depicting the boss in this aspect.
Now let us turn from the boss to the whole narrative. As outlined at the beginning of this chapter, generations of critics have challenged previous interpretations in an effort to come up with a more convincing reading of “The Fly.” As a rule, attention is only paid to one textual movement—that of the plot, and critics tend to map onto it whatever textual elements they find relevant in order to establish the thematic unity of the text. Bledsoe (1947) thus sees the “whole movement of the story” as “explicat[ing] a central theme: ‘As flies to wanton boys, so are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.’” He takes the boss’s treatment of Woodifield as “sadistic.” Bledsoe notices that the boss derives pleasure from Woodifield’s feebleness, but if we open our minds to an alternative undercurrent, we will see that the pleasure is not so much sadistic as conceited. To Bledsoe (ibid.), the boss also gains sadistic pleasure from displaying his newly furnished office “to this broken down hack.” But the text runs, “[the boss] was proud of his room; he liked to have it admired, especially by old Woodifield,” implying that the boss displays his office to all his visitors and that, in all cases, it is a matter associated with his pride and vanity rather than sadistic cruelty. In terms of the boss’s treatment of the fly, Bledsoe (ibid.) notices the boss’s being “amicable,” but he only sees the boss “murder[ing] the fly with wanton and amicable cruelty” (see a similar view in Coroneos 1997), failing to perceive the boss’s identification with the fly.
Stanley B. Greenfield (1958) instead associates the only movement he perceives in the narrative with a different theme: “Time and Life Conquer Grief.” Greenfield discerns what has been overlooked by many other critics, namely, the boss having to arrange to weep casts doubt on his “real love for his son.” But in trying to assimilate everything to the theme of the plot development, Greenfield distorts various textual facts and even contradicts himself. He argues that the boss “has tried to keep his grief alive” so as to be different from other people:
He cannot weep, and his distraction from his effort to do so by the fly is the final blow to his attempt to be different from other men. The fly’s successive weakening struggles to free itself from the ink parallel the boss’ past efforts to keep his grief alive. Each time is more difficult than the last for the fly, and has been more difficult for the boss [to keep his grief alive]…. Appropriately enough, with the death of the fly comes the death of the boss’ grief. (Greenfield 1958)
This contradicts Greenfield’s earlier interpretation that the boss lacks real grief (born of real love) for his son. Nor is there any textual evidence that the boss has endeavored “to keep his grief alive.” On the contrary, the narrative begins with the boss showing off his newly furnished office and drawing old Woodifield’s attention to the things in the room but not “to the photograph” of his dead son. Moreover, when Woodifield mentions the grave of the boss’s son in connection with that of his own, would the reference come as such a shock to a father who has been trying “to keep his grief alive”? As analyzed above, by the time the boss starts dropping ink on the fly, his grief has clearly died.
The specific readings and points offered by Bledsoe and Greenfield are not representative, but their essays are quite typical of critical efforts to discover the thematic meaning of “a single, seamless whole” (Hagopian 1963–64: 387) or of the narrative’s “whole movement” reduced to that of the plot. This narrow focus, apart from distorting certain textual facts, is likely to lead to the underrating or overlooking of certain textual elements that play an important thematic role in the covert progression. As early as the opening part of “The Fly,” for instance, Woodifield’s foregrounded direct speech and the wrong supposition of his family, among other details, appear unimportant or digressive from the viewpoint of the plot development as such: They have indeed usually escaped critical notice.3 But they are found to be important elements in the first stage of the covert progression, shaped to direct ethical irony against the boss’s vanity. When these elements gradually fall into place in the covert progression, they will take on new relevance and gain their due thematic significance. Moreover, they will be recognized as being artful behind their trivial and digressive appearance.
As we have seen, numerous existing interpretations of “The Fly” have shed much light on the narrative from various angles and have greatly helped reveal the rich thematic significance and complicated dynamics of the plot development. But no matter how cogent, ingenious, thorough, and deep-going the analysis is, the picture that emerges is bound to be a partial one unless we perceive at the same time the ironic covert progression behind the symbolic plot development. The two progressions—the plot centering on war, death, grief, time, existence, victimization/being victimized etc. and the covert progression concentrating on the boss’s vanity and self-importance—constitute two interacting dimensions of the whole textual dynamics. They complement each other in characterizing the boss and in generating thematic or ethical significance of the narrative.