Comment on the style of Katherine Mansfield's "The Fly".

Comment on the style of Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly”.

Ans.

Katherine Mansfield was the leading exponent of the art of story writing and was instrumental in getting her native country New Zealand a special place in this genre and to gain international recognition. As D.M. Davin say: “The short story in New Zealand has had for a long time a special place, it has been recognized, not as a novelists’ by-product, or as the promise of a novel, but as a form in its own right by which talent may fully declare itself.”

Katherine’s talent is Chekhovian as the New Zealand Critic and A. Gordon says: “a kind of recherche du temps perdu, a remembrance of things past in a distant dominion”. In The Ply, the theme is the stirring of painful memories evoked by the inadvertent reference to the grave of the son, died six years back.

Katherine Mansfield has the rare gift of building the tempo or mood of the story in an unobtrusive way through picturesque description and vivid images. Woodfield peers out the green leather chair ‘as a baby peers out of its pram’. The office messenger was watching from his cubby hole ‘like a dog that expects to be taken for a run’. The shock of which the remark of Woodfield about the boss’s son’s grave sent through him ‘was exactly as though the earth had opened and he had seen the boy lying there with Woodfield’s girl’s staring down at him’.

How vividly does she capture the movements of the fly :

“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. Over and under, over and under, went a leg along a wing, as the stone goes over and under the scythe. Then there was a pause, while the fly, seeming to stand on the tips of its toes, tried to expand first one wing and then the other. It succeeded at last, and, sitting down, it began, like a minute call, to clean it face”.

Katherine Mansfield’s penetrating observation, her careful execution of the story with no loose strings and little or no direct comment, making her emotional or moral involvement not at all overt, makes the story a great success. The careful reader is aware of the subtle hints and the association with Shakespeare’s King Lear, though nowhere the story writer makes he intention or purpose explicit.