The Old Woodfield Exposed In Katherine Mansfield's The Fly

When a loved one passes away family members commonly attach an item or song to that person to represent them. Katherine Mansfield's “The Fly” is a short story about a boss who is trying to overcome the loss of his deceased son who died in combat on the battlefield, and this is something that the boss can not overcome due to the fact that he has no way of stopping his son's death. The boss pictures his son still being there with him and being as strong as he has always been. The other main character present throughout “The Fly” is the Old Woodifield. He is the boss's former employee who comes to visit the boss every week. Both the Woodifield and the boss suffer the loss of a son that died in battle this brings the two close together. The
boss's son serves in the military and is killed in battle. Throughout “The Fly” Katherine Mansfield uses symbols such as a fly to represent the boss’s grief of his lost son lingering around him, furniture in the boss's office which symbolizes his attempt to distract himself and keep the past behind him and out of mind, and lastly a portrait of the boss’s son illustrates death as in the picture he is described as having a cold and unchanged face, similar to that of a deceased person lying in a casket. The boss silently grieves about the death of his son but he tries to think about him still being here alive.
The boss comes across a struggling fly on his desk which instantly makes him think of his son struggling. The fly is stuck in a cup of ink and figuratively exclaims “help, help said those struggling legs (Mansfield 3). Through the struggling of the fly we can see that the fly is similar to the boss's son who was injured in battle and unable to continue. Similar to that of the boss's son, the fly is also unable to continue because it is stuck in a bottle of ink and practically drowning, with its legs frantically waving, trying to survive. Ultimately, the fly represents the boss’s grief of his deceased son. The boss tries not to acknowledge that his son has passed away because of the fact that he lost his life at such a young age. The boss has always thought of his son as a strong person and he does not want to see that strength go away. In “The Fly” the boss comes across a common house fly that is struggling and trying to get out of the bowl of ink that it just flew into. In “The Fly” the boss interprets how the fly is struggling to get out of the bowl, and he wants to test the struggling fly's ability to stay strong on all conditions, and to do so the boss “ plunged his pen back in the ink, leaned his thick wrist on the blotting-paper, and as the fly tried its wings down came a great heavy blot (3). This shows us that the boss is trying to test the fly to see if it
is strong and can withstand a simple drop of ink, and also to try and figure out how his son would have died so easily on the battlefield without any way to avoid death. In the article “Covert Progression and Katherine Mansfield's The Fly” it states that “the boss’s cruel treatment of the fly is to divert his own grief ” (Shen 155). This gives us an insight to see that the boss is really trying to cope with his grief, and the fly is something that he can torture and play around with to try to get rid of all of the agony that has been bestowed upon him.