SOURCE: “Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Fly,’” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 12, No. 3, July, 1962, pp. 335-38.

In the following essay, a response to F. W Bateson's and B. Shahevitch's 1961 essay on “The Fly,” Jolly argues that the story contains many more layers of meaning than those critics had observed, most importantly that the boss's predicament is really our own.

If the object of the article on “The Fly” was simply to demonstrate that ‘exactly the same critical procedure is in order for realistic fiction as for a poem’, then the exercise was successful. It is disappointing, however, that the critical procedure was not carried either as far or as deep as it would have been with a poem, for the story would have stood up to the closest analysis.

The account in the article of the requirements of the realistic convention, of how Katherine Mansfield enlarges the convention by linguistic...