SOURCE: “Mansfield's ‘The Fly’,” in The Explicator, Vol. 19, No. 3, December, 1960, item 20.

In the following essay, Bell argues that Mansfield's “The Fly” is a story about the inevitability of death and humans' retreat from that realization.

It seems to me that there is room for one more explication of Katherine Mansfield's short story “The Fly”—an explication in which the fly is the fly, the boss is the boss, and Woodifield is Woodifield. (For previous discussions in The Explicator, see the note by Stanley B. Greenfield, Oct., 1958, XVII, 2, and references given therein.)

“The Fly” seems to me to be unified by one predominant theme: death, its inevitability, and man's resistance to it. The most significant single sentence in the story occurs in the opening paragraph: “All the same, we cling to our last pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves.” Frequent references, oblique or direct, to the...