SOURCE: “Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Fly,’” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 12, No. 3, July, 1962, pp. 341-47.

In the following response to F. W. Bateson's and B. Shahevitch's 1961 essay on “The Fly,” Greenwood attacks those critics' conclusions about Mansfield's use of the realistic literary genre and rejects their portrayal of the boss as morally unsympathetic; the point of the story, Greenwood argues, is that the boss is asking a metaphysical question about the meaning of life in an arbitrary and tormented world.

What is ‘realism’? Surely not, as Bateson and Shahevitch suggest, just a trick whereby descriptive trivia are incorporated in a story to break down the reader's disbelief in the actuality of the events narrated? The trivia work because, in the words of Leslie Stephen on Defoe, a master of the trick, ‘surely no one could refuse to honour such a moderate draft upon his imagination’. This is not to...