SOURCE: “Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Fly’: A Critical Exercise,” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 12, No. 1, January, 1962, pp. 39-53.

In the following essay, Bateson and Shahevitch discuss how Mansfield makes extraordinary use of literary realism to create a tale that ends in the reader's moral condemnation of the protagonist.

“The Fly” is probably the shortest good short story in modern English. Its two thousand words therefore permit, indeed encourage, the kind of close analysis that has been so successful in our time with lyric poetry but that is impossibly cumbrous or misleadingly incomplete when applied to the novel or the conte. The object of this exercise is to demonstrate that, granted the difference of genres, exactly the same critical procedure is in order for realistic fiction as for a poem. …

“The Fly” assumes in its readers a readiness to accept and respond to two parallel series of symbolic conventions: (i...