Katherine Mansfield Grief Analysis

The Struggles of Grief Many experts would agree that there are different stages in grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are stages that many grief stricken people must endure to manage life after a traumatic death. The story “The Fly” by Katherine Mansfield has only a few characters in it, but those few characters show the different stages of grief. The characters illustrate how different the grieving process is when the circumstances of the deaths are the same. Mr. Woodifield is in the stage of depression, since he may have turned to harmful habits after his son’s death. He leaves the house only on Tuesdays, and his family has no idea what he is doing during this time: “Though what he did there the wife and girls

Also, the narrator states, “All the same, we cling to our last pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves,” possibly proving that Mr. Woodifield had some kind of dependence on an object and holds on to this pleasure secretly on the days that he goes to town. He smokes his cigars on Tuesdays when he is away from his family. Back in the days that Katherine Mansfield was writing her stories, it was common for people to smoke cigars. However, he only smokes these cigars on Tuesdays which could indicate that he is trying to hide it from his family; perhaps he does this because of his previous addiction. Furthermore, the boss states, “’That 's the medicine,’” showing that the boss may know about Mr. Woodifield’s past, so he tells Mr. Woodifield that this alcohol is the medicine that heals all the pain. After the boss says this, Mr. Woodifield declares, “’D 'you know,’. . . ‘they won 't let me touch it at home.’ And he looked as though he was going to cry.” The family does not let him touch whiskey at home, because he may have been an alcoholic

Woodifield’s family, the boss is in the stage of acceptance. The boss uses his business to suppress his grief until it resurfaces and then finally diminishes. The boss has been keeping himself busy with new renovations to his building: “‘I 've had it done up lately,’ he explained, as he had explained for the past -- how many? -- weeks.” This could show that he avoids thinking about his son by keeping himself busy with his work. Also, when Mr. Woodifield mentions the boss’s son’s grave, there was “[o]nly a quiver in his eyelids [that] showed that he heard.” Through Mr. Woodifield mentioning the grave, the boss had memories of his son flood back into his thoughts. His eyelids quivering are an indicator that the memory of his son is surfacing after being buried for so long by his work. The boss is obviously upset, because he states that he’ll “‘see nobody for half an hour’” and “‘[n]obody at all.’” He needs this time to recover his mind after the memory returns. Also, in this half an hour of down time, he “picked the fly out of the ink” as if to help it, showing that his grief over his son is resurfacing. When he drops another drop of ink on the fly, he buries his grief until it resurfaces again after all the ink is gone. Once the boss drops the last drop of ink on the fly, the fly dies, indicating that the boss’s grief is gone and he has finally moved on. Furthermore, the narrator states, “For the life of him he could not remember,” ultimately showing that the