Mythology and/of the Great War in Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’

Summary

In Katherine Mansfield's 1922 story ‘The Fly’, a father, mourning the loss of his son in the Great War six years earlier, tortures a fly until it dies, because he ‘wasn't feeling as he wanted to feel’. The story bears similarities to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, in which the eponymous general, after the murder of his sons and the rape of his daughter, enacts similar revenge on a harmless insect, because ‘Grief has so wrought on him / He takes false shadows for true substances.’ Shakespeare's tale of a Roman general facing the consequences of his wartime choices is paralleled in Mansfield's story, which Claire Buck argues is a representation of ‘the national task of mourning’ in which ‘the apparent simplicity of grief is refused’. Indeed, the father in Mansfield's story, known as ‘the Boss’ throughout the text, challenges the reader's efforts to sympathise with the character, as his ‘grinding feeling of wretchedness’ (361) is in part a function of the pride and control that tempers his ability to express emotion even when ‘He wanted, he intended, he had arranged to weep …’ (359).

Reading Mansfield's story with the allusion to Shakespeare's play, which is itself based on Greek and Roman antecedents, suggests that a correlation can be found between the Great War and both classical and contemporary mythology. Even if, according to Vincent Sherry, a common interpretation is that the Great War ‘stands as a watershed episode: it draws a line through time, dividing the nineteenth from the twentieth centuries’, I would argue that for Mansfield this line through time serves not solely to separate but also to connect. It is a means for drawing parallels between women's experiences of conflict through the ages to the contemporary moment in which daughters, as well as sons, succumb to the Great War's destruction.

The idea that the First World War is a great divide, separating present from past, old from new, ancient from modern is not entirely accurate. For though, in many ways, as Susan Kingsley Kent notes, the war ‘defied traditional terms and habits of thought’,5 it also marked a continuation of the developments that had been building for decades, ‘a kind of imaginative continuity’, as Trudi Tate puts it.