‘For the life of him he could not remember’: Post-war Memory, Mourning and Masculinity Crisis in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Fly’
Keyword(s):
Post War
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This article examines the entanglement between masculinity crisis and traumatic memory as described in Katherine Mansfield's short story ‘The Fly’. By exploring the way Mansfield depicts the figure of the ‘boss’ in the story as symbolic of the stubborn resistance against the natural organic order of time, the article investigates how such a memory project of preservation fails with all its masculinist hubris. Drawing on Pierre Janet’s notions of traumatic memory and narrative memory and on Freud’stheory of traumatic repetition and castration, the article attempts to locate the politics of memory in Mansfield’s story alongside the politics of masculinity that perversely equates male hysteria with performance and prestige.