The Masculine Trauma in Katherine Mansfield’s the Fly: the Boss' Traumatic Memories

This study applies Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory of trauma to Katherine Mansfield’s (1922) work called 'the Fly'. It discusses the ways in which the protagonist of the story called the Boss attempts to deal with his traumatic memories. Freud in his Studies on Hysteria characterized the individual trauma as when a person is unable to react to a traumatic or affective memory in a way that successfully “discharges” those feelings, and therefore feels powerless in the situation. It is this feeling of powerlessness that leads to the trauma. This relationship between trauma and a lack of power manifests in the boss, which can be seen in his attempts to exert his hegemonic masculinity through the dominance and ownership at any given point of time. The idea of ownership is established throughout the story. The Boss wants to be able to feel traumatized at will or to have ownership on his own trauma so trauma becomes a part of the commodity economy in this particular narrative. It is concluded that although normally we associate trauma with loss and inability but trauma becomes the loss that has equitation of ownership.