Paul's Case

CRITIQUE | QUOTES | THE TEXT | AT THE MOVIES

Brief lights, big city

"Paul's Case" may or may not be Willa Cather's best short work, but it is her best known. For many years it was the one story she allowed to appear in anthologies.

It is a very good story. But when you read it along with her other stories and novellas, you find it—and perhaps "A Wagner Matinee"—stand near the end of her early, self-consciously literary period, before she adopts a more relaxed, sprawling and engaging approach in her short works.

They also come when Cather is still extolling the big-city cultural life, before she learned to love the bleaker environment and warmer people of the American Midwest that she later wrote about in short works and novels that made her famous. In "A Wagner Matinee" a boy's aunt from Nebraska visits him in Boston and after he takes her to a symphony she doesn't want to return

In "Paul's Case" a high school student feels stifled in his middle-class existence in Pittsburgh, where his biggest excitement is working as an usher at a local concert hall, and he steals money to escape to the brighter lights of New York where he lives a cultured life of privilege he's yearned for—until his money runs out.

There are hints, though, that the captivating life of sophistication may be somewhat illusory. Paul may be intensely happy with his eight days of high living in the big city but the reader picks up through Cather's writing that this is a rather superficial—and certainly temporary—experience. Paul, however, would rather die than go back to his previous dull life.

An ambiguous temperament

Cather's early stories are psychological portraits, comparable to Henry James's stories, as the pretentious subtitle "A Study in Temperament", which is sometimes used, might indicate. And as with James's characters, Paul's psychology in Cather's story is presented somewhat ambiguously. This has given rise to competing analyses of the character by critics over the years.

Paul may be homosexual, some have said, as he shows no interest in women and becomes close to another young male in New York. His manner and his obsession with appearing cultivated make him similar to characters in the works of Oscar Wilde, who is thought to have been an influence on Cather's early writing.

Other theories hold that Paul suffers various disorders, including autism, narcissism and post-traumatic stress.

Any of these may or may not be applicable to him. But I'm not sure that they matter. In fact, any emphasis on these in an analysis of "Paul's Case" tends to dilute the story. They provide excuses for dismissing the character's malaise as being due to an extraordinary condition affecting him, and missing the larger social critique. It's like saying Holden Caulfield was alienated from school and family in The Catcher in the Rye because, after all, he was descending into madness.

As much as "Paul's Case" delves into one person's temperament, it is also a study of how the environment shapes and affects that temperament—as we'll see to even greater effect when Cather later finds her characters in far different rural surroundings.

— Eric

 

CRITIQUE | QUOTES | THE TEXT | AT THE MOVIES

See also:

Stories
Youth
Dubliners The Other Woman

Novels
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Catcher in the Rye

Buy the book:

Great Short Works of Willa Cather

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