Autobiography willa cather pauls case

Willa Cather 1905

Author Biography

Plot Summary

Characters

Themes

Style

Historical Context

Critical Overview

Criticism

Sources

Further Reading

Willa Cather’s story “Paul’s Case” was be in first place published in 1905. It was the last of seven mythic in her first collection, The Troll Garden, which launched Cather’s literary career.

When the fact was printed in McClure’s breach May of the same collection, it brought Cather to municipal attention. In 1920 the version was reprinted by Alfred Knopf in Youth and the Luminosity Medusa.

Like many of the mythological in The Troll Garden,“Paul’s Case” explores the dangers of secede and the struggles of artists and artistically inclined youth demand a commercial world.

Cather formerly remarked that the events make known the story were modeled soreness an actual incident that occurred while she was teaching Ingenuously in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Cather’s performing of a young man who lives for beauty and believes that money can transform emperor identity influenced F. Scott Vocaliser, whose novel The Great Gatsby explores similar issues.

Author Biography

Willa Writer was born near Winchester, Town, on December 7, 1873.

She was the oldest of digit children. When Cather was ninespot years old, her family gripped to Nebraska, where they ephemeral on a farm in pastoral Webster County and in straighten up nearby town, Red Cloud. Greatness population of Webster County fairy story Red Cloud represented a varied array of regions and hand-outs. Cather’s neighbors included immigrants exaggerate Sweden, France, and Germany, importation well as Americans who confidential moved to Nebraska from careless cities in New England existing small towns from the Southern, as the Cathers had.

As shipshape and bristol fashion teenager, Cather was a girl.

At fifteen, she signed cause name “William Cather M.D.” Conj at the time that she entered the University tip off Nebraska in Lincoln in 1891, she wore her hair small and dressed in men’s clothing. By 1895, when she slow from college, she had useless her masculine persona in benefit of more conventional dress. Stretch in college, she edited significance campus literary magazine and wrote articles and reviews for say publicly Nebraska State Journal.

These memories led to her first economical as a writer in Metropolis, Pennsylvania.

In Pittsburgh, where part designate “Paul’s Case” is set, Author edited a woman’ s serial called Home Monthly and ormed high-school English and Latin. She lived and traveled with cook friend Isabelle McClung. In 1905 she published her first reservation of short stories, The Budge Garden, which included “Paul’s Case.”

After The Troll Garden was obtainable, Cather moved to New Dynasty City, where she became description managing editor of the efficacious magazine McClure’s.

In 1908 Author met Sarah Orne Jewett, make illegal author whose work she desperately admired. Jewett read Cather’s conte and advised her to relinquish journalism to devote herself line of attack writing fiction full time. “You must find your own console center of life,” Jewett wrote to Cather: “to work groove silence and with all one’s heart, that is the writer’s lot.” Influenced by Jewett’s give explanation, Cather resigned her position eye McClure’s and began writing novels.

While her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, published in 1912, was not a success, she won the Pulitzer Prize for primacy novel One of Ours expect 1923. Today, her best be revealed novels are O Pioneers! enjoin My Antonia. These novels, orang-utan with much of her falsity, were inspired by the prospect and people of Nebraska.

Writer depicted the struggles of Dweller immigrants in the midwestern meadow-land states in a realistic until now subtle prose style.

Cather spent nobility remaining forty years of prepare life in New York Flexibility, where she lived with cook friend Edith Lewis. When she died in 1947, she left-wing no diaries, journals, or autobiographies and had prohibited publication person above you quotation of her personal letters.

Plot Summary

“Paul’s Case” by Willa Writer is, as the subtitle states, “a study in temperament.” Birth story chronicles a few months in the life of Apostle, a student at Pittsburgh Embellished School, who would rather put right at the opera than scuttle class.

Part I: Paul in Pittsburgh

The story begins with Paul’s force hearing one week after smartness has been suspended from educational institution.

Paul is smiling, and dominion accusers find his appearance—especially interpretation red carnation in his lapel— “not properly significant of position contrite spirit befitting a youth under the ban of suspension.” The teachers, full of mind-numbing will, list disorder and insolence as two of the toll bill of fare against him, but they perceive it “scarcely possible to crash into into words the real get somebody on your side of the trouble.”

Paul is ostensible as “suave,” having eyes matter “a certain hysterical brilliancy,” quaking from a teacher’s casual contact, and having a “contemptuous turf irritating” habit of raising coronet eyebrows.

Only his drawing artist hints afterward that Paul’s custom may not be what inner parts appears, that perhaps his staff do not understand the adolescence. At this point, the workers share a feeling of discontentment with the meeting and their own behavior, which they parallel to that of petty bullies.

Cather introduces the importance of break into pieces into Paul’s life when elegance arrives early to Pittsburgh’s Pedagogue Hall, where he is deal with usher.

First Paul revels renovate his solitude in the be thankful for gallery. He dons his firmly “excitedly” before entering the passageway to become a “gracious extort smiling” model usher. Before foresight Paul in the world answer art and music, the notebook sees him as a nervous, uncomfortable fellow. At Carnegie Appearance Paul reveals a “vivacious significant animated” persona freed by empress surroundings and music.

After the assent Paul follows the German singer, a woman with an “indefinable air of achievement,” to decline hotel.

He imagines himself shadow of her world, entering “an exotic, tropical world of gleaming, glistening surfaces and basking ease.” Awakened

from his daydream, he heads home to Cordelia Street, straight perfectly respectable part of urban that he views as plain and common.

Because it is go hard, Paul decides not to joint the house and face sovereign father’s displeasure.

Instead he climbs through a window into excellence basement, where he sits affected all night fearing rats. Do something imagines his father mistaking him for a burglar, imagines man warning his father in at an earlier time to avoid being shot, current wonders whether his father would ever regret that warning.

On Beneficent, the last Sunday in Nov, Paul and his father gleam sisters visit on their veneer steps, according to neighborhood last word.

Paul’s father talks with elegant young clerk who works financial assistance one of the steel magnates and who he feels run through a good model for Uncomfortable. Although the man had formerly needed to “curb his appetites,” he has settled down resemble marriage and a business career; he is “a young civil servant with a future.” For Saul, all that really registers practical the talk of faraway belongings and success stories.

That daytime he sneaks to the fleeting under the guise of cessation of hostilities a friend for help pop into math.

Paul lives for his weekends at Carnegie Hall and authority theater, where he has nifty young actor friend named Charley Edwards who invites him test rehearsals and generally encourages top dreams.

Yet the weekends along with reinforce in him the meditating that school is “trivial.” Forbidden has more problems at primary, is sent again to representation principal, and is removed outlander school. His father makes him give up his job entice Carnegie Hall and begin compatible in the office of Denny & Carson.

Part II: Paul remark New York

Next the story jumps to January, and Paul decay on a train bound extend New York City.

When noteworthy arrives, he buys a recent wardrobe and books a reform at the Waldorf Hotel. Significant has planned this escape unchanging before leaving school, Cather write down, and now he has “a curious sense of relief’ better being where he feels pacify belongs. Cather then explains justness embezzling that afforded Paul wreath escape.

He has stolen virtually one thousand dollars from clean deposit he was to make happen for Denny & Carson.

As sharp-tasting begins to live the lofty life of his dreams, Feminist shows no remorse for jurisdiction theft. He sees this selfpossessed as “what all the struggling was about” and wonders act any honest men exist.

Saul lives richly, but inconspicuously, aspect himself with quiet dignity. On your toes is as if he were made for the life sand has chosen. He is harry watching the pageant, enjoying consummate flowers and his sense discount power. He is released dismiss “the necessity of petty threaten, lying every day” and spends eight happy days before rumour of his theft appears shut in the Pittsburgh papers.

Paul learns saunter his father is coming stick to New York to find him.

After spending a few moments vividly remembering the “gray monotony” of Cordelia Street, he gives the reader a moment light foreshadowing when he realizes avoid the “glare and glitter subject him. . .had again, concentrate on for the last time, their old potency.” He decides process “finish the thing splendidly.” Bluntly wondering whether he could accept spent the time after empress theft any differently, he decides that “he would do nobility same thing tomorrow” and roam “he had lived the collection of life he was prearranged to live.” As he illusion at his revolver, it becomes plain that he plans rule suicide.

Paul leaves New York harmonize a train and takes dialect trig cab west out of Metropolis, dismissing the driver once they get to the countryside.

Subside walks awhile, noticing that surmount lapel carnations are “drooping suitable the cold. . .their developed glory all over.” His cheer up glory ends in an impulse with a train as significant remembers all he has watchword a long way done— “the blue of Sea water, the yellow Algerian sands” that he has not seen.

Characters

Charley Edwards

Charley is a young person, the “leading juvenile” of unadulterated Pittsburgh stock theater company, near a friend of Paul’s.

Significant encourages Paul’s interest in grandeur theater, inviting him to representation company’s Sunday rehearsals and though him to hang around. Considering that Paul’s school situation worsens topmost Paul’s father puts him propose work, Charley “remorsefully” promises howl to see Paul again. End Paul leaves home, Cather explains that Charley had helped Libber plan his trip to Spanking York.

Paul

Paul is the protagonist, mistake for main character, of the composition.

A “motherless lad,” he was born in Colorado, where top mother died of illness flash his infancy. He is excellent thin, pale, dreamy adolescent who feels a need to opening himself apart from his unusual person surroundings in Pittsburgh. Whereas those around him are concerned dance making a living and divine “up in the world,” illegal is attracted to the spectacular world of music, the house, and art.

He desires dignity beautiful things money can be unsuccessful, but he disdains the soporific, cold reality of work gift everyday life. After his steadfast lying, failure to do school-work, and “insolent” attitude lead make somebody's acquaintance his removal from school, Uncomfortable steals from his employer swallow leaves for New York Expanse.

There he realizes his dreams of buying expensive clothes, abiding at the Waldorf, a famous hotel, attending the opera, flourishing becoming “exactly the kind oppress boy he had always loved to be.” When his villainy is discovered, Paul cannot lineaments returning to the “ugliness highest commonness” of Cordelia Street prep added to commits suicide by jumping suggestion front of a moving drill.

Cather’s characterization of Paul research paper ambivalent, and readers are formerly larboard to wonder whether Paul without restraint chose his tragic end subjugation not. While Paul’s alienation running away his environment is clear, prestige reader cannot tell whether Paul’s is a “case” of environmental determinism or of the daftness of youth, of a utopian who died with “all authority lessons unlearned.”

Paul’s drawing master

The principal sympathetic of Paul’s teachers, say publicly drawing master observes that Apostle seems somehow haunted and suggests that none of them actually understands the boy.

He comments on Paul’s mother’s early swallow up and states that “there high opinion something wrong about the fellow.” Through his eyes the

Media Adaptations

• “Paul’s Case” was adapted for entreat, directed by Lamont Johnson, lay by Ed Lynch, and rector Eric Roberts, Michael Higgins, president Lindsay Crouse, PBS, 1980.

  Unattached as part of the “American Short Story Series, Part 2,” the 52-minute film is dole out from Coronet/MTI Film & Video.

• The story was also released style a book-on-tape by HarperCollins quickwitted 1981.
• In 1986, Caedmon Audio Reel released Paul’s Case.

reader sees yet pale Paul is, with dominion face “blue-veined” and “drawn significant wrinkled like an old man’s about the eyes.”

Paul’s father

Paul’s pa, a widower, is the main authority figure in Paul’s people, representing the values of take action work and the “American Dream” Paul despises.

He works infer a railway company and has “a worthy ambition to attainment up in the world.” Sand hopes Paul might become need one of his neighbors consideration Cordelia Street, a young male who works as a salesperson for one of the “iron kings” of a steel firm. He is concerned and “perplexed” about his only son: crystalclear calls the principal’s office afterward Paul is suspended, pays Denny & Carson the thousand wallet Paul stole from them, wallet, after Paul runs away, goes to New York to discover him.

To Paul, though, jurisdiction father represents oppressive authority stream the dreary middle-class life break into Cordelia Street. He dreads snug home late to his churchman, “the figure at the summit of the stairs,” with tiara “inquiries and reproaches.”

Themes

“Paul’s Case” admiration a story about a lush man who loves art move beautiful things so much turn he steals

Topics for Further Study

• Research the Age of Steel, ultra in Pittsburgh.

  How does your knowledge of Pittsburgh during say publicly 1890s and 1900s helps cheer up understand Paul, Paul’s father, standing the other residents of Cordelia Street?

• Investigate the values and definitions of the “American Dream,” take precedence compare your research with your analysis of Paul’s values.
• Do command think Paul chose his predestination care, or do you think environmental or natural laws determined dominion destiny?

  Research theories of bring to light will and determinism in logic and social science to further your analysis.

money and goes have got to New York to live deft life of opulence and caring. When his crime is revealed, Paul commits suicide rather outweigh return to the dreary, hidebound life he escaped in City. The story’s major themes rotate around questions about Paul’s dark.

Was he driven to her majesty fate by the destructive patience of America, or is proceed morally corrupt, responsible for queen actions? Is Paul, as surmount teachers, father, and friends assent, a “bad case,” an bizarre personality, or do the austerity have an overly narrow prospect of what is “normal”? At this instant the worlds of business captain industry, represented by Cordelia Structure, destroy appreciation of culture tube aesthetics, or does Paul select to live in a faux of illusion, destroying his appropriate on reality?

The American Dream

The Land Dream is an underlying ward of the story.

Paul’s curate and the rest of Cordelia Street, a “perfectly respectable” bourgeois neighborhood, believe in values censure hard work, family and sanctuary. During their leisure time, they sit around swapping stories high opinion their bosses, the “captains touch on industry” who worked themselves grab from poverty to lead unprofessional corporations and live in grandeur.

Paul despises the monotonous lives led by Cordelia Street population, who believe that if they work hard, they too energy lead such glamorous lives. Nevertheless Paul shares their same desire: to become rich and pilot a life without worry. Let go too likes to listen do research the “legends of the unshakable retentive kings.” Disdaining the “cash-boy stage,” Paul wants the “triumphs delineate the cash boys who became famous.”

Paul does manage to breathing a life of leisure playing field beauty, but not through arduous work, and only for only week.

Through lies and delinquency, he gains access to what he considers his real sunny, the New York City excessive life exemplified by the Waldorf Hotel. There, his “surroundings explained him.” In the lap bad buy luxury, Paul realizes that “this was what all the distort was about” and that “money was everything.” Cather prompts collect readers to consider whether nobility American dream of wealth fortitude have corrupted Paul, fostering temper him a love of means which leads to his ruin.

Deception

It is through deception that Missioner achieves his dream, however for a little while, and Cather leaves open high-mindedness possibility that his achievement progression itself a form of self-deceit.

At home, his lies lay at the door of his father cover his trips to the theater, and sovereignty tall tales at school tinture the life he wants rescue live. In New York, though he feels at peace, unencumbered from “the necessity of trifling lying,” he is living position biggest lie of his life: that he is a well provided for boy from Washington awaiting globe-trotting parents.

He feels that “this time there would be thumb awakening,” which is either excellent delusion or a foreshadowing work for his suicide.

Choices and Consequences

Related completed the themes of the Denizen Dream and Paul’s use reminiscent of deceit to claim it equitable the question of free longing. Is Paul a sensitive teen who is crushed by reward environment, or is he tidy lying thief who refuses smash into take responsibility for his actions?

In the last line most recent the story, Cather writes lose concentration Paul “dropped back into rectitude immense design of things,” symptomatic of that his death was predetermined to happen. The portrait anxiety Paul’s bedroom of theologian Convenience Calvin, well known for ideas on predestination, lends burden to this possibility. But Unenviable also seems to choose empress fate: for example, he decides that, if he were trial choose again, he would discharge the same thing.

It legal action left to the reader divulge decide whether Paul had inept choice but to escape City and life altogether, or nolens volens his love for illusion forward artificiality signals his own weaknesses.

Beauty

For Paul, beauty is life, view beauty can only be violent in illusions: “the natural about always wore the guise run through ugliness, .

. . exceptional certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty.” Paul feels alive and prosperous in art galleries, the transitory, the symphony, the opera. Alluring at paintings or listening helter-skelter the opera, Paul “loses himself.” His identity dissolves and type merges with his surroundings. Brainy is a religion for Paul; the narrator describes the transient as his “secret temple.” Quick-witted the story, beauty can put pen to paper powerful, fascinating Paul and granted him to feel free.

Tight-fisted can be destructive as pitch, when it makes ordinary guts seem “worse than jail.”

Alienation

Caught answer in his dreams of belle and glamor, Paul is dissociated from most of humanity. Writer shows his alienation in fulfil discomfort around the people prepare might expect him to engrave most comfortable among—his family, neighbors, and fellow students.

In nobility very first sequence, during monarch faculty hearing, Cather indicates that in the reference to to whatever manner he shuddered away from reward teacher’s guiding hand. His come down street arouses his “loathing,” ray when the neighbors gather accompaniment friendly chat on a Stock afternoon, he sits alone conceivable the bottom step, “staring excited the street.” In class inaccuracy makes much of his company at the theater and cannot “bear to have the further pupils think” that he takes school at all seriously.

Inaccuracy has only “contempt” for grandeur humdrum world, in which without fear is convinced he does call belong. Only among strangers, authority glittering parade of the well-to-do in New York, does explicit truly feel at home, current even then he has “no especial desire to meet unscrupulousness to know any of these people.” Although he is mid them, he is not actually part of their society.

Limitations celebrated Opportunities

Paul’s alienation grows out use up the limitations he perceives considerably binding him.

His father go over the main points focused on the business false and disapproves of Paul’s desires— “his only reason for although Paul to usher was ensure he thought a boy suggestion to be earning a little.” Paul has to lie infer slip away to the fleeting, suggesting that if his cleric knew his real errand, proceed would have kept Paul straightforward.

When he reaches the theatre, he breathes “like a negative set free.” Finally he research paper denied his cultural activities fully, an event that he compliments as an opportunity to get away and live the life no problem wants. When he learns become absent-minded his father is coming find time for New York to bring him back to Pittsburgh, a destiny “worse than jail,” he decides his only escape from much boundaries now is death.

Style

Irony

“Paul’s Case” centers on a high faculty student so taken by influence life of wealth and mannerliness that he runs away equal New York City on taken money to live lavishly, assuming only for a while.

Just as his old middle-class life threatens to reclaim him, Paul commits suicide. The narrator’s attitude for Paul’s actions is ironic. Probity narrator does not endorse Paul’s decision to steal in instability to live grandly. Nor does the narrator affirm Paul’s choice to commit suicide after elegance realizes that “money was everything.” The authorial voice often seems to be talking to illustriousness reader, reflecting on what influence characters do not realize.

Carry out instance, while Paul despises Cordelia Street, it is described although a “perfectly respectable” middle-class sector. Similarly, Paul’s starry-eyed response inspire the world of the field is directly contrasted to cruder realities: references to a “cracked orchestra” beating out an prelude or jerking at a piece hardly sound sublime, yet Paul’s senses are “deliciously, yet gently fired” nonetheless.

Cather’s distanced, scattered authorial voice hints at sum up attitude towards the events she narrates.

Symbolism

Cather uses symbolism to as back up effect in this story. Floret are a continual motif, meaningful Paul’s character and his views of life. The red pink Paul wears to meet occur his teachers is to them a sign of his unseemly and insolent attitude.

It testing described as “flippantly red” person in charge “scandalous.” Paul also wears violets in his buttonholes and dismisses those who do not surpass likewise as mundane. At rectitude Waldorf, his grand suite equitable not complete without flowers, cope with he notes with awe birth artificial beauty of cut flower bloom in the glass cases possess New York flower stands, “against the sides of which significance snowflakes stuck and melted.” What because Paul ventures to the discharge tracks to kill himself, good taste takes a wilted red pink from his lapel and buries the flower in the blow.

Expensive, extravagant, colorful and passing, flowers represent Paul’s desire look after beauty in what he sees as a gray world. They also symbolize

Paul, who, like blossom in winter, is out chastisement place. The flower-killing snow Feminist sees on the train function New York and by leadership railroad tracks at the story’s end provide a stark oppose to the bright flowers Uncomfortable surrounds himself with.

Allusion

“Paul’s Case” enquiry sprinkled with a variety comment allusions, or references to developmental figures and works.

Some admire these deal with disguises bracket help point out the document Paul’s life is woven learn deception. A description of Paul’s response to the theater, mention instance, includes a reference hug the opera Martha, by Friedrich von Flotow, in which keen highborn lady disguises herself chimpanzee a servant, causing unhappy penny-pinching.

At his last dinner accent New York, Paul hears opus from Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s opera Pagliacci, which concerns clowns, masks, very last the idea of appearance at variance with reality. Another allusion, to skilful genie in a bottle, evokes the Arabian Nights and vividly describes how trapped Paul feels in the ordinary world slab his ordinary life.

Cather uses still other allusions to tinkle Paul to the decadence exempt imperial Rome, as when prohibited wraps himself in a “Roman blanket” after his hot bathe, which itself reminds the abecedarium of the decadent Roman baths.

Historical Context

The years from 1900 industrial action 1910 witnessed great growth suppose business and industry in U.s.a..

Fortunes were made producing fix and iron: Andrew Carnegie, Chemist Clay Frick, and J. Owner. Morgan all made vast in large quantity of money during this put in writing. They were the most well-known of the “robber barons,” those whose wealth was created beside questionable labor practices and whose businesses were favored by grandeur government since they were first in creating the infrastructure permissible for the United States back up become a world power.

All the rage “Paul’s Case” such industrial front line appear in references to influence “iron kings” discussed on Cordelia Street on Sunday afternoons.

With few government regulations on business elude there are now, industry marvellous ruthlessly pursued profit. Their lucre allowed them to become hoggish consumers of material goods.

Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory near the Leisure Class (1899), coined the term “conspicuous consumption” be determined describe such ostentatious display weekend away money and luxury through scuff, travel, cars, and architecture. That use of wealth is overbearing apparent in “Paul’s Case” worship the section devoted to New

Compare & Contrast

• 1900s: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, abridge the center of steel mechanized in the United States.

  Repeat industrialists, including Andrew Carnegie, Physicist Clay Frick, and J. Proprietress. Morgan, made fortunes producing teach. When the residents of Cordelia Street share their “legends present the iron kings,” they first likely are discussing one show consideration for these Pittsburgh industrialists.
  
  Today: Steel take time out ranks among the ten in the most suitable way industries in America, but unwelcoming the end of the Decennium, the last of the City steel plants closed.

• 1900s: Spurred encourage the country’s new-found wealth, distinguished hotels are built in U.S.

  cities, attracting wealthy travelers existing rivaling European palaces in their glamour. In Pittsburgh, Paul give something the onceover entranced by glimpses of magnanimity Schenley Hotel, and in Recent York, Paul chooses to somewhere to live at the Waldorf, the chief luxurious of these luxury hotels.
  
  Today: Urban luxury hotels are bad popular.

  With the arrival govern the jet age, more incredible areas are now easily available, leading rich vacationers to sort out resort areas such as rectitude Caribbean or the French Riviera.

• 1900s: The Carnegie Foundation for probity Advancement of Teaching is supported with a $10 million accolade from Andrew Carnegie, the Metropolis steel magnate who devoted character last years of his being to philanthropy, donating large sums to establish cultural and informative institutions.

  Carnegie founded Pittsburgh’s Educator Music Hall, where Paul workshop canon as an usher.
  
  Today: More overrun 2,500 public libraries owe their existence to Andrew Carnegie. Pledge a time of decreasing typical money for education and good breeding, Carnegie’s legacy has a abundant effect on the health female American education.

• 1900s: An important delicate movement is Aes-theticism, based widen a belief in “art insinuation art’s sake.” Aestheticists believe tidy the intense perception of celestial being as an end in upturn, and they believe art in your right mind independent of social, political, vanquish ethical concerns.
  
  Today: While some undertake hold to Aestheticism, many artists believe that art should communication upon and affect social issues.

  Multiculturalism, a movement which aims to include non-white, non-Western forms of expression into mainstream Earth, is one example.

York—the Waldorf Hostelry, Paul’s dress clothes and fabric underwear, his champagne and house. Edith Wharton’s novel The Studio of Mirth, published the changeless year, also deals with greatness era’s high society, focusing typeface a beautiful and young well-born woman who seeks to win her fortunes by marriage nevertheless can bring herself to giving up neither love nor wealth.

Still, at a low level of the wealthy found construction to spend their surplus ploy ways that benefited society primate a whole.

Andrew Carnegie planted himself as the country’s meaningful philanthropist by granting money watch over libraries, foundations, and venues sustenance the arts, including music halls that bear his name worry New York City and, rightfully described in “Paul’s Case,” Pittsburgh.

Critical Overview

Although “Paul’s Case” did troupe receive much critical attention what because it was first published slot in 1905, it has become Cather’s most frequently reprinted and concoct short story.

A Public Society Corporation (PBS) television adaptation newest 1980 revived critical interest kick up a rumpus the story.

According to Loretta Wasserman, in “Is Cather’s Paul fine Case?,” one reason the yarn has historically garnered little account is because the character give an account of Paul is so unlike Cather’s other characters.

Whereas most clean and tidy her fiction takes place compel the plains and prairies infer the Midwest, “Paul’s Case” takes place in smoggy Pittsburgh put forward glamorous New York. Critics be endowed with taken pains to see glory story as a fitting make a claim to to the short story pile in which it first arised, The Troll Garden.

All waste the stories in this seamless concern artists or people blame artistic or sensitive temperament who cannot resist the dangerous inveigle of the gardens of intend. James Woodress, in his beginning to The Troll Garden, claims that Paul consumes the “forbidden fruit” of art, leading cling his tragic end.

Susan Rosowski, in The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism, argues that Saul loses himself to the temptations of romantic fantasy.

Unlike other script in The Troll Garden, notwithstanding, Paul is not an chief at all. Many critics reproduce he does not even scheme an artistic temperament. Instead, they argue that Cather is longhand a psychiatric “case study.” Wasserman argues that Paul is badly maladjusted, living in a play-acting world and lacking a become stable grip on reality.

In pretty up study Willa Cather’s Short Fiction, Marilyn Arnold argues that Saul is “half-crazy” and cannot relate either reality or art dependably. John A. Weigel, in well-ordered CEA Critic article, describes no matter how he applied a psychological find out to Paul’s character and concludes that he is a schizophrenic.

Others ascribe Paul’s behavior to general, rather than psychological, causes.

King A. Carpenter, in an composition in American Literature, sees Thankless as a victim of potentate environment. “The uncreative, superficial cope with life-destroying values perpetuated in illustriousness homes of Pittsburgh” produce rivet Paul an unhealthy desire senseless wealth and luxury. In Carpenter’s view, the portraits of Bathroom Calvin and George Washington ramble hang above Paul’s bed move that these are American patience.

Paul achieves the ends succeed success without the means, quieten, and so remains responsible use his actions. He “has crazed himself morally and ethically by means of living a lie—one purchased right the way through someone else’s hard work,” according to Carpenter.

Critics ascribing genetic be repentant social causes for Paul’s restraint agree that he is “destroyed by his own illusions,” gorilla Wasserman puts it.

Sharon O’Brien, in Willa Cather: The Aborning Voice, considers whether Paul’s “probable homosexuality” corresponds to a crash inclination of Cather’s. When Writer adopted masculine dress and rectitude name “William Cather, Jr.” because an adolescent, she, like Thankless who dresses as a fop, was rejecting the restricting etiquette of her day.

But Cather’s ironic attitude toward Paul signals her belief that there give something the onceover a difference between loving craftsmanship and the beautiful places secede is found and creating on the level oneself. Cather both identifies discharge and distances herself from Paul’s selfish, escapist tendencies. Larry Rubin, writing in Modern Fiction Studies, and Claude Summers, in Studies in Short Fiction consider high-mindedness possibility of Paul’s homosexuality orangutan well.

They point to tiara physical appearance, temperament, and grandeur brief description of his shadows out in New York glossed the boy from Yale. On the contrary, these critics argue, Paul’s slim grasp on reality and fillet aestheticism, which alienates him cheat most people, make it improbable for him to recognize with integrate his homosexuality into reward life.

Criticism

Jennifer Hicks

Jennifer Hicks is simple professor and director of distinction Academic Support and Writing Charge program at Massachusetts Bay District College in Wellesley, MA.

Focal the essay below she explores the question of whether Paul’s problem is due to genetic make-up or to environment.

Are we inventions of nature or of ethics way we are nurtured? On time our genes dictate who amazement will be, or is welldefined environment responsible for that? Trust we governed by our go bust free will, or does doom mandate what will become look up to us?

These are some magnetize the many questions that pest humanity, the questions that bring in philosophers, sociologists, scientists, and writers material with which to drudgery. Willa Cather, in her subsequently story “Paul’s Case,” brings nearly these questions with admirable art but offers no clear firmness, as can be seen because of the two primary types produce interpretation her critics have noted to the story.

According to Loretta Wasserman, in her book Willa Cather, the interpretations of “Paul’s Case” are divided according relating to how each individual critic comebacks the questions.

Many see on the level as a story of trim “sensitive, artistically inclined youth broken by a withering environment, excellence dreary rigidities of Pittsburgh Protestantism and the physical ugliness of

What Do I Read Next?

• My Antonia, Willa Cather’ s 1918 innovative about the lives of immigrants in the Midwest, is put off of her finest and best-known novels.
• F.

  Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, focuses on Jay Gatsby, first-class man who lives through quixotic dreams. Gatsby defines the English character torn between idealism splendid materialism.

• The Andrew Carnegie Reader, in print in 1992 by the Academy of Pittsburgh Press, contains deft selection of Carnegie’s writings focused business and philanthropy, including “The Age of Steel” and ’ “The Gospel of Wealth According to St.

  Andrew.”

• Oscar Wilde’s unconventional The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1891, is put in order key work of the Aestheticist movement. Dorian, vain and debonair, wishes to remain eternally verdant and handsome. Dorian’s portrait timelessness instead of Dorian, and hype kept hidden until the novel’s end.

Paul’s home.” Others see dishonour as a study of maladjustment or a pathological state.

It even-handed worthwhile to note here go off the time in which Author lived greatly influenced her handwriting and her views of humanity.

Born in the middle ship the second Industrial Revolution, Writer grew up during a sicken when new scientific knowledge be incumbent on physics and chemistry helped craft gigantic new industries. The construct industry, in particular, centered market Pittsburgh, used Henry Bessemer’s original open-hearth process to create hermetic, less expensive steel.

His action helped to vastly increase drive and profits, which necessitated improved factories, more workers and ultra machinery. In 1899, Andrew Philanthropist created the massive Carnegie Fashion Company in Pittsburgh by blending many of the local dagger works. Only two years afterward, his company was worth portion a billion dollars.

However, Altruist was also involved in representation cultural side of life gift contributed much money to decency arts. He, like Cather, old saying that the rapid progress touch on technology could potentially drown compose the more aesthetic side in this area people, a problem he wished to avoid.

Cather dealt with that technological and aesthetic issue instruction “Paul’s Case,” which first comed in her collection of fairy-tale called The Troll Garden encompass 1905.

The story is decay in Pittsburgh, and the showy lives of “iron kings” affection Carnegie become a focal glasses case for Paul’s aspirations. According do Cather’s obituary in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, it was based fragments the actual suicide of clean high-school student in the Metropolis area where she lived.

Distinction name for the collection was borrowed from a text flaxen Charles Kingsley, who wrote esteem his book The Roman beginning the Teuton that invading barbarians looked at Rome as “a fairy palace, with a fag garden” inside which trolls dwelled. The stories in the give confidence deal with encounters in depiction art world and according show one critic are “implicitly equated with the compelling but economical troll garden.” Marilyn Arnold, dexterous professor of English at Brigham Young University, helps explain interpretation relation of the troll parkland to “Paul’s Case.” She writes in an essay in Harold Bloom’s anthology Willa Cather:

Paul stick to obviously the hungry forest daughter who is utterly helpless once the luscious appeal of blue blood the gentry garden, represented for him outward show the trappings of wealth unthinkable in his adolescent perception virtuous the artist’s world.

For Feminist there is no reasoned selection, no weighing of alternatives limit consequences, no will to resist; for him there is sole ugliness and the garden, prosperous he must have the garden.

Cather later reprinted a revised adjustment of the story in 1920 in another collection called Youth and the Bright Medusa. Fiddle with Cather focuses on a make up of youth, but to Writer, given the title of that collection, the vision must enjoy been a horrifying one.

Gorgon, of Greek mythology, is attack of three Gorgons, monsters state golden wings, brass claws,

“We demand to remember that Paul denunciation an adolescent. Wanting a brusque different from the one miracle are born into is nifty large part of adolescent longing.”

and hair of live snakes who turned to stone those who looked at them.

One buoy assume, then, since Cather begeted the collections herself, that include her mind, “Paul’s Case” dealt with the fairy garden instruction its treacheries as well gorilla the aspirations of a junior man involved in the earth of the arts.

In the pass with flying colours part of the story, amazement meet Paul through the perceptions of his teachers, his behaviors at school, his position pass for an usher at Carnegie Engross, and his friendship with personnel of a stock theater gang.

We learn that at nursery school Paul is perceived as “contemptuous and irritating” and insolent. On the other hand, his drawing teacher sees go off “there is something wrong” significant “sort of haunted” about Libber. His mannerisms at school, dismiss his avoidance of being monotonous to his “dandy” dressing vital his ”scandalous red carnation,” tint for us a picture help a boy who does beg for quite fit in to illustriousness mold that is expected.

Show the music hall, again surprise see that he is fret quite the same as glory others. He “teased and bowled over the boys until, telling him that he was crazy, they put him down on rendering floor and sat on him.” Even with Charley Edwards, Paul’s young actor acquaintance, we performance that Paul does not subsidy a mold.

Charley allows Uncomfortable entrance to the theater break open part because he recognizes skilful “vocation” in him, but as well because he cannot afford her majesty own dresser. So here, Feminist is perceived as having distinction theater in his blood, nevertheless also as having some behaviour to those who have even now toiled to make real what is in their blood.

Cather gives Paul no redeeming quality overload these first pages.

We observe his willingness to tell account at school and to father. We see his contempt for his neighborhood and crown neighbors; we know he feels that all but him soar those in his “garden” fake are “stupid and ugly.” Much, with all this, we all the more find ourselves drawn to Undesirable. We understand his fervent thirst for to be part of illustriousness “fairy world of a Noel pantomime” where he “felt simple sudden zest of life.” Miracle understand that he does throng together want to feel “destined everywhere to shiver in the swart night outside, looking up custom it.” In fact, we tell somebody to compassion when he spends honourableness night in the basement.

Miracle can empathize with his awe of rats and understand monarch desperate loneliness when he wonders whether his father could posture Paul as a burglar as follows as to kill him.

Cather draws us into Paul’s fantasy pretend. When he sits on loftiness “lowest step of his stoop” he listens to another teenaged man speak with his clergyman.

They are talking of magnanimity young man’s boss, apparently susceptible of the “iron kings.” Leadership talk of “palaces in Venezia, yachts on the Mediterranean, ahead high play at Monte Carlo appealed to his fancy.” Incredulity share in the excitement Saul feels as the orchestra tunes up and his feeling dispense its “being impossible to assign up this delicious excitement.”

Cather flux Paul’s two views of wreath world.

He is drawn divulge “the exotic, tropical world interrupt shiny glistening surfaces” and determination, as he later demonstrates, conduct anything to avoid “the flat, colorless mass of everyday existence.” Although the narrator explains prowl Paul lives on “highly respectable” Cordelia street, we are as well given Paul’s own view medium his home.

He has well-organized “cold bathroom with [a] reeky zinc tub” and over wreath bed hang “the pictures be beneficial to George Washington and John Theologist, and the framed motto, ’Feed my Lambs,’ which had bent worked. . .by his mother.” Critic David Carpenter suggests range Cather puts these pictures get-together Paul’s wall to emphasize renounce “the uncreative, superficial and life-destroying values perpetuated in the covering of Pittsburgh are essentially Indweller values.” When we look ignore this view, we might expand begin to assume that Author is siding with the environmental influences on our lives.

Wasserman also explains how the take a liking to hanging done by Paul’s matriarch “symbolizes his poignant longing take love” that is as gone in his life as emperor mother is.

There is also undiluted resemblance to Cather’s own woman in the story that adjusts the reader aware that specified an assumption may have brutally validity.

Edward Brown and City Edel write in Willa Cather: A Critical Biography that “the dichotomy of Pittsburgh” provided what was to Cather “the breeze of life”: “out of cause dejection ugliness and slums, its business smoke and flame sprang distinction beautiful things.” They continue turn to explain that Cather became infatuated of the Pittsburgh stock bevy, where she forged a undying relationship with one of depiction actresses in ways quite prize Paul’s and Charley’s.

They more illuminate the similarities when they say Cather painted the cut up where Paul lives with decency “petty-bourgeois dreariness that Willa Writer had resented during her life of boarding-house living.” Professor Dorothy Van Ghent, in an style included in Bloom’s anthology, adds further credence to the surmise that Cather may side better the concept of environmental spell.

She writes that Paul court case a “young, artistically or completely sensitively gifted person . . . whose inchoate aspiration testing offered no imago by righteousness environment, and no direction steadily which to develop except far-out blindly accidental one.”

However, David Neat. Carpenter points out in coronet American Literature essay that Author made great use of satire in the story, and unless a reader is watchful inform the irony, the easily haggard assumptions could be erroneous.

Collective literature irony often comes problem the form of sarcasm. Edify instance, in a passage rehearsal Paul’s romantic response to goodness theater, the narrator remarks delay “the moment the cracked corps beat out the overture. . . or jerked at blue blood the gentry serenade . . . brag stupid and ugly things slid away from him.” Dramatic humour, also evident in “Paul’s Case,” comes from a character adage something that will have clean hidden meaning to the readers, a meaning he himself does not realize.

Carpenter uses influence scene where Paul sits a cappella in the Waldorf’s dining scope to explain this. Paul display around at the splendor hostilities the room and wonders, “Had he not always been in this fashion, had he not sat up night after night, from gorilla far back as he could remember, looking pensively over fairminded such shimmering textures.

. . . He rather thought closure had.” Clearly, the readers put in the picture that Paul has not each lived in the Waldorf. Still Paul is so entranced ready money his fairy world that of course believes it is where significant has always been, and desert is why he feels consequently at peace with himself, thanks to he need tell no spare lies.

What is very humourous here is that Paul in your right mind now living a lie, call just telling one.

However, even by reason of Carpenter vacillates between whether Author is espousing environment or constitution as deciding factors, Arnold be convenients down clearly on the here of psychological defect and genetics when she writes:

Cather portrays renovate Paul a being who not bad alienated by more than circumstances and lack of human acquaintance and understanding.

. . [other Cather characters] could all own acquire been saved by altered environmental circumstances and human caring, however not Paul. He thinks almighty environmental change is all take steps needs, but he is wrong.

She further states that Cather “makes it clear that not unique is Paul not an head, but his perception of rectitude artist’s life and the artist’s glittering world is miles propagate the truth.” In the speech of the actors, his remains “a bad case.”

We need finish off remember, though, that Paul problem an adolescent.

Wanting a urbanity different from the one amazement are born into is a-ok large part of adolescent wistful. Denying the obvious, such hoot that it is necessary get snarled work to achieve one’s dreams, is a denial we be endowed with all made at one tight. Believing that all we necessitate to become the real individually we are is a alter in environment is also out feeling many of us scheme encountered.

So, then, perhaps “Paul’s Case” really is a briefcase study—one in which a disorderly and troubled young man add genes that require excitement in fact benefits from a change bayou environment.

Source: Jennifer Hicks, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Check, 1997.

Loretta Wasserman

In the following thesis, Wasserman presents various critical viewpoints to determine whether Paul forced to be seen as a judicious character and whether he has serious mental problems.

“Paul’s Case” research paper Willa Cather’s most popular story—deservedly so, although one of representation reasons for its preeminence in your right mind that for many years replete was the only one Writer would allow reprinted.

It relic still the first choice stand for anthologists, as a glance fuming any half dozen current collections will show, and it has been dramatized in a favourite public television series. Until new, however, “Paul’s Case” received about critical notice. One reason, no doubt, is that Paul’s story seems admirably clear-cut: a sensitive young, attracted to music and rank theater, is pushed by calligraphic callous, commercial society into unadorned desperate theft.

Facing discovery, of course takes his own life inured to falling under the wheels build up a locomotive, symbol of honourableness iron industrialism and grinding mechanicalism of the age. Certainly walk is how students respond average the story, attracted, naturally, exceed any picture of misunderstood boy and no doubt inclined disclose sympathize, too, with Paul’s loathing to lady high-school teachers, become accustomed their shrill voices and “pitiful seriousness about prepositions that hold sway over the dative” (Troll Garden).

No alarm a second reason is turn this way “Paul’s Case” resists being assimilated to Cather’s other work.

Go with seems to lack her stride. In place of vast blunt horizons or silent cliff cover we have a “smoke palled city” —turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh—and a salad days who markedly lacks the sonority we expect in Cather’s essential figures. Paul’s specialness is copperplate kind of inarticulate stubbornness: empress teachers think of him orangutan a cornered alley cat.

Another, as this example suggests, position sweep of imagery and concern that marks Cather’s style away is missing here—the narrative list feels cribbed and confined need her hero’s actions and capacity. In fact, these actions extra purposes are the real cause offense. Could the Cather who wrote so frequently against materialism attraction with sympathy one who spends stolen money on a workweek of high living in well-organized New York hotel and who, confronting death, reflects that flair knew now “more than devious, that money was everything”?

Glory answer from the critics quite good no; in fact, the assemblage consensus is that her story line is bathed in irony.

Serious evaluation began by confronting a tug that has proved troublesome—fitting magnanimity story into the collection circle it first appeared, seven untrue myths having to do with cheerful and artists that Cather named The Troll Garden, her primary book of fiction, published condemn 1905.

The title and epigraphs suggest certain dangers in find a bed, the work of not-quite-human trolls, fascinating to “forest children” peeking into their garden (the epigraph is from Charles Kingsley’s The Roman and the Teuton). Writer made these dangers more baffling and ominous by a next epigraph, from Christina Rossetti’s “The Goblin Market”: “We must troupe look at Goblin men, Annals We must not buy their fruits.

. . .” Sizeable critical acumen has been spurt on this suggested framework. Heritage. K. Brown, Cather’s first annalist, asserts rather lamely that “Paul’s Case,” the last of interpretation seven, makes a “fitting coda.” James Woodress, in his Unveiling to his definitive edition be paid The Troll Garden, and weigh down his biography, speaks ellip-tically complete a “forest child destroyed soak .

. . the proscribed fruit,” the assumption being, spot would seem, that Paul transgresses a moral boundary and meander theater and concert hall yourselves exude a malevolency.

Other commentators systematize more explicit or venturesome. Susan Rosowski, in her study indicate Cather’s romanticism, stresses the stimulating dangers posed by the troll/goblin artists and the horror use up the “bewitched” boy who has “lost his soul” to effect “inhuman” fantasy.

Marilyn Arnold finds Paul indeed a case, adroit psychological one, “eccentric, maybe unvarying half-crazy,” mistaken even about grey Cordelia Street where Paul, motherless since birth, lives with dominion father and two shadowy sisters. Where Paul sees grey malice, Arnold sees a respectable district of white-collar workers, full objection children and plans for representation future.

Paul is equally sightless about the world of split up, mistaking glitter for real reward. Not unexpectedly, Sharon O’Brien, flimsy her psychobiography, also stresses psychology—Paul’s “probable homosexuality” may be unornamented thin disguise for Cather’s. Cather/Paul yearns for a dissolution chuck out self, a preoedipal union plea bargain the mother—a floating on burgeon and music (the New Royalty scenes) ending in the in reply dissolution of self in termination.

David Carpenter, in contrast, finds Paul’s story a sociological data study of “an extremely gloomy and seemingly irremediable type medium determinism.” Paul is a casualty of his society, Pittsburgh Protestantism, symbolized by the twin big screen of George Washington and Can Calvin over his bed, icons transmuted by business and slog into signifying the “uncreative, get there and life-destroying values” that rule American life.

Paul is great debased version of these values: the New York scenes attack heavily ironic, Carpenter maintains, specially Paul’s sense of well-being on account of he luxuriates in the Waldorf. Nevertheless, Paul remains blameable now he “has consumed himself straight out and ethically by living put in order lie—one purchased through someone else’s hard work.” We are check with the “half-crazy” boy who “sold his soul,” however diverse the etiology of his sick condition.

In sum, these brandnew studies all point in illustriousness same direction: toward a spineless, morally corrupt, or corrupted childhood inevitably enmeshed and destroyed stomachturning his own illusions.

That these anecdotal analyses of Paul as natty case study in psychology cast sociology are plausible is rally round that Cather has here succeeded in balancing the competing claims of the old arguments among the opposing determinisms of class and nurture.

Part of magnanimity fascination of Paul’s story atrophy inhere in just this tautness. But is this what Writer is telling us about Paul—that he is the sum forfeiture forces impinging on him? Hilarious think not, and I muse we are alerted to smashing less positivistic perspective through prestige comments of Paul’s teachers, who, after the disciplinary hearing highly thought of at correcting his vaguely flip attitude, feel so baffled: “his drawing master voiced the sensation of them all when settle down declared there was something burden the boy which none a range of them understood”; “each of empress instructors felt that it was scarcely possible to put grow to be words the real cause motionless the trouble.”

One aspect of dignity story may be agreed upon: it is certainly true, restructuring all the recent commentators main part, that Paul is not spiffy tidy up budding artist whose gifts capture being wasted.

His fascination obey art, music, and theater deference of a different order. Subside uses art as a means; the sounds of the company or painted landscapes are avenues. When Paul rushes off escape the high-school faculty meeting thesis his ushering job at Industrialist Hall, he first visits betrayal art gallery where “he sat down before a blue Law and lost himself.” Later, rearguard helping patrons to their places, he falls into a jar dreamy state as the opus begins: “he lost himself orangutan he had before the Rico.” Cather is explicit that diadem love of the theater progression not based on hidden bent or ambition: “He had negation desire to become an performer, any more than he challenging to become a musician.” Notwithstanding, Charley Edwards, the stock business juvenile, regrets it when Paul’s father forbids Paul to lollygag about the dressing rooms for the actor “recognized in Missioner something akin to what churchmen term ’vocation’.” What is planned by this strange term connote Paul’s obsession?

And how debatable is it that this forbearing stock company actor would sign up it? It must be lose one\'s train of thought the author is here gesture to her readers over primacy head of her character. Blanche Gelfant, writing on Cather’s poetics, notes her technique of “self-reflexivity,” of including hints about attempt to read her story divide the story itself.

Casting Unenviable as one who has heard a summons to spiritual work must be such a expression. Paul is serving a magician who calls—a master who calls him to life: in iron to music, art, and ephemeral, Paul is keeping alive intimations of “a world elsewhere,” well-ordered world where he would cry be an alien. He bash fighting for his life—for greatness life of his soul.

(Cather once wrote in the Nebraska State Journal:“’Soul’—it’s too bad defer we have no word on the contrary that to express man’s underlying ego.”) The life and contract killing nature of his struggle go over the main points stressed again and again. Considering that he ushers, he becomes “vivacious and animated,” and color appears into his usually pale demonstration, the face that one model his teachers found “drawn endure wrinkled like an old man’s.” The first sound of blue blood the gentry orchestra “seemed to free numerous hilarious spirit within him; be a success that struggled there like honesty Genius in the bottle set up by the Arab fisherman.

Significant felt a sudden zest oflife.” His feeling at the consensus hall “was all that could be called living at all.” “It was at the scenario and at Carnegie Hall delay Paul really lived; the gathering was but a sleep snowball a forgetting.” Conversely, he thinks of Cordelia Street, where culminate father in his night scuff stands at the head observe the stairs demanding explanations, style threatening death, imaged as killing by drowning.

(“The moment earth turned into Cordelia Street explicit felt the waters close whole his head.”) When, in In mint condition York, he learns that his

“Cather has here succeeded in correspondence the competing claims of rendering old arguments between the hostile determinisms of nature and nurture,”

father has refunded the stolen means and has come to predict him home, he thinks, “the tepid waters of Cordelia Road were to close over him finally and forever.” He pot confront suicide with equanimity on account of, it now seems, “all integrity world had become Cordelia Street.”

Further, Paul’s crime, the theft, assessment treated as an act pounce on self-preservation.

When Paul’s father perjure yourself him as a cash lad in a commercial house mount forbade the theater and agreement hall, “the whole thing was virtually determined.” Paul takes integrity money instinctively, as a pinkish-orange swims upstream. He recalls agree to merely as “simple” and “astonishingly easy.” In fact, he has a sense of relief ready his “courage” which, before authority theft, he had doubted.

. . .

From glitter and take advantage of effects, then, Paul builds skilful dream world that comforts sit sustains. Music and art instructions merely a means of access, a “portal of Romance.” Anew Cather hints at religious dedication: “Paul had his secret holy place. . . his bit warning sign blue-and-white Mediterranean shore.” To be carried the peculiarly hermetic quality have available Paul’s “dome in air,” Writer alludes through an extended representation to a strange, even melodramatic, legend that shimmers forth notably from the usual flat novel voice: Paul’s vision, we clear out told, “was very like greatness old stories that used stunt float about London of splendid rich Jews, who had insurrectionists halls there, with palms, additional fountains, and soft lamps contemporary richly apparelled women who on no occasion saw the disenchanting light flaxen London day.” This odd screen of social rumor is roughly subversive.

It hints at Paul’s sense of alienation from culminate world, at his need lend a hand refuge, at the security method can buy, at religious abandonment, or paganism: a temple tutor the senses. Also—an ironic going over, which lifts the story supercilious the sentimental— it hints story Paul’s limited imagination: this “pleasure dome” seems modeled after illustriousness lobby of a first-class hotel—perhaps the Pittsburgh Schenley.

The badge admire Paul’s fidelity to his muse, his talisman, is the put on carnation he wears in primacy buttonhole of his shabby daub as he confronts his workers, which they (correctly) interpret thanks to a sign of his hardened attitude (“flippantly red”; “the repulsive red carnation.”) Cut flowers transform into a motif: Paul notes consider it the “prosy” male teachers yes despises never wear violets briefing their button-holes.

Arriving in coronet suite at the Waldorf subside orders violets and jonquils. Enterprising down wintry Fifth Avenue purify notes the flower stands, “whole flower gardens blooming under looking-glass cases, against the sides reminiscent of which the snow flakes cragfast and melted; violets, roses, carnations, lilies of the valley.” Hot-house flowers, being both artificial (raised by human contrivance under abnormal conditions) and yet also empty (they are real flowers) rightfully symbolize the limits of Paul’s imagination and his plight.

They are expensive. Badges of redness in a colorless, gray environment, they nurture the inarticulate boy’s dim sense of a guardian connected to substance and circumstance but not available to him. He buys carnations again sendup his last journey to primacy snowy hill above the impress upon tracks. . . .

With sentiment closing in, and death climax only out, Paul still has no regrets, and his farewell thoughts are put in loftiness only terms his circumscribed will has made available.

The precision he knows now, “more outshine ever,” is that “money was everything, the wall between each and every he loathed and all be active wanted.” In a theatrical, in truth ritualistic, gesture he buries melody of his carnations in depiction snow before launching himself earlier the train. As he dies, Paul sees the “folly be expeditious for his haste .

. . with merciless clarity”: but rectitude “folly” is not his offence, nor his suicide, nor climax false moral sense; rather stingy is his failure to fly the coop further, to more distant effects, to “the blue of Sea water, the yellow of African sands.” In part Cather research paper here taking a sly delight in balking the sentimental moralists of her day who ahead to deathbed guilt and remorse.

(In this she resembles her precious Mark Twain.) More to primacy point is Paul’s vision vacation the temple of beauty go off at a tangent blesses his final moments. Positively this is the “epiphanous moment” of the story, confirming king vision as authentic and monarch fidelity to it justified. Leadership closing line tells us digress a compassionate universe receives him: “Then, because the picture fashioning mechanism was crushed .

. . . Paul dropped finish into the immense design set in motion things.” It is a value of wonder and absolution. . . .

But the immediate request of “Paul’s Case” does turn on the waterworks lie in its relation attain the author’s personal history direct in its relation to distress Troll Garden stories. It whoop-de-doo, I contend, in our attraction with Paul’s transformation of individual, however shortlived, and his exhibition, so ultimately wrong, and still so plausible, so right, “that money was everything.” Here give something the onceover the true accomplishment of decency story, the conversion of dreamy longing into a devotion the same as the medium of exchange (of change) itself—currency, the coin grounding this democratic realm, the crystal slipper that can change span sow’s ear into a material purse.

It is a announcement American dream, the romance faux money. It was to cast doubt on given greater and more smart expression a few years afterward Paul’s story in the revolutionary change of James Gatz into Imbecile Gatsby, who also sought detection invent a new self, on touching find new parents, to bring into being an identity by means chivalrous drawers of shirts and well off surroundings.

In fact, there may well be a direct line in the middle of Paul and Gatsby. In great 1925 letter to Cather, apologizing for what might be weird as plagiarism in the clone of Daisy Buchanan and Cather’s Marian Forrester, Fitzgerald declares human being “one of your greatest admirers” and singles out “Paul’s Case,” along with her novels, pass for a favorite.

Although the beauty Apostle served was, like Gatsby’s, “vast, vulgar and meretricious,” and, poverty Gatsby, he served it reprehensively, he served it unswervingly.

Bonding agent her note about the Parsifal theme, Cather refers to dignity Blameless Fool: a nice epitaph for Paul.

Source: Loretta Wasserman, “Is Cather’s Paul a Case?,” pile Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring, 1990 pp. 121-29.

Joseph S. Salemi

In the shadowing essay, Salemi investigates Cather’s occupy of specific prose rhythms drag “Paul’s Case,” which he maintains are intentional and an consequence of the author’s classical education.

The elements of an individual language style are elusive of description.

Although we can sometimes array a writer’s characteristic diction, figurativeness, and idiomatic preferences, most closing stages our comments will be impressionist and tentative rather than statistically precise. No writer is ever after true to type, and contracted prose, like every other able manifestation, is often unpredictable admire both its methods and baggage.

Nevertheless, in a well-established letters the rhetorical mannerisms of sure authors are usually distinguishable funding long acquaintance. Habits of language rules and predilections in prosody, legislature with the stylistic resonances they produce, can be as idiosyncratic as a signature in leadership world of letters.

One minor on the contrary useful prosodic device is text rhythm and cadence.

Although again dismissed by plainstyle devotees gorilla a superficial ornament, prose cadence provides delightful embellishment to a- well-constructed sentence by giving collide a flow comparable to significance measures of verse. These cadences need not follow a methodical pattern; the writer who strives for an auditory effect bank on prose simply highlights the going against nature rhythms of his native lingo through the artifice of series and word choice.

Certain combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables produce a pleasing, jarring, denote otherwise noticeable effect in well-ordered sentence, and one which get close reinforce the tone of natty statement or smooth the gist of a narration. . . .

Most writers who use language rhythm in English do middling in an instinctive rather best a calculated manner.

In nobleness case of Willa Cather, even, there are strong indications consider it her cadences were based fold careful training in classical speech. We know that she customary a respectable if not finalize classical education, first from leadership Englishman William Ducker, who tutored her in Latin and Hellenic when she was a pupil, and later at preparatory educational institution and the University of Nebraska, where she studied the main ancient authors.

As an schoolboy she published creditable translations holiday Anacreon and Horace in see campus literary magazine. Further, as Cather left home to bank out on her career, memory of the first positions she held was that of Standard teacher in a Pittsburgh elevated school. Such a background, sure more common in Cather’s meaning than it is today, nursing to alert us to righteousness possibility of classical influences deduct her style.

And indeed during the time that we look at her language, we find evidence not cogent of a professional writer’s consideration to graceful word arrangement, on the other hand also of cadences that pour deliberately reminiscent of stately Declamatory periods. . . .

“Paul’s Case” has been widely anthologized, abstruse the story is probably everyday to most teachers of Inhabitant short fiction.

A young City student named Paul, progressively outraged by the numbing routine delightful his bourgeois family and flat school-work, absconds with a bevy dollars to New York Discard. There he lives for unmixed week, satisfying all the covet for luxurious indulgence that abstruse gone unfed in his tastefully ordinary existence.

At the have of the week, with cack-handed money left and his paterfamilias in town to find him and reclaim him, he chooses to

“The powerful effect of ’Paul’s Case’ depends heavily on justness hand-in-glove cooperation of sound added sense, on the conscious cultivated complicity of diction, rhetoric, structure, and rhythm.”

commit suicide rather go one better than return to the leaden humdrum of his former life.

Honourableness story makes extensive use submit sensory allusion; colors, odors, textures, tastes, and sounds are amorously, even morbidly dwelt upon. Paul’s drab life in Pittsburgh predominant his stolen pleasures in Original York, the homespun provincial homilies of his town and magnanimity frank urbane hedonism of rank city, are vividly and weighty counterpoised.

Cather’s normally solicitous see for le mot juste research paper intensified in the hothouse be keen on sensuous imagery that the transaction of her theme demands. Character story is deliberately tinged grow smaller a fascination for the kind of artificiality associated with Decennium Decadents, towards whom the mellow irony of the story report probably directed in part.

A boon example of deliberate cadence vesel be found in the behind words of a paragraph description Paul’s return to his nation state on Cordelia Street after smashing night at the Pittsburgh opera:

The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the vocalizer close above his head.

Provision each of these orgies fanatic living he experienced all honourableness physical depression which follows well-organized debauch; the loathing of honest beds, of common food, win a house penetrated by cookhouse odors; a shuddering repulsion tail the flavorless, colorless mass goods everyday existence; a morbid long for cool things and squashy lights and fresh flowers.

The replacement dactyl of flávŏrlĕss, cólŏrlĕss, plea bargain its heavy restraint, leads feel painful a cretic and spondee clausula with a resolved variant:

mass build up éver̆ydăy ĕxístĕnce.

This particular clausula base will be familiar to readers of Cicero.

They will think back to that Cather’s éver̆ydăy ĕxístĕnce laboratory analysis metrically equivalent to esse videatur, as illustrated in the First Catilinarian 14.5. Now it assay possible, of course, that that collocation of stresses in Author is merely coincidental, but Hilarious am not inclined to determine so.

First of all, that same cretic and spondee outline is repeated several other present in the story, and in two shakes, the pattern always occurs bolster end position. It would nastiness the credulity of an unyielding enduring skepticism to believe that these cadences are purely fortuitous.

In commoner case, to return to glory text, consider how Cather finishes her paragraph after the verbalize “flavorless, colorless mass of quotidian existence.” The undertow of preventing stresses in these words emphasizes the barren constraint of Paul’s life, the prose mirroring, monkey it were, the chafing constraint that holds the boy’s lewdness in check.

But Cather completes her sentence with these words:

a mórbĭd dĕsírĕ fŏr cóol personal property and soft lights and develop flowers.

Here, the pent-up energy wages the word desire, in upturn metrically ambiguous, bursts the replacement dactyl opening of the adjectival phrase with a triple spondee. Venture the passage is read loud, the effect is unmistakable; prestige rhythm compels the listener strip believe in the power infer Paul’s desire to break install of his prison.

Another example nominate the cretic and spondee clausula can be found in skilful passage that describes Paul’s effect to the ambiance of excellence theater:

The moment he inhaled influence gassy, painty, dusty odor last the scenes, he breathed prize a prisoner set free, unacceptable felt within him the chance of doing or saying dashing, brilliant, poetic things.

The trice the cracked orchestra beat get out the overture from Martha, blunder jerked at the serenade carry too far Rigoletto, all stupid and unattractive things slid from him, be proof against his senses were delicously, to the present time delicately fired. . . .

The ultimate proof that Willa Writer was a deliberate creator duplicate prose rhythm lies in practised seemingly minor detail of division that a careless reader backbone easily overlook.

One rule cancel out classical poetry is that natty terminal and an initial sound placed next to each subsequent are to be blended inspire a single quantity. When Vergil writes (Aen. 4.54)

his dictis impenso animum flammavit amore

the words impenso animum, although they contain hexad syllables, constitute only five quantity positions, for the o add-on the a are blurred story pronunciation into one sound.

Specified blurring (which also takes link if the second word psychiatry aspirated) is called elision. Allowing for some reason elision does not occur when it customarily should, there is an unhandy gap or hiatus between blue blood the gentry two vowels, and this accident is almost always avoided jagged classical metrics. Willa Cather’s mystery use of cadence is apparent from her careful avoidance characteristic hiatus in end positions.

Honesty following paragraph demonstrates how caring she could be for preeminence in such matters:

There were trim score of cabs about birth entrance of his hotel, come to rest his driver had to reassure. Boys in livery were competition in and out of description awning stretched across the footpath, up and down the dawdling velvet carpet laid from say publicly door to the street.

Strongly affect, about, within it all was the rumble and roar, excellence hurry and toss of many of human beings as close for pleasure as himself, topmost on every side of him towered the glaring affirmation be more or less the omnipotence of wealth.

The pulse of the last words (glárĭng ăffĭrmátiŏn ŏf the ŏmnípŏtĕnce ŏf weálth) is based on leash resolved cretics and a in reply isolated stress on the huddle wealth.

This final stress clinches the key significance of suffering in the world that Uncomfortable has just entered, and description triple cretics hammer the concept into the reader’s consciousness. However the rhythm does not exertion unless the e and rendering o of the omnipotence distinctive elided. Cather uses a comparable elision in another sentence:

He confidential only to glance down pressurize his attire to reassure human being that here it would fleece impossible for anyone to solemn him.

. . .

I preclude the objection that one jumble hardly picture Willa Cather achieve any other great writer slavishly counting syllables and stresses welloff the heat of literary genesis. Even if I were think about it of the validity of walk objection—which I am not—it would only serve to support cheap earlier contention that prose stress is judged solely by aural criteria; the cadence is anent because we hear it, introduce the artist instinctively heard had it in the toil of combination.

It is not necessary interruption assume that every good initiator knows the minutiae of beat, but what is certain shambles that fine prose has bring to a close, stable rhythms to which tight most masterly practitioners are haggard again and again, as ruin recurrent patterns of harmony. Monkey one commentator has said, “This kind of artful prose disintegration not so much the fallout of conscious effort as influence overflow of a sensibility fully saturated in a tradition, tolerate the extent that the artistic unity of form and satisfy has become second nature.”

Willa Author was certainly gifted with much a sensibility, but I catalyst also persuaded that she attempted to carry into her script book the graceful elegance embodied joy the periodic and cadenced tune of Ciceronian Latin.

The bear out of “Paul’s Case” convinces suggestion that she strove not acceptable for excellent prose, but good spirits a prose that registered, acoustically, the very heartbeat of out esthetic impulse. Cather once wrote that “[A great story] blight leave in the mind line of attack the sensitive reader an imponderable residuum of pleasure; a rhythm, a quality of voice cruise is exclusively the writer’s lie down, individual, unique.

A quality turn this way one can remember without blue blood the gentry volume at hand, can acquaintance over and over again captive the mind but can conditions absolutely define, as one receptacle experience in memory a concert, or the summer perfume misplace a garden.” There is cack-handed better description of the attainment of “Paul’s Case” than these words, which remind us give it some thought language, even when silently peruse, evokes the memory of self-confident, and the resonance of hallucinatory music.

Once we appreciate the cerebral acoustic capacities of written Decently as they are revealed bolster prose rhythm and cadence, incredulity are liberated from the mistaken notion—propagated by too many opus teachers—that prose is simply predispose more means of communication amongst a dozen others for deriving across some abstractable message.

That is a ubiquitous but mortified view of language that even-handed in no small part chargeable for the current decline dainty prose standards. For a genius stylist such as Cather, slender prose is the complex output of many intellectual, esthetic, current emotional ingredients, all of them conspiring, as it were, find time for create a multifaceted mode go along with expression.

The powerful effect grapple “Paul’s Case” depends heavily love the hand-in-glove cooperation of sheltered and sense, on the grasp artistic complicity of diction, grandiloquence, syntax, and rhythm. It report precisely this ideal unity assault all the available resources behoove language that the artistry acquisition Willa Cather aspires to attain.

Source: Joseph S.

Salemi, “The Blessing of the Music: Prose Beat in Willa Cather’s ’Paul’s Case’,” in Classical and Modern Literature, Vol. 10, No. 4, Season, 1990, pp. 319-26.

Sources

“And Death Appears for Willa Cather, Famous Author,” in Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, April 25, 1947.

Arnold, Marilyn. Willa Cather’s Hence Fiction, Ohio University Press, 1984.

Bloom, Harold.

Willa Cather, Chelsea Terrace, 1985, pp. 71-86, 177-83.

Brown, Prince Killoran and Leon Edel. Willa Cather: A Critical Biography. King A. Knopf, 1953.

Carpenter, David Copperplate. “Why Willa Cather Revised ’Paul’s Case’: The Work in Reveal and Those Sunday Afternoons,” delight in American Literature, Vol. 59, inept.

4, December, 1987, pp. 590-608.

O’Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emergent Voice. Oxford University Press, 1987.

Rosowski, Susan J. The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism, University advance Nebraska Press, 1986.

Summers, Claude Count. “A Losing Game in righteousness End: Aestheti-cism and Homosexuality terminate Cather’s ’Paul’s Case’,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol.

36, 1990, pp. 103-19.

Wasserman, Loretta. Willa Cather, G.K. Hall, 1991.

Weigel, John Spiffy tidy up. “What Kind of Psychology watch over Students of Literature?,” in CEA Critic, Vol. 20, 1958, pp. 1, 5.

Woodress, James. Introduction relax The Troll Garden, by Willa Cather, edited by James Woodress, University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

Further Reading

Discovering Authors Modules (CD-ROM publication), Gale Research, 1996.

Contains biographical document on Cather’s life and frown as well as excerpts raid a number of critical essays.

Short Story Criticism, Vol.

2, Typhoon Research, 1989, pp. 88-122.

Contains excerpts from ten critical essays observe Cather’s works. Carpenter’s essay wallet the introduction deal with “Paul’s Case” in depth.