Paul's Case

There are two prominent readings of Cather’s story: one from the perspective of Cather’s personal life, and another from a broader social-sexual lens.

Beginning with some biographical details about Cather’s life is necessary to the first analysis. Cather was born in Virginia in 1873, where her family remained for the first decade of her life. At age nine, her family moved to Nebraska, where they tried and failed at farming before moving into real estate. Her time in Nebraska was formative. She read many books from her neighbors’ vast library and began writing. A precocious student, Cather graduated at age 16 from the University of Nebraska.

After college, she was hired at a women’s magazine in Pittsburgh, where she wrote in a variety of genres: short story, journalism, and poetry. This included the obviously autobiographical story, “Tommy, the Unsentimental,” about a masculine girl from Nebraska who saves her father’s struggling business. During this period in Pittsburgh, she taught high school English and Latin. Some of her early short stories written during this time, like “Paul’s Case,” were collated and published in a book called The Troll Garden. The collection was published in 1905. A year later, in 1906, Cather moved to New York City.

Cather would spend the rest of her time in New York City, socializing with writers, critics, and artists while writing several acclaimed novels, many of which were set in the Great Plains.

These biographical details bear a direct resemblance to the protagonist in “Paul’s Case,” a story based on many of Cather’s feelings about existence. Like Paul, she lived in Pittsburgh, was involved in the artistic scene there, and yearned to move to New York. One of the story’s concise biographical interpretations is that Paul’s feelings of isolation, displacement, alienation, and aesthetic aspirations are Cather’s own. One important rhetorical maneuver to this point is Cather’s use of free indirect discourse, a style of narration wherein the narrator, though third-person and distinct from the characters, adopts the attitudes of a character and expresses those attitudes as though they constitute the narrative consciousness (see the Literary Devices section for a fuller description).

In Pittsburgh, Paul finds his life and immediate surroundings (Cordelia Street and his high school) largely unsatisfying. He imagines the wonders of the world, faraway places, and the pleasures of New York; he finds Carnegie Hall to be his only portal to such a life. Through Paul’s feelings about his life in Pittsburgh (and, by extension, Cather’s), the entire story takes on a romantic and melancholic tone, with a constant play between hopes and reality. Narrowing the distance between these two points is Paul’s goal. He so desires this life that he resorts to robbery to procure the funds necessary to attaining it, if only momentarily. When this lifestyle that he has grown accustomed to is finally threatened, Paul would rather die than return to his old existence. Ultimately, given the author’s spartan Midwestern upbringing and her time in Pittsburgh, where she likely aspired to literary accomplishment, the story can be easily understood as an outgrowth of Cather’s own concerns, ideas, and ambitions for her life at the time.

Another reading, one proffered by a number of critics and scholars, is that the story portrays the tragic difficulties experienced by a gay man in that era. Taking into account the story’s historical context, there are several instances in which Paul is described in such a way that would have made him “legible” as gay in Cather’s milieu; such legibility, prior even to any inspiration by stereotypes, derives from the character’s subverting cultural norms of masculinity—from appearance to temperament. Paul has a “narrow chest,” and his eyes have a “glassy glitter.” The narrator also asserts that “there was something of the dandy about him” (468), and he has traditionally feminine tastes, particularly for a man in the early 20th century. These tastes include classical music, opera, theater, flowers, and opulent clothes. While, in reality, such traits are certainly not reliable indications of sexual orientation, they would have been vivid textual signifiers in the story’s contemporary cultural imagination. Additionally, feelings that are often concomitant with membership in a minority group—otherness, feelings of being an outsider or not fitting in, alienation—are all apt in understanding Paul’s interior life. That Paul’s story ends in suicide may be the author’s commentary on the stricture of her society’s codified gender expectations. (Her overtly autobiographical story, “Tommy, the Unsentimental,” suggests Cather’s investment in this theme.)

The most important episode for this interpretation is Paul’s time with the student from Yale. The two spend the night drinking together and don’t return home until the morning. Cather treats the event very elliptically, allowing the reader to infer what transpired between the two young men. Finally, the story’s ending reinforces the idea that Paul would rather not go on living if he cannot live the life he wants; in Pittsburgh, where his father expects him to marry, Paul would have no chance of fulfilling romantic or sexual relationships, and he would face familial hostility for simply being himself. This, along with the loss of the cultural and aesthetic trappings of his New York life, are enough for him to end his life rather than return to his previous drab and oppressive existence.

These two analytic avenues do have a nexus point. There have been long running debates over Cather’s own sexual orientation, and there is now general consensus among biographers that she was a lesbian. She had many long-term friendships with women, and, although those relationships’ full nature is unknown, there is nothing to rule out the idea that the story is based on Cather’s life and includes subtle inferences to her own experience with her sexuality.

A final noteworthy interpretation has been put forth, although it does not contradict or disallow those already mentioned. Some have seen the story as a pathologizing portrayal of narcissistic personality disorder. The argument for this, mostly derived from Rob Saari’s essay “Paul's Case: A Narcissistic Personality Disorder,” is that Paul garners little sympathy from the reader; that he cares about things and outward appearances more than treating people well; and, finally, that the ending shows his inability to confront reality. This interpretation has faced some skepticism, and while a loose idea of narcissism dates at least to the Classical era, it was not clinically conceptualized as a personality disorder until the late 20th century, nearly a century after Cather’s writing.