29 pages • 58 minutes read
Willa CatherPaul's Case
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1905A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Tragic Disparity between the Ideal and the Real
The entire trajectory of the story exists in the gap between Paul’s idealized life and his reality. The story opens with Paul’s reality: He finds his Pittsburgh existence unbearably drab, unfulfilling, and oppressive. However, his job as a theater usher offers him a glimpse into something idealized: discussions of worldly and aesthetic pursuits, lavish lifestyles of drink and food, surroundings of elegance and beauty. At first, the real and the ideal are not only remote from one another but seemingly beyond reconciliation, as such an ideal life is seldom offered to someone of Paul’s class and location. The story’s contemporary Pittsburgh, with its many steel factories, was a very working-class city and not usually known for its lushness.
Still, Paul tries to close the gap. Indeed, the story is driven by his impulse to do so. His efforts, however, have the strain of artifice; Paul’s realized ideal is never truly realized, as it is essentially a performance, just like the concerts that first inspire his venture. He sets out with money that, because it is stolen, is only the façade of wealth. His quarters at the Waldorf, in addition to being bought with the illicit funds, he attains only because he lies to the staff about his identity. Despite the ersatz nature of Paul’s realized ideal, however, he feels this life fulfills his identity. As he relates one afternoon after dressing in new clothes, “everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had always wanted to be” (482). A tragic irony is that this New York ideal is both realized and destroyed by the same action: theft. Paul’s crime inevitably returns to him—and it steals back from him immeasurably more than it ever gave.
After Paul finally achieves what he believes is a unity between real and ideal, he cannot bear the prospect of the two realms once more dissociating, and the impending trauma to their unity is at once a trauma to Paul. When he reads the paper and discovers that his glamorous life will soon be over, Paul decides death is preferable to returning to the colorless, restrictive reality on Cordelia Street. This fatal decision underlines and emboldens the theme, but it also articulates Cather’s ethical question of how drastic are the measures that someone should undertake to feel at home in this world.
Performances of Self
“Paul’s Case” is filled with references, allusions, and details of performance. The most basic instance is the presence of actual performers at Carnegie Hall, where Paul works. Paul has an obvious attraction to these people because he envies their access to the worlds that he aspires to be a part of: artistic, moneyed, and worldly.
In addition to literal performances, there is the more subtle and nuanced theme of Paul’s own performance of self. This performance takes place throughout the story, in both Pittsburgh and New York. While living in Pittsburgh, Paul is forced to perform like the other men of his age. His father wants him to conform to a certain normative trajectory of working-class life: wife, children, and a job. Paul is either inept at this performance or simply has no interest in it, as he continually “acts out” at school and consorts with odd characters from the artistic world. Paul is attracted to performers partly because he, too, is his own kind of performer—but also partly for the idealized world that they represent. Paul desires a type of life far from his drab reality, thus, in performance, he can pretend to have the life he wants.
The theme of performance, as a form of artifice or crafted semblance, even finds expression in the fundamental aesthetic sensibility that drives Paul’s character. As Paul marvels at the pleasures of theatrical and orchestral performances, Cather writes, “Perhaps it was because, in Paul’s world, the natural nearly always wore the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty” (478). Likewise, in one of the story’s more vividly symbolic scenes, Paul is enraptured by the sight of gardens kept beneath glass cases, with the encased flowers blossoming “unnaturally” in the winter (482). This notion—that artificiality is a prerequisite for beauty—accounts for Paul’s contentment with the sham element of his New York respite. It also accounts for his superficial sense of fulfilled selfhood within that sham; Paul harbors the unconscious and unwittingly fraught philosophy that a self is not beautiful unless it is artificial.
Nevertheless, even while Paul feels he is living the life of his dreams, one of the story’s tragic ironies is that even in New York, where he admits to feeling his true self and completely at home, he is still performing. For starters, he lies to the hotel staff (telling them that he is waiting for his parents to return from abroad), and thus every interaction at the hotel is a performance for Paul. He also has no real experience in the cultured lifestyle he aspires to, so he must act the part of someone who does. One of the many tragic elements of the story is that one can never stop performing nor escape the realities of their life. Faced with this fact, Paul ends his life.
The Search for Aesthetic Pleasure
One of the themes of this story is Paul’s sense of longing for pretty things and a beauty-filled life. Cather renders this theme not only through plot action but through the prose that relays the action. As Paul’s sense of delight increases, so too does the sensuousness of Cather’s writing. Even when Paul is still trapped in Pittsburgh, his few cherished moments are conveyed with the descriptive vibrance of heightened figurative language that attends particularly to sensory experience: Lights “dance,” the concert hall “blaze[s],” and his senses are “delicately fired.”
However, these moments are few and far between, as living in Pittsburgh offers little aesthetic pleasure for Paul. It is a lifeless environment for him, and, historically, it has been a working-class city because of its many factory jobs. Notably, Paul works at its one world-famous cultural institution: Carnegie Hall. He enjoys the artworks that are stationed in the Hall, and there he finds many of the artistic and cultural pleasures he desires: acting, opera, music, and community. Paul is not natural to this rarified world, however, and tellingly, he works as an usher to seat Pittsburgh’s cultural elite for the performances.
Paul’s existence is directed toward finding and sustaining aesthetic fulfillment. Therefore, he naturally takes extreme measures (robbery) to move to the cultural center of the world, New York City. While there, staying at the luxurious Waldorf hotel, he finds pleasure in his material surroundings: the new clothes, the champagne, the flowers, the perfumes. He now can move through the cultural and artistic worlds, meeting interesting people along the way.
When Paul is in New York, Cather’s writing becomes its most florid and graceful. The beauty of the surroundings is matched by the prose. Paul lingers on objects, their descriptions, and the feelings they stoke. Significant, too, is that the height of narrative lyricism occurs in moments involving not only beauty but wealth, which underscores the pleasure-based nature of Paul’s longings. Among the most descriptive passages are those detailing epicurean scenes at the Waldorf, where the arts and fineries amount to a “bewildering radiance,” the champagne is “cold, precious,” and the ambience’s “shimmering textures” almost cause Paul to forget he ever lived on Cordelia Street. (Even in naming Paul’s hometown street, Cather slips in an allusion to both luxuriousness and tragedy: Cordelia is a character from Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, and the principled young woman is punished gratuitously by her father for not describing her daughterly love in “opulent” enough terms.)
It is when Paul’s New York life is threatened and when he is on his way home that everything becomes colorless again. The notable symbol throughout is that of the flower, which greatly encapsulates this theme. The flower is beautiful and ambrosial in smell, but its beauty only exists for the short period it is in bloom. At the end, Cather presents the red carnation flower in Paul’s jacket as wilted and dying, likely losing its color. The aesthetic vibrancy has dissipated, and, faced with this, Paul ends his life.
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