|
 |
 |
| Paul's Case |
| 作者Author / Willa Cather 維拉•凱瑟 |
|
|
Paul's Case
|
|
Joseph C. Murphy
|
 Introduction
Significance of the Title and Subtitle
Paul's Romanticism
Settings
Climax
Ending
|
| |
| Introduction |
| |
"Paul's
Case" (1905) and "Behind the Singer Tower" (1912) are products of
Cather's early phase, when she was working as a magazine editor in the
Eastern cities of Pittsburgh and New York and finding her own voice in
American literature. Both stories reflect upon the aspirations and the
burdens of urban culture—the world of art and beauty that hovers above
a bedrock of exploitation, materialism, and middle-class drudgery.
These contradictions in city life enriched Cather's complex
understanding of America, as she moved from her upbringing on the
Nebraska prairie—another place that wedded dreams with violence—into
her adulthood as urban literary artist. These stories are therefore
perceptive studies of urban settings. They are also keen
representations of American identities, and examples of Cather's
developing experimentation with narrative form.
"Paul's
Case" is set in Pittsburgh in the early twentieth century, when the
city was a major American center for the production of iron, steel, and
glass. These industries defined the city at every level, bringing
extraordinary wealth to industrialists like Andrew Carnegie,
opportunity of advancement to the middle class, and high-risk
jobs—frequently resulting in injury or death—to the immigrant poor.
These industries also defined the city's cultural life in a
contradictory way. Millionaires like Carnegie found relief from their
hectic enterprises by building vast estates and attending lavish social
events. At the same time, Carnegie and other millionaires became
philanthropists and endowed the city with museums, concert halls, and
libraries for the enrichment of the public good. However, the
capitalist system gave the working poor and the middle class little
time or incentive for leisure. "Paul's Case" is about the struggle of a
highly sensitive young man amid these contradictions. Living in
Pittsburgh from 1896-1906, Cather understood her subject well. It was
the city's expanding wealth that first brought her there as editor of
the women's magazine Home Monthly. In that position and as a free-lance
journalist, Cather came to know firsthand the rich, the middle class,
and the poor. Later as a high school teacher, she became familiar with
young people like Paul who were trying to get their bearings in the
city's bewildering industrial culture.
|
| |
| Significance
of the Title and Subtitle |
| |
The
title "Paul's Case" suggests the story of a misfit who, by the
standards of society, needs to be reformed; a case, after all, is a
problem to be solved. However, the subtitle, "A Study in Temperament,"
suggests a more neutral or even sympathetic perspective—the exploration
of an individual's unique sensibilities. As the story unfolds, there is
ample evidence for both these perspectives. Certainly the teachers
before whom Paul appears as the story opens view him as an abnormal
case. As the drawing master points out, noting Paul's "haunted" smile,
"There is something wrong about the fellow" (245). This abnormality is
represented in the red carnation he sports before the faculty in the
opening scene—symbolizing somehow his "hysterically defiant manner"
(243). Later Paul's father supports this view, seeing in his son a case
of rebellion against the work ethic, and he forces Paul into an office
job.
As Paul lights out from school and heads to Carnegie Hall, his defiance
falls away and we witness a boy of an extremely sensitive temperament,
who loses himself in the world of music and art. |
| |
| Paul's
Romanticism |
| |
It
is important to notice, though, that the narrator distances herself
from Paul's perceptions. Paul's temperament inclines him toward
unrealistic views. The soprano soloist at the concert hall, for
example, is "by no means in her first youth, and the mother of many
children," but Paul sees her as "a veritable queen of Romance"—
imagining her to be "an old sweetheart" of the conductor (246-47).
Likewise, the stage entrance of the theatre "was for Paul the actual
portal of Romance," even though the actors are quite ordinary people.
Art, music, and theatre are for Paul a means of escape, providing "the
spark, the indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his
senses" (252). Paul does not himself want to become an actor or a
musician—he doesn't want to work that hard. It is the artificiality—not
the reality—of the arts that attracts him: "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" (251). |
| |
| Settings |
| |
The plot of "Paul's Case" rides
unrelentingly on a succession of settings: the high school, Carnegie
Hall, Cordelia Street, the stock theatre company, the train, the
Waldorf Hotel in New York, and the snowy tracks where he dies. Among
these Paul's home on Cordelia Street is ground zero, because it
represents everything he is trying to escape in each of the other
settings. What is it about this "highly respectable street," where all
the houses are alike, that is so distasteful to Paul? Two clues (and
there are others) are the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin
above Paul's bed (248). George Washington, first president of the
United States, is an icon of honesty and patriotism. John Calvin is the
originator of Calvinism, the Protestant tradition from which
Presbyterianism, the establishment religion of Pittsburgh, descends.
Since the nineteenth century, Calvinism has been associated with a
"work ethic" founded in the notion that God favors those who succeed in
business. How does Cordelia Street embody the ideals of Washington and
Calvin, and how does Paul respond to these ideals?
 |
The uniform houses of Aurelia Street
in Pittsburgh, the real-life basis for Cather's Cordelia Street in
"Paul's Case."
Photo by Joseph C. Murphy
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
 Climax |
| |
Paul
takes decisive action against Cordelia Street by stealing money from
his employer Denny & Carson and using it for a getaway to New
York City. But the climax of the story is Paul's recognition—as his
money runs out and his father approaches to take him home—that "all the
world had become Cordelia Street." Paul recognizes "now, more than
ever, that money was everything, the wall that stood between all he
loathed and all he wanted" (259). How does Paul reach this conclusion,
and why does he decide that his only alternative is suicide? |
| |
| Ending
|
| |
In
some sense, Paul dies as he has lived—at the edge of reality, in a fog
of romance. He diverts his attention away from his suicide plan by
focusing on the images "of everything he had seen that morning," and he
views the drooping carnations as justifying his own death—because
revolt against the winter is a "losing game" (260). (Cut flowers have
appeared throughout the story, in the principal's office scene, in New
York, and here. What exactly do they suggest about Paul's identity and
predicament?) But as he falls toward the approaching train, Paul
recognizes "the folly of his haste . . . with merciless clearness" and
"the vastness of what he had left undone" (260). Was there an
alternative for Paul? Notice that in the end "the picture making
mechanism" in Paul's brain—the thing that has been the engine of his
romantic life—ceases to function, and Paul "dropped back into the
immense design of things" (261). Cather significantly broadens the
perspective here—suggesting an "immense design of things" of which the
capitalist system, and Paul's designs against that system, are only
imperfect parts. In other words, Cather opens up a window to a reality
outside Paul's "case." In the process we have to wonder: was it Paul's
case alone that needed treatment, or is the "case" really the society
that has trapped him—an imbalanced society whose capitalist means are
irreconcilable with its artistic and spiritual aspirations? |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
