While readers have seen Paul successfully put on an act in front of his teachers, here it becomes clear that he can find such performances exhausting—and he’ll go to extreme lengths just to avoid having to interact with his father, with whom he feels unable to communicate. Instant downloads of all 1360 LitChart PDFs He longs to escape the normalcy of his neighborhood and the life that transpires there. It is strongly implied, here and repeatedly throughout the story, that Paul is gay. The theatre is described as Paul’s fairy-tale realm that allows him to escape the prison of his home and school. PAUL'S CASE A STUDY IN TEMPERAMENT BY WILLA SIBERT CATHER * I. And here's what Paul is trying to escape from: a really nice-sounding life, where families sit out on their porches on Sundays and hang out with their neighbors. There is a real contrast between the warm hotel and the frigid street outside, and the window both joins and divides the two. The yellow wallpaper becomes a symbol of the drabness that Paul longs to escape. JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. He deals with this by telling his classmates tales about his actor friends and by making up stories about his imminent travels to California or abroad. They're like having in-class notes for every discussion!”, “This is absolutely THE best teacher resource I have ever purchased. After eight nearly perfect days, Paul reads about himself in the Pittsburgh papers—his father has paid back the theft and is on his way to New York, where it is rumored Paul has fled. By entering your email address you agree to receive emails from Shmoop and verify that you are over the age of 13.
When he returns to the hotel, he feels overwhelmed by the sensory pleasures and visual spectacle of the hotel dining room, as well as by the Opera that he attends later that night. After they grudgingly agree to re-admit him—with Paul being like, thanks, but this is not a party I really want to be invited to—Paul heads off to the Carnegie Music Hall for his job as an usher.
Loathing his drab, dull house, Paul can’t bear to face his father and try to explain where he’s been, so he sneaks in through a basement window and stays awake for hours, fearing the rats but also entertaining himself by making up fanciful stories. From a general summary to chapter summaries to explanations of famous quotes, the SparkNotes Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament Study Guide has everything you need to ace quizzes, tests, and essays. My students love how organized the handouts are and enjoy tracking the themes as a class.”, LitCharts uses cookies to personalize our services. With about $3,000 in money stolen from the firm where he works. He takes the train to Newark, then takes a cab out of town following the Pennsylvania train tracks. He isn’t lonely at all: it seems that Cordelia Street is no longer real, that all of New York has been created just for him, and that he can be however he wants without having to explain it. Paul suddenly feels that the show is over, and decides that he will “finish the thing splendidly.” After drinking too much wine, he wakes up the next morning and stares at the revolver in his hotel room. End of Act I.
Paul spends one more night on the town and then heads back to Pittsburgh—but not to go home. This section concludes with the implication that Paul’s dreams are unrealistic in part because even art relies on money—and that there’s no escaping from the difficult realities of everyday life. LitCharts Teacher Editions. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Paul is getting the once-over by a panel of angry teachers. These descriptions also reveal the contrast between the jaunty, defiant stance that Paul takes in response to his teacher’s complaints, and his insecurity and sense of being scrutinized, as signaled by his shaking fingers. That Paul’s nerves are calmed by having the other boys “suppress” him by sitting atop him is another clear instance of Cather’s use of innuendo to alert the reader to Paul’s queerness. For Paul, the contrast between his home and his “fairy world” is as much aesthetic and sensory as social and class-based. True, their conversations sound deadly—har, har!—boring. Teachers and parents! Paul, tall and thin with a red carnation in his button-hole, listens to it all with a typically defiantly smile, though his hands are slightly shaking. His last thoughts are of colorful, exotic locales like Algeria and the Adriatic Sea, before all goes black. By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our. © 2020 Shmoop University Inc | All Rights Reserved | Privacy | Legal. The company actors laugh bitterly when they hear how Paul has glamorized their lives in his imagination; they, like Paul’s father and teachers, think that his is a “bad case.”.
He decides, however, that this is not the way to kill himself. My students love how organized the handouts are and enjoy tracking the themes as a class.”, LitCharts uses cookies to personalize our services. When the stock company actors catch wind of Paul’s stories, they laugh bitterly. The women are mostly supporting their lazy husbands, and the idea that they’ve inspired such wild and romantic inventions is preposterous to them. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. He leaves the cab and notices that the red carnation he has bought is drooping. His English teacher in particular feels personally aggrieved by his attitude, and in the meeting she leads the attack against Paul and his behavior.
Paul’s voyeurism is shown to stem from a longing to escape his own everyday life as a Pittsburgh schoolboy, even as that longing is revealed to be based on an unrealistic view of the life of a traveling musician. The next day, Sunday, Paul happens to meet a wild Yale freshman from San Francisco, with whom he spends a spectacular night on the town, though the freshman parts ways with Paul coolly in the morning—and the narrator does not say why. So, the jig is up. Everything there seems perfect after Paul has the bell-boy bring up some flowers. Paul’s father represents a certain view of the American Dream as something which is attainable through hard work, reasonable ambition, and an emphasis on the bottom line—a pragmatism that Paul finds appallingly dreary. The tension of his relationship with his father is evident in this fantasy about his father nearly killing him. It is also strongly implied that Edwards is gay, and has taken Paul under his wing (though the nature of their relationship remains ambiguous).
Paul feels boredom verging on despair, except for brief moments like when a clerk tells of his boss’s trip to the Mediterranean: Paul’s imagination is once again fired up by picturing such exotic colors and sights. Other characters in the story will try to explain Paul’s behavior by the fact that his mother has died, but this brief mention seems to suggest that he barely thinks of her. Yet the narrator is also deeply sympathetic to Paul’s embrace of the artificial as a necessary refuge for him, since he feels unable to be himself in a world that rejects homosexuality. Paul is escaping his life in Pittsburgh with the help of several thousand dollars he’s stolen from Denny & Carlson’s. Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament Summary. Pauls Case, the only short story Willa Cather approved for anthologies, opens with a young boy called before his high school principal and teachers. We open in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, steel capital of the world. “Real life” intrudes in the form of authority figures forcing Paul to get a job. For many years "Paul's Case" was the only one of her stories that Cather allowed to be anthologized. He marvels at the soloist’s tiara and gown, demonstrating further his rapt interest in feminine things that most boys don’t even notice.
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