"Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament"

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In Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament,” the title character is a young man that does not seem to fit in.  He does not have a happy relationship with his father, he does not get along well with the other kids in school, and no one really seems to notice him unless he is making up stories about his rubbing elbows with the soloists at Carnegie Hall. There is always a mystery about him; something is always there but never spoken about. It’s as if Cather wrote about Paul in code. “Letters written by Cather do provide some insight into her personal life, including one written while she was in college to Louise Pound in which she bemoans her ‘unnatural love’ for Pound. Some biographers and scholars now view her as a lesbian and explore her writings from this standpoint” (Polk). In the early 1900’s, being homosexual was not openly spoken about so she never came directly out and stated that was what Paul was struggling with; however, if you decode Cather’s language Paul’s struggle become clear.
There are some characteristics in this story that ring true for many homosexual men. One of those common characteristics is the way Paul dresses. At the beginning of the story Paul is facing expulsion from school and even though he does not have a lot of money and his clothes are not new, he still dresses meticulously. Cather states, “His clothes were a trifle outgrown and the tan velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but for all that there was something dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and red carnation in his button hole” (336). Later when he goes to New York, he talks with a cabbie who takes him to a men’s clothing shop and Cather states, “[H]e spent upwards of two hours there, buying with endless reconsideration and great care” (347). Most of the homosexual men I know spend several hours on their appearance making sure they are perfect. Now, it could just be that Paul is a meticulous man and likes to dress nicely, but his fascination with flowers, another common stereotype, points to his homosexuality as well. Again, at the beginning of the story, Cather talks about the flower in his button-hole and then when he is in New York: “When he was shown to his sitting-room on the eighth floor, he saw at a glance that everything was as it should be; there was but one detail in his mental picture that the place did not realize, so he rang for the bell boy and sent him down for flowers” (347). When he is out in the city, instead of seeing the building architecture or the people, the first thing he notices are the flowers: “Here and there on the corners were stands, with whole flower gardens blooming under glass cases, against the sides of which the snow flakes stuck and melted; violets, roses, carnations, lilies of the valley – somehow vastly more lovely and alluring that they blossomed thus unnaturally in the snow” (349).
Not only are the stereotypes obvious once the story has ended, but there is always a question as to the mystery behind him. Why is he lying all the time? Why does he feel as if he is being watched? Facing expulsion from school, Paul is asked by his principal why he wants to be there. Knowing that he is lying, Paul states that he wants to be. Cather writes, “This was a lie but Paul was quite accustomed to lying; found it, indeed, indispensable for overcoming friction” (337). Paul also has a tendency of lying to his father. One night after dinner and dishes were done, he requested to go to his friend George’s house to work on his geometry. Knowing that he really was not going to his friend’s house,
Paul bounded upstairs, scrubbed the greasy odour of the dish-water from his hands with the ill-smelling soap he hated, and then he shook over his fingers a few drops of violet water from the bottle he kept hidden in his drawer. He left the house with his geometry conspicuously under his arm, and the moment he got out of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown car, he shook off the lethargy of the deadening days, and began to live again. (344)
         Paul could be using lying as a form of coping mechanism. Lying helps cover things up if you are made to feel ashamed of what you are doing or feeling. This could also be why he has the feeling of being watched all the time. Cather writes, “Paul was always smiling, always glancing about him, seeming to feel that people might be watching him and trying to detect something” (Cather, 337-38). Why would he feel like people were watching him, trying to figure something out if he did not have anything to hide? When a person is trying to figure out their sexuality, they can feel like people are trying to see into them to find out what they are hiding. When Paul is first in New York, he released that feeling and finally relaxed for the first time:
Until now, he could not remember the time when he had not been dreading something. Even when he was a little boy, it was always there – behind him, or before, or on either side. There has always been the shadowed corner, the dark place into which he dared not look, but from which something seemed always watching him […]” (348).
Again, his sexuality could not be what he is dealing with, but Cather never comes out and says one way or the other. Even the principal of his school knew that there was something “not right” with the boy. He once stated:
I don’t really believe that smile of his comes altogether from insolence; there’s something sort of haunted about it. The boy is not strong for one thing. I happen to know t hat he was born in Colorado, only a few months before his mother died out there of a long illness. There is something wrong about that fellow (338).
If he did not know what was amiss with the boy, it was okay with him because anything out of the ordinary was “wrong’’ at the time.
         Not only does Cather use traits in the story that are common to many gay men, she also uses terms that have now become known as words to describe homosexuals. As early as the 1920’s the term gay was being documented as use for homosexuality, it “arises from an extension of the sexualised connotation of ‘carefree and uninhibited’, implying a willingness to disregard conventional or respectable sexual mores” ("Gay"). Cather uses the term gay several times throughout the story to describe certain things that Paul observes. She also uses the terms hysterical, faggot, and fagged-looking. It seems that when she uses the term gay she is using it in the old sense of being bright or showy, but the other terms are not so easy to decipher. Cather uses hysterical in a reference to Paul’s eyes, “His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical brilliance and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy” (337). According to a 1615 definition of hysterical, it: “Originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus” (“Hysterical”). Homosexual men are often referred to as feminine, so saying that something about him is hysterical is similar to saying he is womanly-like, based on the 1615 definition of the word. Cather also uses the term faggot. It seems that the spelling is interchangeable with fagot, but the meanings are the same either way it is spelled. There are many definitions for the term, but, according to Wikipedia, an on-line encyclopedia, the origins of the word are vague. “It is often claimed that the derivation is associated directly with faggot meaning ‘bundle of sticks for burning’, since homosexuals were supposedly burnt at the stake in medieval England” ("Faggot"). There is another meaning that is similar to hysterical, “The word has also been used since the late sixteenth century to mean ‘old or unpleasant woman’” ("Faggot"). When Cather uses the term, it could be interpreted to mean either definition. “He burnt like a faggot in a tempest” (349). It seems coincidental that she uses two terms that have definitions dealing with women when the story is about a boy with questionable actions.
         While he is in New York, Paul forgets about the street that he calls home. He detests everything about Cordelia Street. “Had he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a place where fagged-looking business men got on the early car…” (350). Here Cather refers to men as looking like fags. This is the only time in the story that she comes out and uses the term derogatorily; it would be unlikely that she used the term to mean a bundle of sticks. The other times in the story, hysterical and faggot could have had dual meanings, but fagged-looking could have no other meaning.
         At the end of the story, Paul jumps in front of a train and kills himself. He sees that as his only way out of his personal hell. Dealing with what he was dealing with is hard at any time, coming out is hard enough these days; I can only imagine what it would be like in the 1920’s. Maybe that is why Willa Cather never came out as a lesbian and used terms with dual meanings in her writing. Not until may years later did the literary community start looking at her work and seeing the homosexual undertones. Society does make it easy for a gay person to be out and proud. Pressures are getting easier, but they are still tough to deal with. If you really look into the language that Willa Cather uses, you can begin to see that the issues Paul are dealing with is his homosexuality.

Works Cited
Cather, Willa. “Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament.” American Literature. Ed. William E. Cain. Vol. 2. New York: Penguin Academics, 2004. 336-354. 
“Faggot.” Wikipedia. 2001. 16 Feb 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/faggot_(epithet)>.
“Gay.” Wikipedia. 2001.18 Dec 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/gay>.
“Hysterical.” Online Etymology Dictionary. 2001.Douglas Harper. 7 Feb 2007 <http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=hysterical&searchmode=none>.
Polk, Danne. “Willa Cather (1873-1947).” queertheory.com. <http://www.queertheory.com/histories/c/cather_willa.htm>.