Paul's Case

"Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament" is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in McClure's Magazine in 1905. It also appeared in a collection of Cather's stories, The Troll Garden (1905). For many years, "Paul's Case" was the only one of her stories that Cather allowed to be anthologized.

Around the turn of the century, Pittsburgh was an industrial center with a successful class of business leaders, the most successful of whom, according to Cather's story, could manage their companies while traveling in Europe. New York City, on the other hand, was a place one escaped to, a center of fine living and society, and “the symbol of ultimate glamor and cosmopolitan sophistication at that time.”

The symbolism of this lifestyle in "Paul's Case" is the luxurious Waldorf Astoria Hotel. The cities offer contrasting models of the humdrum life of routine and life lived in high style.

Paul, a Pittsburgh high school student, is frustrated with his middle-class life. He dreams of another life, in which, he associates with concerts and theater, though his appreciation of the arts is more social and superficial than aesthetic. For example, he enjoys a symphony concert not for the music but for the atmosphere: "the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable splendor." He steals money to support a short escapade in New York City, but once he exhausts his funds, he commits suicide rather than allow his father to take him back to Pittsburgh.

Paul's teachers and father refer to "Paul's case," representing him at a distance and as an example of someone to be studied, handled, and managed. The term enables Cather to adopt "the voice of medical authority."

At the start of the story Paul is getting suspended from a Pittsburgh High School for a week. He meets with the principal and his teachers and they complain about his "defiant manner" in class, and the "physical aversion" he exhibits toward his teachers. Paul's teachers also mention that his mother has died back when he was a child in Colorado. He then goes to work at the Pittsburgh music hall Carnegie Hall. Here he enjoys donning his uniform, he performs his job as an usher with enthusiasm, as if he were the host of a grand social event. He stays for the concert and enjoys not so much the music as the social scene. After the concert he follows the soloist and imagines life inside her hotel. Returning home very late, he enters through the basement to avoid a confrontation with his father with the fear his father will mistake him for a burglar and shoot him.

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