Essay on Paul’s Case A Study in Temperament by Willa Cather

A Symbolic Perception Imagine being entrapped in a life that you did not feel you belonged in. That is the story of Paul in â€Å"Paul’s Case,† written by Willa Cather. He lived in a suburban home where everyone seemed the same and there was a feeling of despair. Paul, who was a young man, felt that his father, teachers and classmates misunderstood him and therefore were unworthy of his company. In the story there are many symbolic elements. Flowers, for instance, symbolize Paul’s personality and life. The parallel between the boy and the flowers is made by the author many times throughout the short story. In the beginning of the story Paul has a meeting with the teachers of his school because he was misbehaving. For the meeting†¦show more content†¦He became lost in the music, plays, and art. While Paul was at home, he would dream about the life he believed himself to be living as â€Å"a morbid desire for cool things and soft lights and fresh flowers† (55). To Paul, people who enjoyed having the presence of flowers seemed to be of a higher class above the rest. That is why he always wore a flower. He describes his neighbourhood, the people he despises to be, â€Å"prosy men who never wore frock coats, or violets in their buttonholes (pg. 60).† He would dream about, â€Å"the flowers he sent (pg. 60),† to members of the stock company who were his â€Å"acquaintances.† Paul wants to be as the flowers, living to all of their extent, saturating in the beauty of life. While Paul was in New York City one of the first things he did was â€Å"[ring] for the bell boy [to send] him down flowers† (62). He was living out his dreams. He was pleased with his surroundings and his style of living during his days in New York and expressed his â€Å"dearest pleasure [was] . . . his enjoyment of his flowers† (66), and goes on to say that he couldn’t remember a time of such bliss. He loved all forms of creative expression and was intrigued by, â€Å"whole flower gardens blooming behind glass windows, against which the snowflakes stuck and melted; violets, roses, carnations, lilies of the valley-somehow vastly more lovely and alluring that they blossomed thus unnaturally in the snow.† (64) The flowers induceShow MoreRelated Young Goodman Brown VS. Paul Essay1045 Words   |  5 Pages Young Goodman Brown vs. Paul nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;After studying the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s â€Å"Young Goodman Brown† and Willa Cather’s â€Å"Paul’s Case†, I began to see many similarities within the two stories. Both of the main characters in each story have characteristics that could be looked at as being alike, but after analyzing each character I started to find that although alike in some aspects, these two characters are very different from one another. At first I noticedRead MoreAnalysis Of Paul s Case 907 Words   |  4 Pagesthe human personality. The case of what constitutes this enigma is one of the many controversies that are analyzed and broken apart in Vincent Parrillo’s chapter, â€Å"Causes of Prejudice.† In particular, human temperament is expounded in Parrillo’s passage, and further observed and experimented with in Willa Cather’s short story â€Å"Paul’s Case.† Parrillo correlates one’s childhood upbringing and surroundings to the maturation of an authoritarian personality, akin to Paul’s rough development that contributesRead MoreAnalysis Of Willa Cather s Paul s Case1009 Words   |  5 Pages In Willa Cather’s â€Å"Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament†, a short story set in Pittsburgh and New York, Cather introduces us to the young Paul. Self-centered, delusional, and some may even argue, narcissistic, Paul is fascinated and encapsulated by the fine arts around him. Whether it be in the theater where he ushers, the art gallery at Carnegie Hall, or the hotel he runs away to in New York, Paul is always finding a way to escape what he considers a hopeless and mundane reality back home, throughRead More Willa Cathers Paul‟s Case: A Study in Temperament Essay1867 Words   |  8 PagesWilla Cather‟s â€Å"Paul‟s Case: A Study in Temperament† (1905) invites the reader to wonder, â€Å"What really is Paul‟s c ase?† Cather provides us with ample clues and descriptions of Paul‟s temperament with remarkable detail and insight into the human psyche considering that she had no formal background in psychology and that she was writing when Sigmund Freud was just beginning to publish his theories and was therefore writing by intuitive observation rather than by using a scientific approach. Because