Homosexual Identities in Willa Cathers Pauls Case

Jane Nardin National University of Singapore

As long ago as 1975, Larry Rubins essay The Homosexual Motif in Willa Cathers Pauls Case argued that, although this possibility is never explicitly raised, the storys protagonist may well be gay. In a move characteristic of the early 1970s, which might be called the last hurrah of the New Criticism, Rubin suggests that homosexuality functions in the story as a metaphor for more universal concerns. The importance of his thesis, Rubin asserts, lies not so much in the fact that Paul is very probably homosexual, as in the fact that Cather is trying to show us the tragic consequences of the conflict between a sensitive and hence alienated temperament and a narrowly moral, bourgeois environment.1 Had Cather written about homosexuality in and of itself, Rubin claims, this would have been an artistic error: although the story does have the aura of a case history it is a measure of the authors art that she has absorbed the clinical level into the literary, so that the story may be read as an insight into the human condition.2 Rubins essay is also of its time in its refusal to consider the historical context of the story. Arguing that the tale should not be read as a Freudian case study, Rubin asserts that Cather knew nothing about Freud, who was only beginning to publish his theories when the story was conceived.3 Instead of investigating the theories concerning homosexuality of which Cather could have been aware, Rubin simply asserts that she, like Sophocles and Shakespeare, is working through intuitive apprehension, rather than along the lines of any codified or systematized scientific approach.4 In keeping with the New Critical belief that great literature is great by virtue of its timelessness, and not by virtue of its engagement with history, Rubin praises Cather for ignoring the science of her day: This, too, is all to her credit.5 In A Losing Game in the End: Willa Cathers Pauls Case , published in
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2000, Claude Summers faults Rubin for failing to historicise his reading, claiming that the complexity of Cathers story and the perspective on homosexuality in it can be grasped only if the work is read in the context of the aesthetic movement in general and the Wilde scandal in particular.6 Summers demonstrates that in journalism written in the mid-1890s, around the time of his trials, Cather expressed great hostility to Oscar Wilde. In Summerss view, Wildes effeminacy and celebration of artifice offended Cather, whose own aesthetic celebrated the masculine and ordinary. But during the years preceding the publication of Pauls Case in 1905, as Cather redefine[d] the masculine aesthetic of her youth, she modulated her view of Wilde, whom she came to see not only as a discredited aesthete, but also as a persecuted victim.7 Summers suggests that in Pauls Case, the protagonist functions as a stand-in for Wilde. In its ambivalent attitude toward Paul, the story expresses both Cathers continuing anger at Wilde for his refusal to compromise with society and her new sympathy with him as the victim of homophobia. At this point, Summers gives his argument a universalizing twist that brings it closer to Rubins position than he seems to realise. After stressing the need to historicise the story, Summers suddenly shifts his ground, claiming, like Rubin, that homosexuality functions in the story primarily as a metaphor for more significant issues.8 Noting that both Pauls associates and Paul himself fail to exercise imagination in the sense of sympathy for others, Summers concludes that the problem on which the story focuses is the need for agape a religious term meaning spontaneous, altruistic love, which Summers uses loosely as a synonym for understanding. Because homophobia simply stands for the absence of agape, this absence, and not homophobia itself, is the root cause of Pauls alienation.9 I would not argue that Rubin is wrong to see Paul as the representative of other unhappy young men,10 or that Summers is wrong in linking Paul to Wilde, or that Pauls Case does not, like many another literary work, implicitly endorse agape as an ideal of conduct. But a different story emerges when Pauls characterization is related to a more inclusive set of historical circumstances than the one provided by Summers and a more precise geographical background than the hometown milieu cited vaguely by Rubin.11 Instead of reading the story metaphorically, we may do well to take seriously Cathers prosaic claim that Paul was inspired by a student in the Pittsburgh high school at which she taught and that his experiences in New York were based on her own feelings about the city, a claim which Summers brushes aside.12 In analyzing Cathers characterization of her protagonist, three separate historical contexts must be considered. First, we must examine the ways in which homosexuality was represented in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imaginative writing, in order to understand why Cather chose to represent her protagonists sexuality through hints and innuendos. Second, we must consider the theories of contemporary sexologists, in order to understand why Cather attributed particular traits to the hero whose homosexual orientation she wished to establish indirectly. Finally, we need to identify the options that were available to a middle-class American boy, reaching adulthood around 1900, who wanted to forge a homosexual identity, in
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Homosexual Identities in Willa Cathers Pauls Case order to uncover the motives behind Pauls actions. By approaching Pauls Case as a rich and detailed examination of one homosexuals historically specific predicament, it is possible to avoid a logical problem that plagues Rubin and Summers, both of whom argue that although Cathers story superficially seems to be about alienation, it employs a homosexual subtext to suggest metaphorically that it is really about alienation. When she drafted Pauls Case, Cather had already worked as a reviewer and a teacher of literature. She was aware of the ways in which sexual matters could and could not be treated in fiction. As a former aspiring medical student, who had once dissected frogs in her spare time, Cather kept abreast of the putatively scientific theories about sexuality published in the late-nineteenth century.13 As a participant in a Boston marriage, Cather paid attention to recent developments in various homosexual subcultures the sort of thing a homosexual boy might also have investigated. She had visited New York repeatedly and knew that the city was a homosexual mecca. Cather was thus well-qualified to examine the case of a contemporary American homosexual from several perspectives. Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there, Cather wrote in a frequently quoted passage, that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named that gives high quality to the novel.14 Cather could easily have discovered the imaginative power of nameless presences from the way same-sex intimacy was treated in serious nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury American fiction. Several twentieth-century critics, Leslie Fiedler most prominent among them, retrospectively discerned homoerotic sensibilities in a number of nineteenth-century American texts from Moby Dick to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.15 These sensibilities jump off the page today, yet they were buried deeply enough to evade generations of critics uninterested in, or repelled by, homoerotic desire. Cathers contemporary Henry James, always one of her masters, was a true master of indirection in treating sexual matters.16 In an essay on The Beast in the Jungle, Eve Sedgwick infers that James hero is unable to return his friends sexual love simply because she is female, despite the fact that this unspeakable possibility is never voiced.17 Sedgwicks inference is rendered plausible by the many dark hints that James does voice about his protagonist, who has a secret,18 a queer consciousness,19 and suspects himself of monstrosity.20 Cather learned from American novels to use displacements, code phrases, cryptic allusions, and other strategies of subtle indirection to represent the love that dared not speak its name. Some poets were a bit more open than writers of serious fiction. The Calamus poems, which Walt Whitman included in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, were sufficiently frank about their authors sexuality to cause no little uproar upon publication.21 In both Britain and the United States, homosexuals saw exciting possibilities in Whitmans pioneering effort, and a tradition of Catamite poetry by men developed (the name is derived from catamitus, a young male prostitute). Byrne Fone notes that the homoerotic ambience of this traditions most celebrated product, A.E. Housmans A Shropshire Lad (1896), is muted and can be appreciated fully only when it is read in company with the most outspoken British poems
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of the period, such as John Gambril Nicholsons A Garland of Ladslove, whose titles signaled the kind of audience at which they were aimed.22 Cather admired Housmans work, and the highest priority for her 1902 trip to Europe was to seek out the poet, whose bond slave she claimed to be.23 Around 1900, several Americans were producing homoerotic verses, many of which ostensibly dealt with friendship among the ancient Greeks. Hugh McCullochs The Quest of Heracles is a typical example: Antinous returned/ [Heracles] love so greatly that he scarcely yearned/ For love of women.24 Because the least reticent of them reached only self-selected audiences, the Catamite poets stayed out of trouble with the authorities. The writer who did get into legal trouble was of course the well-known Oscar Wilde. Though The Picture of Dorian Gray disguises the nature of Basil Hallwards love for the beautiful Dorian, it was impossible to misunderstand or ignore the novels alarming subtext after the Marquis of Queensberry called Wilde a sodomite. The contemporaneous outpouring of Catamite poetry increased the alarm. The timing of [Wildes] criminal trial [for gross indecency], Fone argues, suggests a connection between the flourishing literature of the 1890s, the increasing visibility and boldness of homosexuals, their efforts to speak out, and this massive act of retribution.25 This cautionary lesson was not lost on Cather, who once described American fiction as the young ladies illusion preserver.26 It wasnt entirely a matter of caution, however. Serious American fiction writers avoided explicit representations of deviant sexuality because several fictional traditions of questionable reputation offered such representations. A few nineteenthcentury French novels by important writers had featured frankly lesbian or bisexual heroines: in Gautiers Mademoiselle de Maupin, Daudets Sapho, and Zolas Nana, the protagonists sexuality is exploited for its shock value or treated as a symptom of social corruption. Though Cather read its products eagerly, this cynical and all-tooFrench tradition struck most Americans as thoroughly offensive. Pornography was even more disreputable: two anonymous English novels of the 1890s, Teleny and The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, presented explicit descriptions of homosexual practices. A few frank treatments of homosexual issues, though not of homosexual sex, appeared in American fiction aimed at a mass audience. In 1895, in response to the recent trial of a lesbian for the murder of her lover, Dr. John Carhart published Norma Trist, or Pure Carbon, a Story of the Inversion of the Sexes. Unlike more literary works about lesbian attraction, such as Jamess The Bostonians, this sensational novel made it clear that its heroines erotic attraction to another woman had been given full, active expression.27 The 1899 popular novel A Marriage Below Zero, by Alfred J. Cohen, made same-sex love its central theme and inaugurated the long-lasting tradition of ending the novel with the suicide of the homosexual character.28 Popular American fiction was granted the same license to treat scandalous material that tabloid journalism enjoyed, although serious fiction, as we have seen, had to uphold high moral standards. The history of A Florida Enchantment (1891), by Archibald Gunter and Fergus Redmond, reveals the different criteria that were
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Homosexual Identities in Willa Cathers Pauls Case used to judge different genres. The book had no artistic pretensions as a critic wrote in 1902, Gunter and Redmonds novels were not meant to be kept in the library, but to be read and thrown away.29 A Florida Enchantment describes the transgendering of two women who swallow sex-change seeds, and it concludes with the marriage of one to a long-standing female friend. Reviewers reacted favorably to this slightly naughty novel, but when it was turned into a Broadway play in 1896, the reviews were unanimously negative, all on grounds that it violated codes of taste and decency.30 Performances in the legitimate theater were intended for educated middle-class audiences, and the sight of a newly minted man, still dressed in womens clothes, pursuing a woman was out of place in such a context. Cathers understanding of the tacit limits governing the representation of sexuality, and the way they were linked to genre, explains why she chose the mode of indirection in writing her story of a homosexual teenager. But this choice created a delicate artistic problem: Pauls homosexuality must be hidden from the common reader, yet revealed to readers concerned with sexual deviance. Cather solves this problem by drawing upon the theories of sexologists in her descriptions of Pauls background, physique, and personality. Fone notes that late nineteenth-century scientists were obsessed with the topic of sexual inversion; over a thousand articles appeared [in medical journals] between 1898 and 1908, in addition to pamphlets and books.31 Articles drawing on sexology began to appear in the popular press, and the word homosexual was coming into use. Cather kept up with these developments. In 1892, for example, she lamented the way sexologists were pathologising romantic friendships between women, which had previously been seen as innocent: What a shame that feminine friendship should be unnatural, she wrote.32 But she agreed that it was. Sexology enabled Cather to characterise Paul as a homosexual without naming his condition and she could assume that some readers would get the point. Before the mid-nineteenth century, sodomy was a legal category, defining certain forbidden sexual acts. Having committed sodomy did not define [the perpetrator] as a person or provide him with an identity.33 But after the 1850s, as scientists developed new ways of thinking about behaviour, sexology attempted to wrest authority for defining sexual abnormalities away from juridical discourse.34 In 1864, Karl Ulrichs published the first of his many scientifically inflected works. He argues that male homosexuality came about when the embryo [in the process of normal development] shed the female sex organ, but the same change did not occur [as it normally did] in the part of the brain that regulates the sex drive.35 Individuals whose prenatal development followed this pattern were congenital inverts. Possessing a female soul in a male body, they had the sexual desires and personalities of women and thus could be thought of as a third sex, intermediate between normal males and females. A male invert was defined as a person and given an identity by his sexuality. Since inversion was inborn, Ulrichs argued that it was neither criminal nor sinful.36 English sexologist Edward Carpenter accepted Ulrichs third sex hypothesis, claiming that male inverts exhibit such female characteristics as evasiveness and vanity.37
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Other sexologists were less sympathetic to the congenital invert than Ulrichs, whose thesis, despite its empiricist underpinnings, had been crafted to further his advocacy of homosexual rights. Degeneracy theory, which formalized the loose ideas about heredity and environment that informed discussions of crime on both sides of the Atlantic in the late nineteenth century, argued that psychiatric and medical problems were transmitted from one generation to another.38 Progressive degeneration was blamed for sexual deviance, as well as for crime. Thus, in his influential Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), Richard von Kraft-Ebbing claims that in almost all cases [of homosexuality] where an examination of the physical and mental peculiarities of the ancestors and blood relatives has been possible, neuroses, psychoses, degenerative signs, etc., have been found.39 In the same year, Benjamin Tarnovsky argued that homosexuality arose when parental genes were damaged by epilepsy, alcoholism, or a number of other psychological or physiological traumas.40 The most widely-read American sexologist of the early twentieth-century, Havelock Ellis, straddled the fence on this controversial issue. Thus, although he was relatively liberal in his refusal to trace homosexuality to hereditary degeneracy,41 Ellis also held that inverts should not have children, for their offspring would probably be of neurotic and falling stock.42 Elliss Sexual Inversion (published in America in 1900) argues that male inverts display feminine traits, especially an interest in the arts. Sexologists drew upon the field of comparative anatomy as they investigated the nature of homosexuality. Comparative anatomy, Somerville notes, which had been the chief methodology of nineteenth-century racial science, gave sexologists a ready-made set of procedures and assumptions with which to scan the body visually for discrete markers of difference.43 As they gathered case histories of deviants, sexologists performed physical examinations. Kraft-Ebbings case histories frequently feature a paragraph describing the subjects anatomical peculiarities, and these details also interest Ellis. Sexological accounts often note some degree of androgyny: Physically, wrote Dr. Allan Hamilton in 1894, many of these men approach the female type.44 Cathers title describes Paul in medical terms, as a case. Though his father and sisters are utterly ordinary, he is nonetheless a hereditary degenerate: his mother was dying while pregnant with the boy, who was affected by the trauma she suffered. He is obviously not strong.45 In sleep Pauls face appears white, blue-veined drawn and wrinkled like an old mans about the eyes, the lips twitching.46 His hands jerk spasmodically and his fingers tremble. His narrow chest[ed] and unusually slender body,47 along with the remarkable eyes that display a certain hysterical brilliancy suggest effeminacy as well as illness.48 As one of his teachers shrewdly remarks, There is something wrong about the fellow.49 Through background information and physical description, Cathers narrator discreetly invokes degeneracy theory to explain her protagonist, aligning him with the subjects of recent case studies. Pauls androgynous body is not the only evidence that his degeneracy takes the form of homosexuality. Pauls unconsummated crush on the actor Charlie Edwards, for whom he works as an unpaid dresser, is compared to unconsummated fantasies of heterosexual pleasure: the stage entrance of that theatre was for Paul the
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Homosexual Identities in Willa Cathers Pauls Case actual portal of Romance . It was very like the old stories that used to float about London of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls there, with palms, and fountains, and soft lamps, and richly appareled women.50 A visceral horror of women is revealed in the involuntary51 way Paul starts back with a shudder, when a female teacher touches him.52 And these sexual proclivities are shown to be congenital. The narrator notes that Paul suffers from a pervasive sense of guilt: He could not remember the time when he had not been dreading something . There had always been the shadowed corner, the dark place into which he dared not look.53 The shadowed corner, whose exposure to publicity Paul fears, hides his deviant desire a desire that must be inborn, because it predates his earliest memories. Paul displays the feminine personality traits that sexology attributed to the invert. Like the third sexer described by Carpenter, he is evasive and dishonest, constantly playing a role, vain of his appearance in his very becoming ushers uniform.54 Like the typical invert described by Ellis and like that most famous invert Oscar Wilde Paul is artistic. His feeling for the theater resembles a secret love,55 and he is capable of los[ing] himself as he contemplates a painting.56 Carpenter was only one of many sexologists who identified a taste for music as the distinguishing characteristic of the male invert. In a 1904 journal article, for example, Dr. William Howard describes a homosexuals response to music: Music is [Mr. As] pleasure and his curse. After attending an opera or recital it is impossible for him to resist the sexual impulse. Rushing from the opera house, trembling and rabidly impulsive, he surges on until he finds the object of his desire.57 Like Mr. A, Paul finds that music affects him as an aphrodisiac: the first sigh of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious spirit within him.58 As he listens, Pauls senses are deliciously, yet delicately fired; concerts feel like orgies of living,59 which are paid for by the physical depression that follows a debauch.60 Such hints enabled readers interested in sexology to diagnose Pauls disorder. But the story offers no evidence that Paul himself has studied the subject. It does, however, suggest that he is aware of developments on the homosexual scene and that he is trying to use his knowledge to forge a satisfying homosexual identity. These developments have recently been studied by a number of historians. Their discoveries can help us to understand the options that would have been available to a boy like Paul and the choices Paul makes among them. Around 1900, George Chauncey notes, the heterosexual-homosexual binarism, which sexology was busily publicising and which was already becoming hegemonic in middle-class sexual ideology, did not yet constitute the common sense of working-class sexual ideology.61 Instead of categorising as homosexuals all men who were sexually interested in other men, this working-class ideology categorised as faggots or fairies the effeminate men who played the womans part in sexual relations by allowing their bodies to be penetrated. But their sexual partners whose gendered style of self-presentation was masculine and who preferred the mans part in sexual activity were categorized more neutrally, as trade or simply as men. Similarly, only the gender-bending masculine lesbian was stigmatised as abnormal;
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the feminine member of a female couple was spoken of as if she were not also a pervert.62 In the 1890s, there were small fairy subcultures in several American cities.63 But New York, which had possessed a homosexual subculture since the 1830s,64 was the only wide-open town for fairies. Fairy prostitutes were a prominent feature of the Bowery and the Tenderloin red-light districts. They were only half-heartedly harassed by the police and by agents of private groups like the Society for the Suppression of Vice, for the primary object of these moral watchdogs was to suppress female prostitution. As noted above, the ban on discussing homosexuality in serious literature did not extend to tabloid journalism. And so, beginning in the 1880s, newspapers like Joseph Pulitzers World and William Randolph Hearsts Journal, whose voyeurism turned urban life into a commodity to be hawked at a penny a copy, reported on the activities of fairies at the New York saloons that encouraged their presence.65 When Cather wrote Pauls Case, then, Americans who followed such matters were likely to be acquainted with the persona of the fairy. A Pittsburgher like Paul could have learned in two ways that fairies signaled their inclinations through their demeanor and clothing: from meeting them on the streets of his home town or from reading about them in the newspapers. The red tie was the most prominent marker of fairy status at the turn of the century, but black and white newspaper cartoons from the period, unable to indicate the color of a tie, often show the nattily dressed, wasp-waisted fairy sporting a large flower in his lapel. Because the working-class fairy was the most conspicuous personification of male same-sex desire in the United States at the turn of the century, adopting the fairy persona offered the most obvious way of acting upon such desire. Some middle-class men seized this option. They often lived double lives, hiding their homosexuality from their families and employers, but sporting the dress, female nicknames, and effeminate manners of the fairy on visits to rough neighborhoods where they were not known. For many, this was a passing phase. There were two reasons why middleclass men did not generally embrace the fairy persona as a permanent identity. First, fairies were, as we have seen, primarily a working-class phenomenon. Tolerated in working-class districts, they were often gawked at by middle-class slummers. And the toleration they enjoyed was by no means perfect. If fairies were widely recognized as social types in the streets of working-class neighborhoods, they were also regarded as easy marks [for robbery and blackmail] by the gangs of youths who controlled much of the traffic on those streets.66 A middle-class man had much to lose by appearing as a fairy, even if he concealed his real identity. Second, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, heterosexual, middle-class American men feared that the social patterns and cultural expectations that had formed [their] sense of themselves as men were being challenged or undermined.67 One challenge was the rise of large corporations [that] transformed the meaning of work performed by many middle-class men. Increasing numbers of men lost their independence as they became the salaried employees of other men.68 A second challenge to middle-class male identity was the womens suffrage campaign, which
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Homosexual Identities in Willa Cathers Pauls Case some men saw as an attack on their prerogatives as the heads of families. A third challenge was posed by changing views of sexuality. During the Victorian era, sex-forprocreation was often seen as a biologically determined imperative, a purpose inherent in the structure and function of female or male bodies and organs.69 Many middle-class men who were raised in the mid-nineteenth century learned to suppress non-procreative sexual desire even within marriage. But with the spread of birth control information, the procreative norm was on its way out, a pleasure ethic was on its way in.70 The new pleasure ethic threatened mature mens control of their sons, who might be tempted to reject both the discipline needed to repress their sexual impulses and that needed to resist the consumer pleasures offered by the capitalist city, with dire financial consequences.71 The result of these threats was a renewed emphasis on conventional masculine qualities, apparent in the big stick rhetoric of Theodore Roosevelt, who deplored the effeminate tendencies of the era.72 A cult of muscularity developed among the middle-classes, as men worked to heighten their physical difference from women. It was not a comfortable time for a middle-class man to embrace androgyny, and in the long run, he was likely to reject the persona of the fairy for this reason, if for no other. However, as Chauncey notes,
Forms of speech, dress, or demeanor that might be ridiculed as womanly, effeminate, or inappropriate to a real man in one cultural group might be valued as manly, worldly, or appropriate to a cultured (or sensitive) man in another. This made it possible for men to try to recast gay cultural styles that might be read as signs of effeminacy as signs instead of upper-class sophistication.73

And so middle-class men, who chose the appellation queer as their self-descriptor, began to construct new personae. Not so blatantly gay as either the Wildean aesthete or the fairy, the queer used his cultured style to disguise his inclinations from heterosexuals, while discreetly revealing them to other queers. Queers as a group were more likely than fairies to regard themselves as manly, and this was at once the cause and the effect of their chosen style of self-presentation.74 Becoming a queer allowed a middle-class man to distance himself from the fairies whose androgyny marked them as outsiders, and so to bolster his self-respect at a time when manliness was highly valued. When readers first meet Paul, as a high school student, the description of his mannerisms and dress supports the conclusion that this son of a businessman of moderate means is experimenting with the persona of the fairy.75 He flaunts his aestheticism, telling his teachers, for example, that he has no time to fool with theorems, because his involvement with the arts is so demanding.76 His teachers find his theatrical mannerisms peculiarly offensive in a boy.77 Paul always appears suave and smiling, and even though his clothes are shabby, there is something of the dandy about him.78 He wears the jewelry, four-in-hand necktie, and scandalous buttonhole flower that distinguish the fairy in contemporary cartoons plus some violet-scented cologne.79 But it is clear that this mode of self-presentation causes Paul more problems than it solves.
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The adult denizens of Pauls middle-class community are suffering from the contemporary crisis of masculinity, which Cather analyses with impressive accuracy. To neutralise the loss of manly power inflicted by their status as wage slaves in large corporations, Pauls potbellied neighbors on the suggestively named Cordelia Street take vicarious pride in the sagacity of their various chiefs and overlords, Pittsburghs notorious iron kings.80 They pride themselves upon their procreative powers and smile to see their own proclivities reproduced in their offspring.81 They believe that their young sons ought to be earning a little and spending almost nothing.82 These men defend themselves against self-doubt by emphasising several key elements of old-fashioned, middle-class masculinity: reproductive sexuality, paternal authority, and hostility to the nascent ethic of consumption. A father of this type would hardly be pleased to see his son putting on dandified airs, even if he failed to fully understand their implications. Not surprisingly, Pauls father pressures his son to pattern himself after a young neighbor, who had once,
been a trifle dissipated, but in order to curb his appetites and save the loss of time and strength that a sowing of wild oats might have entailed, had taken his chief s advice, oft reiterated to his employees, and at twenty-one had married the first woman whom he could persuade to share his fortunes. She happened to be an angular school-mistress, much older than he, who also wore thick glasses, and who had now borne him four children, all near-sighted like himself.83

Although reputed to be a young man with a future, this neighbor is only a clerk and a clerk he will remain if the past of the older Cordelia Street men is a prologue to his future.84 For in their day, those underlings were as industrious and conformist as he. The narrator implies that the libido which the young man has diverted from pleasure seeking to the service of ambition has been short-sightedly squandered. The men of Cordelia Street identify with the iron kings who employ them, just as Cordelia identified with Lear. But the text shows this identification to be a form of false consciousness. And their procreative sexuality is exposed as an equally absurd source of pride. Paul feels nothing but loathing for the respectable beds in which his neighbors tepidly cavort.85 And readers are encouraged to sympathise with his choice of effeminacy over masculinity, of consumption over production, and of art over arithmetic. But because those choices expose the boy to constant persecution from adults, we can understand why he might be on the lookout for a new identity. If Paul has participated in Pittsburghs small homosexual subculture, his fairylike airs may have brought him some sexual partners. This is perhaps implied by his uneasy recollection that he has done things that were not pretty to watch, for the nature of these unsavoury acts remains pointedly unspecified.86 But his marked effeminacy is as objectionable to ordinary Pittsburgh teenagers as it is to his father. Changing into his ushers uniform in the presence of a several other youths, Paul, excited by this situation and twanging all over, teases the boys until, telling him that he was crazy, they put him down on the floor and sat on him.87 Among his peers, Paul is not merely a case, but an outcaste as well.
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Homosexual Identities in Willa Cathers Pauls Case Pauls longing for a different persona leads him to study the newspapers which report on life outside Pittsburgh. Paul has pasted pages of description about New York hotels, cut from the Sunday papers in his scrapbook, and he can hardly have failed to learn about other aspects of New York social life from the same sources.88 This study would have informed him of New Yorks status as a relatively open city for homosexuals. It would also have informed him of an alternative to the unsatisfactory fairy style he has adopted: the newly developed style of the well-off queer, an option available only in the biggest, most sophisticated city of them all. Paul dreams of becoming a new man in New York, and he never considers another residence: Not once, but a hundred times Paul had planned [his] entry into [the city].89 After his father puts him to work in an office, Paul decides to realize his dream. Revealing his degeneracy in the readiness with which he takes to crime, he embezzles a large sum. Arriving in New York, he transforms himself from fairy to queer. Luggage, street clothes, dress clothes, hats, shoes, silver toilet articles, and a residence at the Waldorf convert Paul into a more manly kind of boy, an apparently wealthy sophisticate.90 For the first time, he is able to behave with dignity and in no way [make] himself conspicuous.91 The worst problem with Pauls new identity is that so much money is required to support it. Sustained by a finite sum of stolen money, Pauls transformation can only be temporary. Even as a temporary identity, however, Pauls queer persona does not prove completely satisfactory. In his elegant disguise, Paul feels invisible to the gaze of the heterosexual world, and initially he desires only to enjoy the self-confidence generated by his masquerade. Blending in with the rich, he is not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to meet or know any of these people.92 But other details imply that Pauls sexual desires will impel him toward dangerous human contacts. Queer identity was, after all, a means of satisfying sexual desires in a dignified manner not an end in itself. Riding down Fifth Avenue, Paul cant help noticing the boys on display: boys in woolen mufflers boys in livery.93 The narrator describes his response in sexualized language: Paul experiences a spasm of realization the text of all romances, the nerve-stuff of all sensations, was whirling about him . He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.94 Paul still flames like a faggot, though he is no longer easily identifiable as one. Soon Paul makes the kind of personal contact he had wisely planned to avoid. He falls in with,
a wild San Francisco boy, a freshman at Yale The young man offered to show Paul the night side of the town, and the two boys went off together after dinner, not returning to the hotel until seven oclock the next morning. They had started out in the confiding warmth of a champagne friendship, but their parting in the elevator was singularly cool.95

With her usual reticence where the sexual subtext is concerned, the narrator does not reveal the reasons for the breach between Paul and the freshman. If the boys visited a fairy resort while touring the towns night side, Pauls drunken response to the licentious atmosphere could well have revealed his sexual tastes, with the
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results described. This episode implies that Pauls impersonation of a cultured queer isnt sufficiently authoritative to survive scrutiny by heterosexuals while signaling his desires to other gay men. His masquerade is doubly unsustainable, so Paul, following the tradition inaugurated by the hero of A Marriage Below Zero, decides to commit suicide. After realizing that shooting himself is not the way he wants to die, he chooses instead to throw himself under a train.96 No wonder. The railroad is the quintessential symbol of modernity, and Paul is modernitys victim. Modernity, after all, produced large metropolitan cities like New York, which alone could support a range of homosexual subcultures. Modernity also produced the mass circulation newspapers that informed provincial lads of the opportunities available in the metropolis. As the train hits him, Paul drop[s] back into the immense design of things.97 But these words, which conclude the story, leave an unanswered question: in what sense is Pauls death part of an immense, yet unnamed, design? In the light of the storys subtext, its concluding words make sense. A hereditary degenerate, Paul cannot, originally, either eradicate his deviant desires or find an acceptable way to express them. He turns to crime because ill-gotten gains seem to promise him a satisfactory identity. Consumer capitalism with its tacit promise that a man can actually be whatever his possessions imply that he is bears much responsibility for the manner in which Paul attempts to solve his identity problem. But Pauls Case does more than simply treat consumer capitalism in a general way. Through its references to Pauls sexuality, it analyzes one particular kind of latenineteenth-century consumer: the middle-class, urban, gay man, who consumes both sexual and material pleasures. Pauls homosexuality is rooted in nature, while its tragic outcome results from a number of complementary social forces. His death thus fits into a design in which both the natural and social worlds participate. With the advent of feminism and gay studies, critics and biographers broke the diffident silence surrounding Cathers own sexuality.98 They have explored the implications of the fact that, according to some definitions of the term, Cather could be called a lesbian, though she was reticent about her private life and never used the word to describe herself. In a groundbreaking 1984 article, Sharon OBrien argues that the most prominent absence and the most unspoken love in [Cathers] work are the emotional bonds between women that were central to her life . [S]he is the lesbian writer forced to disguise or conceal the emotional source of her fiction.99 Because OBrien believes that lesbian desire is the source of Cathers art, she assumes that such desire must be present in Cathers fiction, and she finds it displaced into the landscape and into male characters who yearn for a woman they have lost, as Jim Burden does in My ntonia.100 For OBrien, such frustrated lovers are really lesbians in male attire. Marilee Lindemann notes that during the late 1980s and 1990s, many critics, following OBrien, began combing [Cathers fiction] for evidence of how sexuality is transformed into textuality, of how lesbianism is masked or disguised.101 But the most important of these critics, Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler, both find OBriens account too simple to fit Cathers work. Sedgwick suggests that as a lesbian, Cather could present masked versions of her own personality and plight in female charac42

Homosexual Identities in Willa Cathers Pauls Case ters, outcast characters, happily married men, and male friends, as well as in the bereft male lovers discussed by OBrien. Unmasking the author is thus a difficult task. Noting that the eponymous dwelling in The Professors House may allude to the enabling provision for Cathers own writing of a room of her own by Isabelle McClung, the woman Cather adored, as well as to the provision of a stable domestic routine by Edith Lewis, the woman who functioned as Cathers spouse, Sedgwick suggests that the novel expresses Cathers different feelings for these two friends through two different translations that cross accepted lines of demarcation. Cather represents her romantic feelings for Isabelle via the gorgeous homosocial romance of two men on a mesa in New Mexico, and she represents her husbandly feelings for Edith via the conventional but enabling heterosexual marriage of a historian.102 Although lesbianism could not in Cathers time freely become visible as itself , Sedgwick argues that Cather represented it fruitfully through these strategies of indirection.103 Agreeing with Sedgwick that complex translations are central to Cathers treatment of sexuality, Butler rejects the claim that they offer indirect representations of a timeless lesbian reality. Segwick errs, Butler suggests, in assuming that there exists an original truth about lesbianism which could not be represented explicitly in Cathers day because of censorship, but which could be represented indirectly via translations like those discussed above.104 For Butler, lesbian sexuality has no existence apart from its representations in discourse: What we might now be tempted to call lesbian is itself constituted in and through the discursive sites at which a certain transfer of sexuality takes place, Butler writes.105 In arguing that the translated discourse characterizing Cathers texts cannot refer to anything outside them because there is no ahistorical [gay or lesbian] sexuality to act as a referent,106 Butler overlooks the existence of a historical sexuality to which these texts might well refer. Though serious fiction could not represent homosexuality explicitly, homosexuality was being practiced in particular ways by real men and women, and it was being represented explicitly, without refraction or translation, in other kinds of contemporary texts. Cather studies, Lindemann writes, has been transformed in the last thirty years. She is no longer merely Nebraskas first lady of letters, whose well-wrought paeans to the American Dream earned the modestly respectful attention of myth and symbol critics.107 Lindemanns Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather (2005) reveals a turn toward history in recent Cather criticism. The assembled essays describe Cather as an acute observer of American life,108 whose fiction responded to changes in legal theories of property and contract, to the influx of so-called New Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, and to other historical developments. This essay attributes a similar level of awareness to Cathers treatment of homosexuality.

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Literature & History Notes

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1 Larry Rubin, The Homosexual Motif in Willa Cathers Pauls Case, Studies in Short Fiction, 12 (1975), 131. 2 Ibid., 129. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Claude J. Summers, Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall, Studies in a Male Homosexual Literary Tradition (New York, 1990), p. 63. 7 Ibid., p. 66. 8 Ibid., p. 68. 9 Ibid. 10 Rubin, The Homosexual Motif , 131. 11 Ibid.,p. 128. 12 Summers, Gay Fictions, p. 66. 13 James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1987), p. 71. 14 Willa Cather, The Novel Demeuble, Not under Forty (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1988), p. 50. 15 Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson (eds), Homosexual Themes in Literary Stuides (New York, 1992), p. xii. 16 Woodress, Willa Cather, p. 108. 17 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic, in Dynes and Donaldson (eds), Homosexual Themes, p. 323. 18 Ibid., p. 358. 19 Ibid., p. 378. 20 Ibid., p. 379. 21 Dynes and Donaldson (eds), Homosexual Themes, p. xi. 22 Byrne Fone, Homophobia: A History (New York, 2000), p. 281. 23 Woodress, Willa Cather, p. 158. 24 Quoted in Stephen Wayne Foster, Beautys Purple Flame: Some Minor Gay American Poets, 17861936, in Dynes and Donaldson (eds), Homosexual Themes, p. 142. 25 Fone, Homophobia, p. 308. 26 Quoted in Sharon OBrien, The Thing Not Named: Willa Cather as a Lesbian Writer, in Estelle Freedman, et al (eds), The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs (Chicago, 1985), p. 79. 27 Jonathan Katz, The Gay/Lesbian Almanac (New York, 1983), p. 159. 28 Dynes and Donaldson (eds), Homosexual Themes, p. xii. 29 Quoted in Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, N.C., 2000), p. 40. 30 Ibid., p. 53. 31 Fone, Homophobia, p. 275. 32 Quoted in Neil Miller, Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present (New York, 2006), p. 59. 33 Ibid., p. 14. 34 Somerville, Queering the Color Line, p. 18. 35 Miller, Out of the Past, p. 15. 36 Ibid., p. 15. 37 Ibid., p. 21. 38 David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago, 1988), p. 411. 39 Quoted in Nicholas C. Edsall, Towards Stonewall: Homosexuality and Society in the Modern Western World (Charlottesville, Virginia, 2003), p. 132.

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40 Fone, Homophobia, pp. 2745. 41 Katz, The Gay/Lesbian Almanac, p. 151. 42 Quoted in Miller, Out of the Past, p. 20. 43 Somerville, Queering the Color Line, p. 25. 44 Quoted in Katz, The Gay/Lesbian Almanac, p. 258. 45 Willa Cather, Pauls Case, in Stories, Poems, and Other Writings (New York, 1992), p. 470. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., p. 471. 48 Ibid., p. 468. 49 Ibid., p. 470. 50 Ibid., pp. 4778. 51 Ibid., p. 469. 52 Ibid., p. 468. 53 Ibid., p. 481. 54 Ibid., p. 471. 55 Ibid., p. 477. 56 Ibid., p. 470. 57 Quoted in Katz, The Gay/Lesbian Almanac, pp. 31112. 58 Cather, Pauls Case, p. 471. 59 Ibid., p. 473. 60 Ibid., pp. 4734. 61 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 18901940 (New York, 1994), p. 48. 62 Katz, The Gay/Lesbian Almanac, p. 144. 63 Ibid., p. 297. 64 Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, p. 355. 65 Chauncey, Gay New York, p. 39. 66 Ibid., p. 59. 67 Ibid., p. 111. 68 Ibid. 69 Katz, The Gay/Lesbian Almanac, p. 142. 70 Ibid., p. 143. 71 Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, p. 366. 72 Ibid., p. 393. 73 Chauncey, Gay New York, p. 106. 74 Ibid., p. 107. 75 Cather, Pauls Case, p. 473. 76 Ibid, p. 479. 77 Ibid, p. 468 (emphasis added). 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., p. 469. 80 Ibid., p. 475. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., p. 476. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., p. 474. 86 Ibid., p. 481. 87 Ibid., p. 471.

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88 Ibid., p. 480. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., p. 485. 91 Ibid., p. 484. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., p. 482. 94 Ibid., p. 483. 95 Ibid., p. 484. 96 Ibid., p. 487. 97 Ibid., p. 488. 98 Marilee Lindemann, Introduction, in Marilee Lindemann (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather (Cambridge, 2005), p. 3. 99 OBrien, The Thing Not Named, p. 68. 100 Ibid., p. 84. 101 Lindemann, Introduction, p. 3. 102 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Across Gender, Across Sexuality: Willa Cather and Others, in Ronald Butters, John Clum, and Michael Moon (eds), Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives in Literature and Culture (Durham, N. C., 1989), p. 68. 103 Ibid., p. 69. 104 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York, 1993), p. 145. 105 Ibid., p. 162. 106 Ibid., p. 145. 107 Lindemann, Introduction, p. 3. 108 Ibid.

Address for correspondence

Dr Jane Nardin, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, Blk AS5, 7 Arts Link, Singapore 117570. Email: ellnjb@nus.edu.sg

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