Willa Cather

Paul and Prejudice: Comparative Essay on Tone and Perspective Both Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Willa Cather’s Paul’s Case share a variety of differences in tone and perspective. Although both works deal with trying to make sense of a situation, the way each story conveys their work are contrasting. One way each work differs is through the use of perspective. Having different styles of perspective drastically affects the flow of a story and how the reader can interpret the roles in a…

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady have been captivating readers for almost a century. However, many readers have failed to see a hidden connection between the two novels. In fact, Fitzgerald wrote to Willa Cather “to explain an instance of apparent plagiarism.” He wrote that he had been reading A Lost Lady when he wrote The Great Gatsby and noted the similarity in description between Cather’s Mrs. Forrester and his own Daisy Buchanan. The resemblance between…

Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! was published in the midst of the industrial revolution. She definitely attempted to make a radical statement by establishing the main character in her book as a strong female, with her book coming out during a time when gender roles were constantly being challenged, but there are quite a few hits and misses that Cather made if she tried to make Alexandra out to be the quintessential pioneer. To be a pioneer means to be the first to discover or explore a certain area,…

Cather added that it seemed to her that a novel “is merely a work of imagination in which a writer tries to present the experiences and emotions of a group of people by the light of his own.”2 In that sense we might safely say Huckleberry Finn is a novel…

you ever felt uncomfortable with being yourself? How did you handle that? Hopefully, there was support and an understanding that all of humanity is important. During the time period of the 1800s and 1900s, homosexuality was not socially accepted. In Willa Cather’s short story entitled “Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament” written in 1905, the main character is a homosexual boy who eventually commits suicide. According to the author David A. Carpenter, “Throughout the story, beginning with the…

Stirling McKelvie Mrs. Ivey English IV – AP 10 March 2015 Point of View Essay Written in third-person omniscient point of view, the short story “Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather explores the theme of alienation. Throughout the story, the thoughts and feelings of the characters are expressed. This allows the narrator to reveal the opposition and resentment the other characters feel towards the main character, Paul. Paul also tries to find comfort in Carnegie Hall, a place filled with theatre and…

with merely the clothes on their backs. They had no idea where they would be resting their heads at the end of the day. Typically, where most lived was not glamorous. This is also true for the family of the Shimerdas in the novel My Ántonia by Willa Cather. The Bohemian immigrants came into the small town of Black Hawk, Nebraska where their living quarters were worth much less than they paid. However, their friends, The Burdens', home was severely different. The Burdens were an upper-middle…

Many literary analysts dissect and argue that Paul in Willa Cather’s 1904 publicated creation of Paul’s Case predominant tragic flaw is the suppression of homosexuality as well as the heteronormative culture Paul is constantly striving to veer away from. However, a more apparent perspective surfaces from the dismal conclusion of Paul’s short life. Paul’s crucial struggle was accepting a new world filled with opposing realities that threatened his own. He is forced with the pressure of growing up…

A second example of how the statement works in Willa Cather’s literature is in Lucy Gayheart . This novel is known for being a poetic novel. There are different major events that had happened, throughout the novel, but not all detail was written. Like in Sebastian’s death, how Lucy found out about his death, as well in her own death. Sebastian’s death is read about in a newspaper article by Auerbach. As a reader, we get just a small part of what witness saw. There is no mention don’t about…

Author Willa Cather in her short story, “Paul’s Case”, suggests that the main character Paul is unhappy with his lifestyle, and therefor he devotes himself towards living a life of luxury. She supports this by first showing Paul in his disciplinary meeting at school, then Paul goes to the theater, then he returns after the theater to the dullness and darkness of Cordelia Street. Cather’s purpose is to demonstrate that nothing good comes out of hoping for something that you don't have, and be…