Paul's Case

Flowers, particularly red carnations, are the preeminent symbol throughout Cather’s story. The many references to flowers (forget-me-nots, violets, jonquils, carnations, roses, and lilies of the valley are all mentioned throughout) serve a dual function. First, they symbolize Paul’s desire for beauty and aesthetic pleasure. Their beauty, their fragrances, their association with bourgeois life—all of these are desirable to Paul.

Second, flowers symbolize the trajectory of Paul’s life. A flower grows and eventually achieves its vibrancy and colorful bloom before wilting and dying. This arc applies to Paul’s life. He is born in the dirt (Pittsburgh) before blooming in New York City, where he lives colorfully and lavishly. Finally, he wilts, and his colors fade at the end. Cather makes this explicit by referencing the red carnation at both the beginning and end of the story. At the beginning, when Paul faces the disciplinary panel, “[h]is teachers felt this afternoon that his whole attitude was symbolized by his shrug and his flippantly red carnation flower [...]” (469). The red flower, in full bloom, sets him apart from everyone in Pittsburgh, and it makes him stand out to those around him. Then, at the end, the carnation appears again, this time in an elegiac tone as Paul approaches death: “The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed; all their red glory over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen in the show windows that first night must have gone the same way, long before this” (487). Just like the flower, Paul is drooping, his color gone, and he returns to the earth, “the immense design of things” (488). 

Throughout the story, doorways provide a subtle but no less poignant symbol of Paul’s existence. Doorways, thresholds, and entrances are constantly in Paul’s world and represent the worlds from which he is excluded, or to which he has uneasy access. When Paul follows the German singer’s carriage to a hotel, he watches her enter through the doorways, and Paul, likely not able to enter, imagines himself on the other side of the door: “In the moment that door was ajar, it seemed to Paul that he, too, entered. He seemed to feel himself go after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building, into an exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking ease” (472). Paul’s lack of entry causes him to romanticize the world on the other side. It is this rampant romanticization of the unlived life that brings about Paul’s demise.

Cather also uses the stage as a portal or threshold to another world. Consider his experience at Carnegie Hall, where “it would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly the stage entrance of that theatre was for Paul the actual portal of Romance” (477). Unlike the stage door, which is an actual, physical threshold, the stage entrance is an abstract doorway—this time to romance. The stage becomes an escape from the humdrum of his Pittsburgh life, and he can imagine himself in a better, brighter world.