Answer to Question 1
- Delia married out of love. Sykes, she believes, brought only lust to the union (a longing after the flesh). Two months after the wedding, he gave her the first of many brutal beatings. In town, he is notorious for beating her and she for surviving his savage assaults. Sykes has frequently disappeared to squander his irregular earnings while Delia has worked as a laundress to pay their bills. Delias hard work wounds Sykess masculine pride: it reminds him that he cannot support her. Sykes is now adulterously involved with Bertha. Delia is not surprised to discover that he is trying to kill her.
Answer to Question 2
- Robinson has this to say about Cathers view of Paul:
As if to underscore her own intuition in regard to the story, Willa gave it the subtitle A Study in Temperament, and to the modern reader the pathological attributes of Pauls malaise are more persuasive than the romantic aspects. Willa told George Seibel that she drew on two boys who had been in her classes for the character of Paul, but to others she confessed how much of her own hunger and frustration were embodied in the unhappy boys flight from the drab reality of his daily life and in his instinctive reaching out for beauty.
In other words, we today tend to think Paul seriously disturbed, but apparently Cather didnt see him that way. In conflict with school, neighbors, and family, Paul seems to her an admirable victim. Cather often sticks up for the lonely, sensitive individual pitted against a philistine provincial societyas in her famous story The Sculptors Funeral.
Pauls Case was featured in the PBS television film series
The American Short Story. It is available on video and DVD from Library Video Company at
www.libraryvideo.co m. Short scenes from the script of Ron Cowens adaptation are included in
The American Short Story, Volume 2 (New York: Dell, 1980), and invite comparison with the original.
A detailed plan for teaching Pauls Case is offered by Bruce E. Miller in
Teaching the Art of Literature (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1980). To get students involved in the story before they read it outside of class, Miller suggests reading passages from the early part of the story (before Paul flees to New York) and summarizing what happens, and then asking students how theyd imagine Cather would continue the story. He advises the instructor to show the class a few photographs of adolescent boys and to ask how closely the pictures reflect students mental images of Paul. The point is to spark a discussion of Pauls complex character. Is he a cheat? A victim? A hero? Various opinions are likely to emerge, and students may come to see that the different views of Paul are not necessarily incompatible with each other, and that Cather has accomplished the difficult feat of delineating a complex character who, though flawed, engages the readers sympathy.
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