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"A Losing Game in the End": Aestheticism and Homosexuality in Cather's "Paul's Case"

Willa Cather's homosexuality, for years a well-guarded but scarcely well-kept secret, is by now widely acknowledged. Sharon O'Brien's Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice sensitively traces Cather's personal and artistic development, her emergence from the male-identified male impersonator of her adolescence and youth into the mature woman writer who created the first strong female heroes in American literature. Central to this transformation were Cather's eventual liberation from her early internalized male aesthetic after a long and difficult struggle and her acceptance of her lesbianism, even as she recognized the need to conceal her sexual identity as "the thing not named." As O'Brien remarks, "Throughout her literary career, Cather was both the writer transforming the self in art and the lesbian writer at times forced to conceal 'unnatural' love by projecting herself into male disguises" (215).1 What has not been sufficiently noted, however, is Cather's early contribution to gay male literature and to the debate about homosexuality sparked by the Wilde scandal. More particularly, "Paul's Case," the acclaimed story that marks the beginning of Cather's artistic maturity after a prolonged period of apprenticeship, has not yet been placed in the context of its author's growing awareness of the limits of the masculine