The Theme of Fatherhood and Faithfulness in Two Stories

Isolation in “To Room Nineteen” and “Paul’s Case”

At root in Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” is a young boy’s fear of his father, which is the most devastating aspect of the story. As in Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen”, in Cather’s the ultimate problem falls on the man who should be more empathetic and loving. In both stories, it is a lack of love and empathy on the part of the man—the husband in Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” and the father in Cather’s “Paul’s Case”—that pushes the respective wife and son of the stories into total isolation.

The “failure of intelligence” identified by Lessing in “To Room Nineteen” is not a reference to Susan’s gradual descent into madness but rather a condemnation of her husband Matthew for his inability to understand and empathize with his wife’s illness (875). He simply sees her as unreasonable and cruelly dismisses her needs. As her husband, he is bound to love her and support her as though she is his own flesh—but an indiscretion earlier in their marriage has already revealed what type of husband he is: one who puts his own feelings first and negates those of others around him; in short, he is a self-centered husband and his inability to love his wife as she deserves and needs to be loved leads her into a pit of emotional isolation from which she cannot escape. There is no hope for her in the material realm or in the spiritual, since there is only but one moment in the entire story when she kneels to pray, and it is then more an act of terror and desperation than of genuine faith. Similarly, Cather’s “Paul’s Case” is a tale of despair exhibited through a young man’s isolation from contemporary society. He is attracted by the allure of the lavish night life of the theater and big city, yet he possesses none of the virtues that would enable to rise up and join that social life in a meaningful way. He steals, impersonates a wealthy patron, and then hurls himself in front of a train to avoid the coming retribution.

Paul and Susan differ in their isolation in terms of social circumstances: Paul is a young lad; Susan is a married woman with children. He is unhappy with his boring town and its lack of a culture or social life. She is unhappy with the lack of meaning in her life. Paul sees no meaning in the ho-hum of everyday life. His father tries to get him to see the young married man at the iron company as a role model—but Paul is more impressed by his actor friend Charley, whose life seems exciting and free to Paul. And yet Paul’s attitude is not without justification: his actor friend “recognized in Paul something akin to what churchmen term ‘vocation’” (Cather 9). Paul has to some degree been called to be part of that ethereal world of the arts. His father cannot and will not understand it. Susan, on the other hand, has been called to be a wife and mother—but there is no sense of it meaning anything, since she does not have the true love of her husband: Lessing writes: “Their love for each other? Well, that was nearest it. If this wasn’t a centre, what was? Yes, it was around this point, their love, that the whole extraordinary structure revolved” (877). The problem of course is that the structure is failing because the husband’s love is lacking.