SOURCE: Summers, Claude J. “‘A Losing Game in the End’: Aestheticism and Homosexuality in Cather's ‘Paul's Case.’” Modern Fiction Studies 36, no. 1 (spring 1990): 103–19.

In the following essay, Summers examines “Paul's Case” in the context of Cather's opinions about Irish writer Oscar Wilde and her retreat from the male-centered aestheticism that she espoused early in her career.

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...