In Cather’s “Paul’s Case,” how would you characterize Paul’s relationship to consumer goods and luxury? How does William Leach’s discussion of the new department stores and their interior design and display influence your reading of Cather at one particular moment in the story?
3 thoughts on “Desire, Luxury, and Department Stores”
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We see in Cather’s story that Paul is a teenager who despises his middle class citizenship. He longs for wealth and extravagance, and loathes his neighborhood and the plainness of it. Although his life is the most natural, he longs for an abstract world of the wealthy class. Paul wants material goods and the correct accessories to display the wealth he wishes to obtain. Leach’s discussion of department stores and how they manipulate the displays to be more attractive makes it obvious as to why Paul was so intrigued by material goods. Since he also strived to look and act like an upper class citizen, we see why he gave in to buying objects he associated with that class and would help him to feel as though he was a part of it.
In Cather’s story it seems that Paul is made to have an unhealthy desire for expensive material consumption. His relationship with consumption is based around class distinctions that he observes while working as an usher. As Cather says Paul develops a “morbid desire for cool things” and a relationship with beauty that relies heavily on a certain degree of artificiality that exists in the material goods of the time that are indicative of high social class. During Paul’s 2-3 hour shopping binge at Tiffany’s, and presumably other department stores, Leach’s discussions on department store design and display shed light on how a person of his age could be consumed by the material available to him and its very specific arrangement. The article also allows us to understand how he would have been coerced into purchasing based on the class distinctions that he aspired to.
Throughout the story we learn that Paul has an obsession with material goods and a desire to be wealthy and have the “correct” clothing items. When Paul first comes to the city he seeks out a new change in clothes and goes to the correct stores for his desired class, picking out exactly what he believes a person of a high class should wear. By going to the magical department stores that Leach describes, it seems to me that Paul only goes to the department store because that is what he should do. Paul wants to be part of the future and modern ways which the department stores represent according to Leach.