Double Birthday

2. Cather

3. Double Birthday
• The conformism implicit in the American
dream an be stifling.
• The arts give humans the chance to transcend
the petty American materialist dream.
• Folly is a key to authentic friendship.
• Tone: a deep nostalgia for a kind of exotic
American past with strong European ties.

4. Double Birthday
• Judge Hammersly and Mrs. Parmenter give us
a prism though which we may see the
“Alberts.”
• Death of a beautiful young woman is a
standard convention of some short
fiction….we think of Poe and the gothic.

5. Debt to Poe (this is Dana Goia’s idea)
• The defining characteristic of the short
story, Poe affirmed, was its "unity of effect."
• The artist should produce "an intense and
enduring impression, "short enough to be
experienced at one sitting to produce a
temporary "exultation of the soul" in the
reader.

6. Poe
• 1) The importance of originality and effect2) A work
should be brief enough "to read at one sitting"
• 3) "Melancholy is the most legitimate of all the
poetical tones"
• 4) "The death then, of a beautiful woman
is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world
-- and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best
suited . . . are those of a bereaved lover"
• 5) "Circumscription of space" creates a sense of
isolation that connected the work in isolation; "it has
the force of a frame to a picture"