This document discusses Willa Cather's short story "Double Birthday" and analyzes its influences from Edgar Allan Poe's theories of short fiction. It notes that Cather uses the characters of Judge Hammersly and Mrs. Parmenter to observe the main characters, references Poe's frequent use of a beautiful young woman's death, and discusses Poe's ideas about the short story form emphasizing unity of effect, brevity to be read in one sitting, and use of melancholy tones.

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"