ABSTRACT
In 1918, Willa Cather began her novel my ntonia with a prologue in which an author emerges, a narrating figure, who is never introduced, indeed, never named. This prologue is in fact called an introduction, as if written by someone other than the author, perhaps as an introduction to the author himself, Jim Burden. To read Cathers text as a lesbian text is to initiate a set of complications that cannot be easily summarized, for the challenge takes place, often painfully, within the very norms of heterosexuality that the text also mocks. The introduction to schoolboy Paul in Pauls Case makes clear that he is a figure under the ban of suspension. Pauls body refuses to cohere in an ordinary sense, and the body parts which nevertheless hang together appear discordant precisely because of a certain happy and anxious refusal to assume the regulatory norm.
