Cordelia Street Symbol Analysis

In Pittsburgh, Paul lives with his father and sisters on Cordelia Street, part of a middle-class neighborhood some distance from downtown. On Cordelia Street, the houses all look the same and contain the same kind of people—businessmen whose families dutifully attend church and have few interests outside gossip and business. Cordelia Street represents all that Paul despises about his home—its shabbiness, its humdrum concern for moneymaking, its embrace of the common and the ordinary, and its ethic of limited improvement. As with many aspects of Paul’s life, the street is associated with a visual characteristic—that of colorlessness—as well as with an odor: that of daily cooking. The story refers to “Cordelia Street” as a shorthand for everyday life itself, one that Paul dreams of leaving behind for a life of luxury and excitement. But the story also represents Cordelia Street as possibly worse than just dull: its values leave no room for difference, including sexual difference, and thus exacerbate Paul’s feelings of alienation. Cordelia Street is variously imagined as a jail or as a place where Paul might drown, and by the end of the story, when he imagines that Cordelia Street has become the entire world, the infinite expansion of this dreary place underlines just how trapped Paul has come to feel in his failure to escape his hometown and its values.