The plot
The story takes place in a hotel on the Italian coast on a rainy day. We are introduced to an American couple waiting out the rain in their room above the town square. He is reading. She is looking out the window. The wife spots a cat outside, huddling under a table in the rain, and decides to go out to rescue it. Her husband, with no great concern, tells her not to get wet and goes back to his reading.
Downstairs, the owner or "padrone" of the hotel bows to the wife and Hemingway lingers for a moment on all the reasons why the wife likes him so much. She goes outside, followed by the maid with an umbrella, but doesn't find the cat and returns to her room. The husband, George, is still reading as the wife sits down before her mirror and starts listing the array of things she wants and wants to change. Frustrated, George quickly tells her to "shut up" and returns to his book. The wife complains that if she can't have any of the other things on her list, she at least wants a cat.
Just then, there's a knock at the door. It's the hotel maid, holding a large cat—a gift for the "Signora," she tells them, from the padrone.
Setting
An Italian Seaside Town on a Rainy Day
This story is set in a small, coastal Italian village. This town may have been familiar to Hemingway, as he was stationed in Italy during World War I. The Great War happens to be tremendously present in this story, too. Remember the War Monument in the public garden? It's one of the things the wife sees from her perch at the window.
If you've ever been to Europe, you may have noticed that these sorts of monuments are in pretty much every town, commemorating the citizens of that particular town who were lost to the violence. The fact that the story was written in 1925 hints to us that the story must take place pretty near 1918, the year the war ended.
The sheer scope of World War I's tragedy and destruction across Europe was immense and unprecedented. It wiped out nearly an entire generation of young men and left the landscape scarred with trenches, craters from bombs, and half-populated towns. The fact that the war was over, however, also meant a period of relief and celebration amid the mourning. In the opening paragraph, Hemingway juxtaposes the painters and colors in the public garden with the war memorial. This is a pretty good representation of the dueling sorrow and celebration in the years following the armistice. The town in the story is on the seaside, too, which suggests it's as a place for vacationers, for people wanting to get away and forget.
Still, Hemingway doesn't set this story on your typical sunny day on vacation. The relentless rain and the way it envelops the whole scene—gardens, sea, square—conveys a feeling of imprisonment. No one's going out, there's no moving around, no distraction. Rainy days in vacation towns also have a more disappointing feeling to them than rainy days elsewhere. It sort of hints that things aren't what they're supposed to be, or they're not what people hoped for when they set out on holiday. Hm…sound at all similar to a certain marriage in this story?
Characters
American Wife
George
Padrone, the hotel-keeper
The maid
Point of view
Third Person, Omniscient (know-everythino)
You might think the narrative perspective of this story sounds very third person: the basic sentences and statements seem strictly factual, and we don't get a sense that the narrator has an opinion or bias. Or do we? It does seem that we have a bit more intimate connection with what's going on in the wife—more so than any other character. She's the one we travel with.
Our view of the hotel owner in particular is filtered through the wife's mind: Hemingway's perspective is more focused on what she feels and thinks about him than it is on the padrone himself. By staying in third person, Hemingway can also convey things about her that she might not be aware of in herself, like her feelings, which are described in a deeper way than she could articulate in speech. In this way, the narrator's omniscience (all-knowingness) allows Hemingway to both remain on the surface, above what characters may be thinking for themselves, but also to go much deeper than those personal conscious thoughts.
Theme:
Gender
Hemingway barely describes the American wife in "Cat in the Rain." Is she pretty? Is she tall? Is she a blonde or brunette? We have no idea. The only physical description we get is of her short hai...
Foreignness and The Other
The opening sentence of "Cat in the Rain" introduces this theme perfectly: There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel. (1)Even though we proceed through the story from the perspective of t...
Dissatisfaction
Have you ever seen or used a pressure cooker? If the marriage in "Cat in the Rain" were a piece of kitchen equipment, that's probably what it would be. The wife's restlessness is a mounting force i...
Isolation
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Hemingway is an author who takes the material world very seriously. So before we get all crazy-analytical with things, stop and consider this for a second: that the cat in the rain is perhaps just a cringing, drippy, unhappy cat under a table.
Let's imagine this soaking wet cat for a minute. It has to be pretty pitiful. A horse or a dog in the rain is one thing, but there's something really wretched about a wet cat. It's basically trapped, too, beneath its little table-shelter in the plaza. The rain is pouring down so hard that it's trying to make itself as "tight" and small as possible to stay dry. As the American wife so perceptively says:
"It isn't any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain" (30).
Hold up—did you catch that part where the cat was described as "tight"? A bit later in the story, Hemingway uses the same word to describe the way the wife feels around the padrone: "tight" Also with the silly quote above, we hear the wife sympathize with the cat. If we match this sympathetic statement alongside the shared adjective "tight," we'd say we have enough evidence to consider the cat as a symbol for the wife—or at least for some aspect of her.
There's something in the cat that the wife both wants and identifies with, which means that it's a symbol that works in at least two ways. Think about the cat's isolation, pitifulness, its lack of protection, and also the hostility of its surroundings.
All of these things remind us of the wife's own situation with her husband. She, too, is in an environment that's far from ideal, which explains why she might sympathize with the cat. The word that she uses in her statement about the kitty—"fun"—is also echoed later when she tells her husband that if she can't "have any fun," she should at least have a cat. When you're dealing with a writer who is as choosey with his adjectives as Hemingway, the repetition of a word is a big huge deal.
So, if the wife identifies with the cat's dire straits, what might she want from it? Well, think back to that adjective that they share: "tight." The cat's tightness and the "small, tight" feeling that the wife has before the padrone, are both instances of them being or feeling diminutive. It's the protection of the table that makes the cat tighten up and the largeness of the padrone that causes this in the wife. The protectiveness and respectfulness she sees in the padrone makes the wife want to tighten and draw towards him. She's experiencing her own sensitivity and vulnerability.
Amazing isn't it? The wet kitty doesn't get more than two sentences of face-time in the story, yet it's important to our understanding of the wife in two completely different ways. And never will you feel the same about wet cats again …
