21 pages • 42 minutes read
Ernest HemingwayCat in the Rain
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1925A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Traditional Gender Norms
One of the most important themes in the story is the American wife’s embrace of traditional gender norms. The protagonist in the story is a woman who faces constraints to expressing and embracing her femininity. From the beginning of the story, the wife is unhappy. Notably, while her husband, George, is named, the wife’s name is never stated. She is referred to as “the American wife,” “the wife,” “his wife,” and “the American girl,” implying that she is young and that her identity is limited to her role of wife.
The wife aspires to traditional femininity: long hair that she can brush in front of a mirror, candlelit dinners with her own silver, caretaking, and being cared for. She immediately likes the hotel owner because he projects traditional, masculine traits in a way her husband, George, does not. He is tall, hard-working, self-possessed, and dignified. His masculinity makes her feel small, but she also likes that he’s eager to serve her. He gives the umbrella to the maid to hold over the wife as she looks for the cat, and he asks the maid to deliver the tortoiseshell cat to her at the end of the story. He makes an overt effort to make sure she is protected from the rain and that her wants are satisfied.
Her husband, George, doesn’t offer the same type of care and protection as the padrone. George, immersed in reading, spends the entire story reclining on the bed, and he seems unconcerned with her desire for femininity. Her short hair, likely in a bob popular in the 1920s, is considered “boyish,” and George prefers it that way. He is content to let his wife venture out in the rain in a strange city to find a cat, and he offers her neither company nor protection from the rain. He makes a perfunctory offer to get the cat for her yet doesn’t move from his spot on the bed.
Had the American wife been able to express her femininity and desires more fully, and had her husband been more receptive to her needs, she may have felt less lonely in her marriage.
Disconnection and Isolation
Isolation and disconnection run through the entirety of “Cat in the Rain.” The couple, George and his wife, are the only Americans at the hotel in Italy, and though the wife speaks some Italian, they pass other guests on the stairs but don’t know anyone else. By not speaking to others they encounter and by keeping to themselves, any loneliness they experience within their marriage is compounded by social isolation. The conversation between George and his wife is brief and unfulfilling; she finds more meaningful interaction with the hotel-keeper and the maid, both of whom listen to her and respond thoughtfully.
The central conflict the wife faces in the story is lack of connection. When she sees the cat in the rain, she immediately wants to rescue it. While at first she can’t articulate to her husband why she wants it so much, one reason is that she wants it to sit on her lap where she can pet it and it would purr. She also implies that she identifies with it since it “isn’t any fun” (122) to be a cat trapped in the rain. To empathize with the cat this way, the wife must feel either trapped, alone, or vulnerable, or a combination of those emotions. Also, rescuing the cat offers her an opportunity to get out of the hotel room and interact with others, thus momentarily alleviating her isolation, boredom, and loneliness. Having a cat gives her something to connect with, and she imagines the cat would purr as she pets it. In this way, her connection with the cat would be reciprocal and perhaps be an adequate substitute for authentic connection with her husband.
The rain also emphasizes the theme of isolation. The opening paragraph of the story describes the emptiness the rain has caused: there are no artists in the garden, no tourists at the war monument, and no cars in the square. The only real movement is the falling rain as it gathers in puddles and glistens off the monument. The solitary café waiter watches the rain fall on the empty square. The rain, which persists throughout the story, suggests that the isolation and disconnection between the couple will persist as well.
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By Ernest Hemingway
