The Structural Isolation of the American Wife, and the More-Than-Cat in the Rain
The Structural Isolation of the American Wife, and the More-Than-Cat in the Rain
A structuralist reading of Ernest Hemmingway’s 1925 ‘Cat in the Rain’ identifies the formative structures and attention to common social codes through which the American wife is so poignantly isolated, and the cat is metonymically extended to embody the wife’s desires for emotional comfort.
Each character in the narrative is defined primarily by his or her social roles and functions within the story. The American wife remains unnamed and is identified through her social structure as a wife, a woman and an American. Ironically, this socially constructed character is isolated through her position in opposition to her husband (husband/wife), the hotel staff (professional/personal), and the Italian setting (American/Italian). The wife/husband binary forces the two apart, inverting the societal code which implies marital closeness. Spatial separation also creates a sense of isolation for the American wife through physical boundaries (Felty, 363), such as George’s book, which is continually between them, and the window separating her from the outside, most notably from the cat. The cat is the object which the American wife desires. The cat is defined by its absence, in contrast to the wife’s isolation, which is ironically present and pervasive in the story’s tone and structure. While Hagopian believes that the absence embodied by the cat is that of a child (222), the sense that the cat is oppositional to the wife’s isolation, identifies it with comfort and emotional attention. Thus the cat becomes the more-than-cat: the symbol of the wife’s unfulfilled social and emotional needs.
Each actant in the narrative serves a functional purpose. The wife is the subject and undertakes the performative task of “getting that kitty”(129) which constitutes her disjunctive role. This journey comprises what Hagopian (221) identifies as the underlying symmetrical structure of the story, with the movement from the hotel room, through the lobby, to the table, then back through the lobby, to the hotel room. A balancing of characters supports this structural symmetry, the four principle characters equalising the story in terms of male/female and personal/professional binaries (Lodge, 33).
The hotel keeper and maid jointly function as helpers through various physical and emotional means such as providing an umbrella and ultimately a cat. George is identified as the opponent through his emotional and physical passivity as well as his oppositional position to the hotel keeper. George’s detachment signifies a dishonouring of the contractual role implied by his status as husband, which is partly fulfilled by the hotel keeper. The hotel keeper is constructed as George’s ‘other’, and privileged above him in spatial terms of size and weight. He is described as “very tall”(129) with “big hands”(130) and an “old, heavy face” in the gravitated position of the ground floor. By comparison, George’s position is weightless on the second floor, spatially separate from the other characters (Felty, 365), and his size diminished through his lying position. The presence of the wife’s anaphoric ‘liking’ for the hotel keeper implies an absence of liking for George.
The use of size to imply value extends to the wife and the cat. Notably, the wife is referred to as “the American girl”(130) after being disappointed by not finding the cat (Hagopian, 221). This diminutive status is countered by the subsequent feeling of “supreme importance” (130) afforded to her by the hotel keeper, spatially paired with a feeling of being “very small”(130). This “very small and tight” “something” (130) inside the wife mirrors the position of the crouching cat under the table. The postural connection between the wife and the cat illustrates her desire to transcend the binary division between what she has (isolation) and what she desires (the more-than-cat). The cat itself is identified by the diminutive term “kitty” (Hagopian, 221) and constructed as something small and fragile. In the peripeteia, the cat delivered by the maid is comparatively defined as “big” to the extent that it “swung down against the maid’s body”(131). Critics as Lodge (32) argue that the delivered cat is probably not the “kitty” under the table because this “big” cat cannot serve the metonymic function of fulfilling the wife’s “wants” for her own silver, candles and new clothes. However, the oneness of this ironically large cat and the “kitty” emphasises the fact that the wife does not desire the cat itself, but the more-than-cat.
The deep structure and social codes which underpin the story are essential in creating the strong, implicit emotional context of the American wife, and allowing the cat to be identified as a more-than-cat, symbol of the comfort and emotional closeness absent from the story.
I wrote the essay above at age 21, for an undergraduate English Literature course. Looking back at 32, I realise that at that point in my life I had never been truly lonely. I was also perhaps still blissfully naïve to the real implications of the structures I took as a literary critique — and the sexualization and anonymisation of women in Hemmingway’s prose — but that’s a topic for another time. For now I hope anyone reading this today has a similar snapshot in time to look back on, where loneliness exists only in abstract.
Works Cited:
Felty, Darren. ‘Spatial confinement in Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain”.’ Studies in Short Fiction. 34,3 (1997): 363–369. ProQuest. Web. 20 Aug. 2012.
Hagopian, John V. ‘Symmetry in “Cat In The Rain”.’ College English. 24, 3 (1962): 220–222. JSTOR. Web. 25 Sept. 2012.
Hemmingway, Ernest. ‘Cat in the rain.’ The complete short stories of Ernest Hemmingway. New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987. 129–131. PDF.
Lodge, David. ‘Analysis and interpretation of the realist text.’ Modern Literary Theory: a Reader. Ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh. London : Edward Arnold, 1989. 24–42. PDF.