New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  The problem about these interpretations is that the girl’s purpose is not that concretely identifiable. There is no definite verification in the text for drawing the kitty/tortoise-shell cat or tortoise-shell cat/baby equivalence along the metaphoric axis. The final scene evokes a symbolic reverberation but does not refer directly to another concrete object.

  What the climactic ending primarily does is to reinforce the metaphoric significance of the central action in the story—the quest for a cat. When the big cat appears in the doorway, the visual immediacy creates a stark antithesis between the cat’s symbolic vitality and the state of the couple. Meaning becomes all the clearer by the final shift of perspective to that of the husband’s. Previous to the shift, George, supine on the bed, reading, has been reprimanding his young wife for her restless longings, which he finds irrational and cannot gratify for some reason. The cat’s sudden intrusion upon their separateness and lack of communication (this connection established through contiguity of time) thus acts as a smack in the face for George and his point of view. Whether there is, at the same time, an ironic hint of the wife’s immature disposition, which may equally separate them from fulfillment, remains more uncertain. The fact that her perspective is dominant throughout the bulk of the story, however, indicates authorial sympathy, making this last possibility less likely.

  The preceding interaction of metonymy and metaphor identifies the kernel conflict in the story. Consequently, the climactic “resolution” provides the most reliable point of departure for applying a structuralist analysis. Without a recognition of its significance, the clues for analysis and interpretation are insufficient. These conditions do not imply reservations about the great value of utilizing structuralist theories for critical readings of texts like this one. Structuralism can no doubt uncover meanings that would otherwise evade critical consideration. In fact, the procedure which disclosed the central conflict of “Cat in the Rain” was precisely grounded on the structuralist notion of meaning as the product of binary oppositions. With the oppositions indicated, the disparate surface manifestations of the text may be traced down to a deep structure of values bearing on the opposition of “desire for Life/denial of Life.” A theoretical framework for this approach is offered by Greimas, neatly summarized by Lodge: “All concepts are semantically defined by a binary relationship with their opposites (e.g. Life/Death) or negatives (e.g. Life/Non-Life) yielding the basic semiotic model A:B::-A-B (e.g. Life:Death :: Non-Life:Non-Death), so that all narrative can be seen as the transformation into actants and actions of a thematic four-term homology.”9

  Greimas’s model offers valuable guidance in analyzing the second dominant motif of the story: rain. Furthermore, it clarifies the critical procedures of two contradictory views. Hagopian presents one reading: “As she [the wife] looks out into the wet empty square, she sees a man in a rubber cape crossing to the cafe in the rain. The rubber cape is protection from rain, and rain is a fundamental necessity for fertility, and fertility is precisely what is lacking in the American wife’s marriage.”10 Hagopian makes an elaborate network of symbolic explanations to derive a coherent meaning from the various elements. The rubber cape, by some subconscious projection of the wife’s preoccupations, becomes a symbol of contraception. She is allegedly childless and therefore wants a kitty to cuddle as compensation. In effect, such a reading combines the fertility associated with the rain and the “public garden,” the “big palms and green benches.” As signaled by her awareness of the man with the rubber cape, the wife’s marriage to George is a contraceptive against fertility. One might argue that the possibility of such a connection is strengthened by the fact that the hotel proprietor brings her an umbrella for protection against the rain.

  A very different analysis is provided by Lodge, who applies a model of binary oppositions to counter Hagopian’s interpretation: “Now rain can symbolize fertility, when defined by opposition to drought. In this story, however (and incidentally, throughout Hemingway’s work), it is opposed to ‘good weather’ and symbolizes the loss of pleasure and joy, the onset of discomfort and ennui.”11

  One critic regards the rain as a positive force, the other takes it to be negative. Lodge views the situation both inside and outside as belonging to one single group of metonymies. The incidents in the hotel room and the various wet objects outside function as part of a whole, a dominant oppressive atmosphere. The rain/good weather model naturally conditions the interpretation of the cat’s role. It loses its credibility as child-surrogate, since the symbolic properties of the metaphors are reduced. All that may be stated with certainty is that the different objects are integral facets of a total atmosphere. To Lodge, then, atmosphere is merely presentational and suggestive, with no differentiated meaning implied, and as such explains why the ending would be ambiguous.

  Since the analytic methodology makes possible some interpretations while excluding others, the methodology has to be based on the kernel oppositions in the text. Jonathan Culler accounts for the “general models, which we apply unconsciously in the process of reading.” Postulating Greimas’s four-term homology as the basic structure of plot, he suggests that:

  what the reader is looking for in a plot is a passage from one state to another—a passage to which he can assign thematic value. . . . First of all, the incidents of the plot must be organized into two groups and these groups must be named in such a way that they represent either an opposition (problem and solution, refusal and acceptance or vice versa) or a logical development (cause and effect, situation and result). Secondly, each of these groups can in turn be organized either as a series of actions with a common unifying factor which serves as name for the series, or as a dialectical movement in which incidents are related as contraries and named either by a temporary synthesis or by a transcendent term which covers both members of a contrast.12

  The division of “Cat in the Rain” into a rain/good weather opposition does not build on “incidents of the plot” as outlined above. Good weather, only briefly mentioned, remains an abstract concept of no dramatic consequence in an economical and condensed narrative like this. The essential balance between these two contraries is too unequal to signify a major conflict. The only two references to good weather in the text will do as examples of this point. The description of the monument in the garden, “It was made of bronze and glistened in the rain,” does not identify any thematically significant opposition, as Lodge suggests. All it does is to imply that the monument looks different when it is not raining. Nor does the following passage identify thematic distinctions. “In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel. Artists liked the way the palms grew and the bright colours of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea.” This is a gay picture of bright reflected colors, but it bears no thematic opposition to the same scenery in rain, for the table in the garden is also “bright green in the rain,” light-reflecting like the “glistening” bronze statue. Similarly, there is no one single valid interpretation of the following picture: “The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain.” It is by no means certain that it primarily signifies, as says Lodge, “Excess of wetness. Monotony. Ennui.” It may just as well represent the rhythmic elemental pulsations toward which the wife is oriented, made even more elemental by the fact that all the tourists and artists and motor cars have disappeared, leaving nature to itself.

  Meaning depends on what symbolic level this is to be read at. The repeated remarks to the wife about rain as an unpleasant element indirectly refer to more pleasant associations of good weather. However, subjective attitudes of individual characters may not express the author’s message. His intent may rather be to focus on some characters’ estrangement from pulsating nature and their lack of vital perceptivity. Lodge means to analyze the conditions for meaning but in doing so pays insufficient attention to different levels of the text. He establishes a dominant rain/good weather antithesis on uncertain
grounds, thereby excluding far more relevant structural and thematic oppositions. Attempting to reconcile his model with the text, moreover, he invokes an interpretative meaning which narrows the symbolic richness.

  With any decisive temporal opposition between rain and good weather diminished, a spatial division becomes all the more obvious: the dryness inside the hotel and the objects associated with the rain outside. In the spatial perspective drought attains different connotations from the comfort associated with good weather. Between the two worlds stands another important motif: the window. Its transparency does not merely enhance the marital ennui within through the aggravating atmosphere of endless rain without; it points to central thematic oppositions. An indication of this is provided by the fact that the window is by no means a metaphor-free image but to a high degree an acknowledged metaphoric cultural stereotype. T. S. Eliot’s famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” stresses the dependence of literary works on conventions, for a work of art does not imitate experience but previous works of art. Section one (named “The Window”) of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse depicts Mrs. Ramsay by her drawing-room window, contemplating life’s “myriad impressions” and gazing at the lighthouse which prevents her from finding a harmonizing balance by its symbolic remoteness. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights the window designates the boundary between two opposed realms of existence. To Catherine Earnshaw, after her marriage to Edgar Linton, the window marks separation by cultural constrictions from a fuller engagement with natural life. She implores Nelly, the housekeeper:

  “Open the window again wide, fasten it open! Quick, why don’t you move?”

  “Because I won’t give you your death of cold,” I answered.

  “You won’t give me a chance of life, you mean,” she said.13

  The window organizes the elements into binary oppositions bearing on either life or death. When Catherine, reconciled with the natural elements by her corporeal death, seeks Heathcliff, she can only scratch on the pane but cannot get in, whereas Heathcliff, forcing the window open, cannot get out into the night to join her spirit. When he dies, Nelly Dean notices the window swinging open. It suggests, at one level, a breaking-through of a separating medium between isolated individualism and a vital natural harmony.

  In “Cat in the Rain” the image of the wife, ensconced behind her hotel window, yearning for a more pulsating reality, suggests a mythical reading. “Cat in the Rain” may be said to be equivalent with the quest myth which, according to Northrop Frye, has “as its final cause the resolution of the antithesis . . . the realizing of a world in which the inner desire and the outward circumstance coincide. This is the same goal, of course, that the attempt to combine human and natural power in ritual has.”14 Within this myth perspective in which the protagonist’s quest is principally directed toward fulfillment, structuralist theories offer invaluable guidance in systematizing archetypal images. The central window motif, as a divider between worlds, plays a crucial role in the mythical scheme. Inside is the isolated heroine whom Frye associates with the tragic vision; outside is a garden of life. Contradictory images occur as well, however. In the garden is the kitty, which naturally belongs in the comic world of gentle, domesticated animals, whereas the big tortoise-shell cat is harder to label. Furthermore, the sea, in traditional myth, is usually a sinister element (as opposed to the river), but there are no such connotations here. There finally is mention of the passage from light to dark in the story, not merely a reminder of cyclic inevitability or monotony, but of life’s polarizations. Recognition of the metaphoric richness of the outside world allows for a double meaning in nature. Perhaps the wife, in the final analysis, feels most attracted to the dynamic quality of life’s contradictory possibilities.

  The central metaphor of the wife’s quest is the cat which, initially, eludes her and is mystically lost. As she again returns to her place at the window, darkness enhances the sense of mysticism surrounding the animal. Her needs are suddenly answered by the unexpected delivery of a cat. In mythical terms its vigorous sensuality emphasizes her subconscious wishes and its significance as a messenger transcending boundaries between worlds. Hermes, the boundary-crosser in Greek mythology, whose images are ithyphallic, is the god of fertility, closely connected with deities of vegetation. As the patron of travelers, he may, as cat, mediate between the garden and the hotel, for he is, among other things, the god of doorways. Doorways are salient in the story. The wife stands hesitant in the doorway of the hotel before venturing out into the rain, and the doorway of the hotel room frames the cat’s climactic entry. As the messenger of the gods, Hermes crosses thresholds to attend to the needs of the recently born, but also to those of the dying.15 And the couple may be dying spiritually and in need of the services of some phallic herm.

  The possibility of a mythical reading only strengthens what already seems clear: the structural opposition is between drought and rain. It seems equally implicit that the two poles are metaphors of spiritual equivalents, the incentive of the quest being natural fertility. The author embeds persuasive clues to confirm the underlying conflict of attitudes among the characters. The repeated warnings, as the wife goes out to find the cat, that she must be careful not to get wet, are not fortuitous. “Don’t get wet,” George says, not looking up from his book. “It is very bad weather,” the maid warns her when reaching the vestibule. “You must not get wet,” the maid reminds her opening an umbrella behind her. And the American wife knows, “Of course, the hotel-keeper had sent her.” A little later she repeats her warning, “‘Come, Signora,’ she said. ‘We must get back inside. You will be wet.’”

  These exchanges convey subtle indices of the functions of the different characters. In reference to Greimas, the wife is subject of the story, the cat is object. George is the opponent, but so is also the hotel-keeper indirectly, and the maid enacts the role as his helper. The two men attempt to shield the wife from the rain (they even decide to avoid the rain themselves), and the maid is acting out the hotel-keeper’s orders. It is equally significant that the third male in the story is trying to protect himself from the rain by wearing a rubber cape. In fact, this figure is the first one she sees after opening the door to go out. The sight is again a reminder that “It was raining harder” and that she must be careful. When the American wife agrees to retreat inside on account that she will be wet, she mutters, “I suppose so.” The scene represents the compliance of a young wife dominated by conventional male expectations. It may further be argued that the hotel-keeper’s deference to his client has little to do with interest in her as a woman. The fact that he always sends the maid to execute his services indicates the professional attitude behind his attentiveness.

  The pattern, however, is more complex. There is the wife/(little) girl, kitty/large cat opposition. The moment the wife discovers that the creature has disappeared, she is no longer described as “the American wife” but becomes “the American girl.” It may be that her disappointment causes regression to an immature obstinacy. Or it may rather be that, at a symbolic level, her femininity suffers when her quest for the cat fails. There are many indications that the kitty and the cat are symbolic opposites; that the little kitty, in need of shelter, pertains to her more regressive self, whereas the big cat reflects her desire for a more natural femininity. Their symbolic opposition may further signal her anxious ambivalence. In the first part of the story, she says she wants a kitty; at the end she insists she wants a cat; and a large cat is what she finally gets and probably has been wanting all the time.

  A central male/female opposition supports the previous reading. The wife yearns for long hair and disapproves of the short hair she shares with her husband. He, however, remarks that he likes it the way it is. The fact that he tells her “You look pretty darn nice,” might suggest his responsiveness to her attractions after all. In this context, however, his male instincts fail to convince. His attention and approval concern her hair “clipped close like a boy’s,” a h
int that he is a stranger to her real feminine distinctness. The woman in her needs to expand: to grow longer hair, to have a larger cat, to commune with a more inelusive natural world.

  The wife’s natural instinctual self-assertion is tamed by domestication. As she retreats inside, “something felt very small and tight inside the girl.” This is a contracting, inhibited feeling, a similar reaction of failed communion experienced by the Italian maid in relation to the American wife a few sentences previously: “When she talked English the maid’s face tightened.” Both girls act in accordance with civil patterns which are no true expression of their feminine natures. The maid’s opening the umbrella behind the wife happens with the almost comical automatism of a shadow always there to serve the guests. The wife is entrapped in conventional clichés and perceives the cat, not as in any way a vigorous challenge, but an innocent little female creature like herself: “The cat was trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on.”

  Subconsciously, however, the wife’s desire for the cat stems from a discontented restlessness: “I don’t know why I wanted it so much. I wanted that poor kitty.” It may have had to do with finding consolation in her self-pity. Her problem is that her insulated existence removes her from pulsating nature. Her craving is to break through the windowpane of abstracted observation to vital involvement and fulfillment of her female energies. In her vague, confused manner, she says, “I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel” (emphasis added). Since the story is largely told from her point of view, moreover, only that which attracts her attention is described, an important factor. Hagopian notes how the narrator repeats seven times “She liked” as she passes the hotel-keeper, the intensity of the repetitions reflecting the force of her need to feel. They are phrases succeeded with even greater insistence by sixteen repetitions of “I wanted” and “I want.” As evidenced by her emotional intensity, her many desiderata—including the kitty, silver, candles, spring—are really sublimations of a deeper instinctual female urge. When the cat she finally gets is not a harmless little kitty but a vigorous furry animal, the irony consequently seems to turn partly on her self-deception.