Analysis

By telling the reader that the Americans know no one at the hotel, the narrator highlights their
otherness—they are strangers in a strange land. The landscape that the hotel room looks out on is
beautiful. However, the narrator’s comments suggest that on the day the story is set, the weather is
not in fact very nice, given that there are no artists painting in the garden. Furthermore, the presence
of the war monument communicates to the reader that there has been a major conflict in this region.
The war monument calls the reader’s attention to the fact that the First World War (1914-1918) has
recently passed through Europe. By referring to the Italian sightseers who come to visit the
monument, the narrator locates the action of the story in Italy. Furthermore, the interest that the
Italians take in the monument suggests just what a momentous event the war was for them. The
image of the monument glistening brightly in the rain further highlights the monument as an
important aspect of the landscape.
The overcast, rainy weather gives a desolate aspect to the scene. The landscape—except for the lone
waiter in the café doorway—is practically deserted. The stillness and bleakness of the scene implicitly
recall the destruction and desolation wrought on this landscape by the war, which is referenced
through the war monument.
As she looks out on the scene, the wife’s attention is on the cat—not the war monument. This is
significant because it implicitly suggests that the wife is not very interested in the war. As an
American, she is removed from the conflict, unlike the Italians who have experienced the war
firsthand and who come from a long way off to visit the monument. Instead, it is a small animal that
catches her attention. That the wife sympathizes with the cat in its predicament is also significant,
because it suggests that she identifies with the animal’s vulnerability and loneliness.
The hotel-keeper’s courtesy to the wife is emblematic of old-world European hospitality. The
emphasis that the narrator puts on the distance between the hotel-keeper, who stands at the far end
of his office, and the wife as she passes by, however, suggests that although she likes him, a certain
formality and remoteness characterizes the wife’s relationship to the hotel-keeper.
The American wife’s strong feelings of liking for the hotel-keeper are notable because there is a stark
absence in the story of an expression of such feelings towards the American wife’s own husband,
George. The narrator’s comment that the American wife likes the way the hotel-keeper is ready to
serve her implicitly suggests that the American wife lacks such attention and consideration from her
own husband.
The hotel-keeper’s consideration and attentiveness are dramatized here through his action of sending
out the maid to follow the wife with an umbrella. While earlier in the story, the wife’s husband,
George, had simply commanded his wife not to get wet, here the hotel-keeper acts to actually prevent
the wife from exposure to the elements. Again, this sets up a contrast between the consideration and
attentiveness of the hotel-keeper and George’s inattentiveness.
The wife’s deep disappointment at not finding the cat suggests that she herself seeks something from
the animal. Her disappointment contrasts with the maid’s reaction, who seems to find the American
wife’s mission trivial and humorous. This perhaps suggests the gulf that exists between the Italian
maid’s experience—presumably, like other Italians, she had lived through the deprivations of the First
World War—and the experience of the American hotel guest, whose whimsical wants imply that she
has lived a life far-removed from true deprivation. Furthermore, the difficulty in communication here,
expressed through the wife’s lapsing into English, further reinforces the idea that a gulf in experience
divides the two women.
The American wife’s feelings as she passes by the hotel-keeper’s office highlight the extent to which
the cat’s loss has affected her. That she feels small points to her own feelings of vulnerability and
powerlessness—feelings, perhaps, that she had projected onto the cat. Her contradictory emotion of
self-importance points to the confusion and upheaval she experiences as a result of the loss of the cat.
It’s also significant that the narrator begins to refer to her as a “girl” here. It’s as if, as she grows more
insecure and uncertain, the narrative perspective on her changes, casting her as an immature,
vulnerable youngster.
George’s prostrate position on the bed suggests the contrast between his attitude towards his wife
and the hotel-keeper’s. While the hotel-keeper rises from his seat on each occasion he meets the
wife, George remains stretched out. His own comfort and ease seem to take precedence over his
wife’s.
The wife’s preoccupation with wanting and losing the cat affirms the sense that there is something
beyond the cat itself that she desires. That George returns to his reading as she speaks suggests that
an alienation or distance pervades the relationship between husband and wife. George seems
inattentive and unresponsive to his wife’s needs.

The wife’s action of examining herself in the mirror suggests that she is going through some process of
self-reevaluation, one triggered by the loss of the cat. Her dissatisfaction with her short hair, and her
desire to not look like a boy, also imply an ambivalence on her part towards her own femininity. She
sports a short hairstyle that, considering the time in which the story is set, was a marker of a
progressive and liberated feminine identity. And yet her hankering for long hair suggests that she
desires a more conventional and traditional feminine identity. George’s response that he likes her hair
the way it is is also telling, in that he seems to cast her appearance in terms of his own needs, rather
than hers. What seems to matter to him is what he thinks of her hair, not what she thinks.
The long list of desires that the wife shares with George indicates that a deep dissatisfaction pervades
her life. Her desire for a cat with which she can have close physical contact specifically implies that she
yearns for close and warm connection and contact. Such connection seems to be lacking in her
relationship with George. His abrupt order to her to shut up and get something to read points to his
own callousness, as well as his alienation from her needs. The wife’s desires are also suggestive of a
hankering for a more conventional feminine identity. Long hair and silver, as well as a need to nurture,
as expressed through her desire for the cat, are all associated with conventional femininity.
The wife’s return to the window, where she takes up the same posture she had held at the beginning
of the story, reinforces her distance from George. Her husband has returned to his reading, and she
has turned away from him towards the window—as though she is searching for possibilities for
satisfaction from the outside world. Her repeated demands for a cat indicate that her feelings of
dissatisfaction continue to consume her. George’s obliviousness to his wife’s words as he reads his
book underscore his inability to address, or even recognize, her unhappiness.
The maid’s arrival with a cat—a gift from the hotel-keeper to the wife—ends the story on an
ambiguous note. The reader is not given the wife’s reaction to this cat. Furthermore, it’s not certain
that this is the same cat that the wife had spotted earlier from her hotel window, given that the wife
referred to the cat she had seen as a “kitty,” and the cat that the maid brings up to the room is
“large.” As such, the reader is left in doubt about whether the wife’s desire for a cat has been fulfilled
or not. She has gotten a cat, but it’s quite likely that it is not the cat she had initially sought. The
story’s ambiguous ending suggests to the reader the ways in which people’s desires, even when they
are satisfied, can often be disappointing.

Themes
Longing and disappointment
In Ernest Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain,” a woman’s yearning to bring a cat indoors becomes an
embodiment of all her longing and desire. On a rainy day in Italy, the unnamed protagonist of the
story, an American wife, spots a cat from the window of the hotel room she shares with her
husband, George. Her sudden impulse to save the cat from the rain, however, is frustrated when she
descends to the street only to discover that the cat has disappeared. Through this simple incident, the
story delves into the discontent and disillusion that often haunt people’s ordinary lives. The world is
indifferent to people’s whims, the story suggests, and thus even as longing and desire are
fundamental human impulses, they inevitably end in frustration and disappointment.
At first, the woman’s desire seems simple and easy enough to fulfill. Upon seeing a cat taking shelter
from the rain beneath a café table, the woman informs her husband that she will go downstairs to
bring it indoors from the bad weather. In noting to her husband how “the poor kitty” is “out trying to
keep dry under a table,” the protagonist seems to recognize the cat’s own frustrated desire to find
shelter. It is significant that the cat’s predicament triggers the wife’s empathy, as this suggests that
there is something about the animal’s plight with which she identifies.
When she goes out in the rain only to find that the cat has disappeared, however, the woman is
“disappointed.” Instead of being glad that the cat has perhaps found a better shelter elsewhere, she is
frustrated, telling the hotel maid who has followed her out with an umbrella that “she wanted [the
cat] so much.” This moment reveals that, despite her feeling of kinship, the animal—perhaps
representative of the larger world itself—is indifferent to her desire. In expecting to find the cat easily,
the woman is left longing for something she can’t have.
The woman’s desire for the cat is, of course, about much more than the cat. Indeed, her
disappointment over the disappeared animal awakens a whole host of other frustrated longings. After
returning upstairs to the hotel room where her husband continues to read the paper, she examines
herself in the mirror, and tells him that she wants to grow out her short hair. Her desire to transform
her appearance is implicitly linked to a latent desire to transform her life; she not only wants a cat, she
wants to change the way she looks, and she also adds that she wants her own silver. She even wishes
it were spring—something decidedly out of her control. On the surface, the desires that the woman
expresses are mundane, but they point to a deeper striving for radical and transformative change,
which seems to be beyond reach.
At the end of the story, the woman does indeed get a cat. The attentive hotel-keeper, who had found
out about her search earlier, sends up the hotel maid with a cat to give to her. This ending, however,
is ambiguous. On the one hand, the woman’s longing for a cat seems to be on the brink of fulfillment:
standing in front of her is the maid with an animal in her hands. On the other hand, it is not clear
whether the cat that the maid presents is the same one that the woman had sought earlier. The
reader is never given a description of the cat that the woman sees from the hotel window, while the
cat that is brought up by the maid at the end of the story is described as a “big tortoise-shell cat.”
At the end of the story, the narrator doesn’t describe the woman as recognizing the cat—in fact, the
story ends before the reader is given the woman’s reaction to the animal at all. Thus, there is the
strong possibility that the hotel owner has simply found another cat to give to the woman. In this way,
the story leaves the reader in the dark about whether the woman’s desire is in fact fulfilled or not. The
woman gets a cat, but is it the cat she wants? By leaving open the possibility that it is not, the story
reinforces the idea that, even in their fulfillment, people’s wishes may be frustrated. Whether the
woman chooses to settle for this replacement animal—in a way, to accept her reality—remains left
unsaid. The story also leaves open-ended the question of whether it is wiser to anticipate
disillusionment, or to forever seek a (perhaps foolish) sense of personal fulfillment in an indifferent
world. Either way, the woman’s frustrated desire for the cat in this story reflects the longing that all
people experience at one point or another—a longing for more, and for better. Set on a rainy day in
Italy, “Cat in the Rain” has an atmosphere of isolation and loneliness. The unnamed American wife is
unable to find the companionship and emotional closeness she seeks from those around her—
including from her husband George, despite that they are living in the same hotel room. To assuage
her feelings of loneliness, she becomes fixated on getting a cat. Hemingway’s brief tale implicitly
argues for the importance of connection through its exploration of the pain and desperation of
isolation—which, it further suggests, can develop regardless of one’s physical proximity to another
person.

Loneliness and isolation

The setting of the story itself mirrors the isolation of its characters. The wife and her husband are
stuck inside their hotel room because of the rain. The room faces out onto the sea and a public
garden, yet even looking out the window offers no comforting glimpse of other people; there are no
artists out painting in the garden, as there would be in better weather, and the square on which the
room faces is empty—no cars can be seen anywhere. The image of water standing “in pools on the
gravel path” further imbues the landscape with a sense of stillness and desertion.
Even if there were others around, however, the story suggests that the husband and wife would
remain isolated. They are notably the only two Americans staying at the hotel and do not know any of
the other guests. This implicitly suggests their sense of alienation from those around them in this
foreign country—they are strangers in a strange land. What’s more, as the husband contentedly
retreats into a book, he leaves his wife alone to look out the window upon this wet, abandoned world,
thereby deepening her feelings of solitude.
Indeed, the couple is not only isolated from those around them, but also from each other. The first
image of the wife presented to the reader depicts her facing away from her spouse, who reclines on
the bed reading. As she looks out the window, her physical position in relation to her husband echoes
the emotional distance between them. The wife’s alienation from her husband is again emphasized
when she returns to their room after failing to find the cat. Again, the wife does not look at George,
but instead goes to the mirror to look at herself before proceeding to look out the window—
effectively choosing to turn away from her lonely life and toward the world beyond, which perhaps
offers the possibility of connection.
George is not sympathetic to her subsequent string of complaints and desires about wanting the cat,
wanting new silver, and wanting it to be spring. He responds by saying, “Oh, shut up and get
something to read.” This response affirms that George is unable to understand or connect to his wife’s
emotional needs. It is no wonder that she feels estranged from him and never bothers to look at him
directly. Nevertheless, the wife still clearly longs for connection with someone—a desire that
manifests in the narrator’s statements about the hotel-keeper whom she meets when she descends
to find the wet cat. The narrator states that the “wife liked him,” and “[s]he liked the way he wanted
to serve her.” The narrator never communicates any such feelings of fondness on the part of the wife
for her husband.
Yet her relationship to the hotel-keeper is also ultimately characterized by distance. When the wife
goes downstairs, for example, he stands “behind his desk in the far end of the dim room.” He is
physically separated from her—just as her husband had been upstairs. This distance between the
woman and the hotel-keeper alludes to the fact that, regardless of her fondness for him, their
relationship remains formal and remote; she can only interact with him in his professional capacity as
the hotel-keeper.
These markedly cold relationships establish the wife’s desperate loneliness; she has no means by
which to feel valued, needed, and close to another living creature. The woman, in turn, projects her
own feelings onto the cat that she seeks to save from the rain. Looking out of the hotel window at the
beginning of the story, the woman sees the cat alone, crouching under a dripping café table. That the
cat’s trouble provokes her immediate sympathy suggests that she identifies with the animal’s
isolation.
Significantly, the woman’s disappointment at not finding the cat when she goes to rescue it further
highlights her need for some sort of intimate emotional contact and connection. She tells George that
she “wanted [the cat] so much.” That she sought to overcome her own loneliness through her contact
with the cat is implied in her statement to George that “I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr
when I stroke her.” This image of close, warm, physical touch again underscores the woman’s
immense sense of isolation—a feeling she had hoped her contact with the animal would alleviate.
Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain” thus repeatedly highlights alienation as central to the American wife’s
experience. In portraying her distance from her husband, the story further underscores the ways in
which people can feel emotionally disconnected even from those with whom they are supposedly
most intimate. Nevertheless, the need for close emotional contact and connection remains
irrepressible. People will look for such connection anywhere—even if that means turning to a helpless
cat caught in the rain.

Gender roles and femininity

Published in 1925, a time of liberation and new-found freedoms for many women, “Cat in the Rain”
projects a clear ambivalence regarding certain changes in women’s position in society. The female
protagonist herself—a short-haired, ostensibly childless wife living out of a hotel room—seems to
bristle at being distanced from more stereotypical femininity, as is evidenced by her ultimate longing
to embrace a more traditional woman’s role (that is, to be a caretaker, a homemaker, to be beautiful).
Yet the fact that she also seems to be dismissed or infantilized by the men around her (and even by
the author himself) implicitly suggests the reductive nature of restrictive notions of both masculinity
and femininity. The story’s ultimate ambiguity regarding gender roles can be read both as a general
reaction to era’s promises of “progressiveness” that dictated new (but ultimately equally restrictive)
rules for women’s behavior, and as a likely consequence of Hemingway’s own positioning as a
“macho” author writing at a time of radical transformation in the relations between the sexes.
George’s attitude towards his wife is marked by condescension, which seems to stem from a
stereotypical understanding of gender. When the wife first informs her husband that she will go
outside to rescue the cat from the rain, George tells her, “I’ll do it.” In offering to take on this very
simple task, one which his wife is easily capable of doing herself, the husband seems to position her as
weak and dependent, and he himself as able and powerful by contrast. In this way, he reinforces a
traditional gender hierarchy.
Furthermore, when the wife returns upstairs after having failed to locate the cat and begins examining
herself in the mirror and wondering whether she should grow her hair out, George seems concerned
that she keep her appearance according to his liking. Considering her short hair, he says, “I like it the
way it is,” and affirms again, “You look pretty darn nice.” While perhaps a half-hearted attempt to
assuage his wife’s anxieties about her looks, these comments implicitly reveal George to be more
fixated on his own appreciation of his wife’s appearance, rather than on hers; his comments—
however complimentary—suggest that his wife’s appearance exists primarily for his consumption.
George’s condescension towards his wife is further reflected in his irritation over the list of desires she
communicates to him. Rather than affirming her desires—for a cat, for long hair, for silver, and for
spring—he tells her, “Oh, shut up and get something to read,” before turning back to his newspaper—
effectively ending the discussion with a complete dismissal of his wife’s attempt to communicate her
needs. While it’s arguable that the wife’s desires are in many ways mundane and petty, George’s
refusal and/or inability to respond to them—particularly to her need for genuine connection,
expressed through her longing for the cat—alludes to a certain masculine insensitivity and
callousness.
While the hotel-keeper behaves more kindly towards the wife than her husband does, his attitude,
too, is ultimately marked by a distinct sense of condescension. The wife seems to like the hotel-keeper
more than her husband. When she sees him downstairs, the narrator notes how she “liked” him and
“liked the way he wanted to serve her.” In responding to the way that he “wanted to serve her,” the
woman seems to be adopting a more traditionally feminine posture in relation to the hotel-keeper
than towards her husband, whose offers of service she had refused.
And indeed, the hotel-keeper does serve the woman. At the end of the story, he sends up the
hotel maid with a cat (one, however, that is likely not the same one that the woman had sought
earlier). It remains unclear if the hotel-keeper’s action is a reflection of his genuine respect for her
wishes, or simply a sloppy attempt to “serve” an eccentric female guest. The fact that the cat the
hotel-keeper offers may very well not be the same cat that the woman had wanted suggests that the
hotel-keeper, like the husband, treats the woman in a condescending way—he thinks that any cat will
do, and thus, in a way, fails to understand that her hankering for a cat has really been an expression of
her longing for emotional intimacy. In fact, he arguably treats her like a child, seeking to distract her
from the loss of one “toy” by offering another instead. This action suggests that he, like George,
infantilizes her and her wishes.
The wife’s own attitude towards gender is complex, in that she seems to revolt against the feminine
passivity ascribed to her by her husband, yet also seems to embrace a more traditionally feminine
identity. By insisting on going down to get the cat herself, for instance, she acts against her husband’s
presumption of her weakness and incapacity. In this way, she steps out of the role of passivity
ascribed to her by George.
However, the longings that the wife expresses after failing to find the cat also suggest her desire for
the stereotypically “feminine.” She wants to grow her hair out because she is tired of “looking like a
boy.” She wants silver, presumably to entertain with, thus affirming her traditionally feminine identity
a homemaker. She wants to nurture the cat—again expressing an impulse for caretaking often
associated with femininity.
The wife’s contradictory actions and expressions suggest an ambivalence at the heart of her identity.
Again, given that this story was published in 1925, this can be read as a response to specific changes in
women’s position in society. The wife acts independently of her husband and wears a short hairstyle
that, at the time, was reflective of the more progressive, rebellious identity that women were
adopting. As such, her desire for things that are more traditionally “feminine” may suggest that she is
not yet entirely comfortable with these changes, or that she ultimately finds them to be unfulfilling
demands on her behavior.
The fact that the wife remains unnamed further complicates the story’s ambiguous gender dynamics.
While the narrative begins by referring to the two Americans as “husband” and “wife,” this changes
over the course of the story. The husband is given a name—George—while the wife never is. This is
especially striking given that she is the tale’s protagonist. Her lack of naming can be taken to allude to
her anonymity and invisibility as a woman; indeed, George ignore her desires and needs.
Furthermore, the tag that the narrator uses to identify the woman also changes over the course of the
story. While the narrator refers to her as “wife” to begin with, as she grows increasingly insecure and
unhappy after failing to find the cat the narrator begins to refer to her as “girl.” Both labels identify
the woman condescendingly: either in relation to her husband or in terms of her emotional
immaturity. This, in turn, raises questions about the narrative voice telling the story: the voice seems
to reflect (ironically or not) a masculine bias whose attitude towards the woman is characterized
either by feminine dependency or feminine emotional immaturity.
Ultimately, the treatment of gender in Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain” is anything but simple.
Ambiguity and ambivalence are reflected even in the wife’s attitude towards her own femininity. The
men that surround her take on stereotypically masculine postures in relation to her, either by
dismissing her desires, or by infantilizing her even in their attempts to appease her. “Cat in the Rain’s”
complicated depiction of gender is, of course, a reflection of the time in which the story is set—when
gender roles were being fiercely contested both by women and men, and when attitudes towards
gender were very much in flux. Furthermore, Hemingway’s well-known tendency to idealize
masculinity may well be a reason why the story, while striving to engage meaningfully with the
predicament of its female protagonist, raises more questions than it answers.
Tourism and war
“Cat in the Rain” depicts an American couple on holiday in Italy shortly after the First World War. In
doing so, the story inherently foregrounds issues around tourism, difference, and foreign identity.
The American wife’s longings—which include having the cat as a pet—become mundane when played
out against the backdrop of the conflict that had recently traumatized Europe. Implicitly contrasting
the wife’s dissatisfactions with the tragedy of war of which she hardly seems aware, “Cat in the Rain”
highlights the innocence, and privilege, of the American experience.
Through his landscape and setting description, Hemingway highlights the First World War as a
backdrop to the story. In the opening paragraph, the narrator tells the reader that the room occupied
by the American woman and her husband, George, faces out onto a “public garden and the war
monument.” The narrator goes on to further state that the monument “was made of bronze and
glistened in the rain.” In highlighting the monument, these details immediately call the reader’s
attention to the fact of the recent war, which broke out in Europe in 1914; American troops did not
join until 1917, two-and-a-half years after the conflict’s start. At the time of the story’s publication in
1925, the First World War was the largest and most violent conflict ever witnessed in history.
The description of a desolate, wet landscape also implicitly calls attention to the destruction wreaked
by the war. The public garden is deserted; there are no cars on the square by the war monument. The
vast expanse of the sea—which the American woman can see from her hotel window—also gives the
impression of desolation; there is no one on the beach, only the sea breaking “in a long line in the
rain.” This image of a deserted, bleak landscape echoes the fact that the war had only recently
wreaked havoc on this environment in which the couple now comfortably visits. The emptiness also
recalls the great death toll of the war, which literally led to a significant depletion of the European
population.
While the woman looks out on this landscape marked by war, she seems completely unaware, or
uninterested, in the conflict itself. The narrator tells the reader that “Italians came from a long way off
to look up at the war monument.” This suggests the importance that the war holds for the Italians,
who after all experienced it firsthand and lived through it. The woman’s attention, on the other hand,
seems not to be caught by the monument, but rather by a wet cat sheltering under a café table. By
setting up a contrast between the Italians’ interest in the war monument and the woman’s interest in
the cat, Hemingway implicitly reflects the main character’s obliviousness to the toll of the war on this
community. This obliviousness is significant, because it alludes more broadly to the lack of
consciousness among many Americans about the destruction caused by the war, having not lived
through or experienced the conflict themselves.
Furthermore, the positioning of the woman and her husband as tourists in this war-riven landscape
further reinforces the sense that they are “foreign” in Italy, not only as Americans, but also as a result
of the innocence of their experience. The narrator states that the couple are the “only two Americans
stopping at the hotel,” and that they “did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on
their way to and from their room.” By highlighting their estrangement from those around them, the
narrator points to a gulf between the couple and the Europeans who surround them.
This gap is further reinforced in the differences in language that the story highlights. The American
woman speaks some Italian, but clearly her grasp of the language is weak—she lapses into English
when speaking to the maid who accompanies her outside. By including Italian dialogue in the story,
Hemingway calls the English reader’s attention to difference: the reader is forced to read words that
he or she most likely does not comprehend. In this way, the story creates a gap—or a gulf—on the
page. This gulf can be taken to allude to the gap in experience between the Americans who can enjoy
the landscape as “tourists,” and the Europeans who have experienced its destruction.
Within this context, the American wife’s mundane desires and longings seem petty to those around
her. When the hotel maid who accompanies her outside discovers that she is looking for a cat, she
laughs. While the rescue of the cat seems very important to the American woman, to the Italian maid
it is so trivial as to be funny. Given the backdrop of the war, all of the American woman’s longings and
desires—not only for the cat, but to grow her hair out, for new silver, and for spring—seem trivial.
They allude to her privileged obliviousness as a person who has not suffered the true deprivations of
war.
Hemingway’s story thus highlights aspects of tourism and the foreign in such a way as to draw a
contrast between the Americans at the center of the story and the landscape and people that
surround them. By framing the story’s action in the context of the First World War, “Cat in the Rain”
underscores the naïve—and privileged—innocence of the American tourists visiting Italy, whose
mundane desires and longings seem to take no account of the experience of cataclysmic destruction
and desolation that marks the foreign environment through which they move.