Spatial confinement in hemingway's "cat in the rain"

Darren Felty// Studies in Short Fiction. FindArticles.com. 15 Jul, 2009. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2455/is_3_34/ai_59211543/

In "Cat in the Rain," Ernest Hemingway illustrates the emotional estrangement of his characters by manipulating spatial relationships and geometric patterns in the visual imagery of his text. The work revolves around the desire of Hemingway's protagonist, an American wife vacationing in Italy, to rescue a cat from an afternoon rain storm. She fails in her attempt, revealing in the process the emotional distance she feels from her husband and the attendants at the hotel. The story employs a complex of barriers, enclosures, and geometrically defined details to represent the emotional and psychological boundaries that restrict character interaction. These boundaries ultimately evoke a claustrophobic sense of isolation, especially for the American wife. The world of the story is, in fact, one of confinement in which every space operates in opposition to all other spaces and each action is intensified by the degree of restriction placed upon the characters <…>

The narrative perspective of "Cat in the Rain" ensures the affective quality of the setting, since--excluding the opening and closing paragraphs--the narrative revolves around the wife's point of view. In her examination of Peter Taylor's "Porte Cochere," Simone Vauthier discusses the relationship between narrative perspective and spatial dynamics. She contends that the Taylor story presents "the narrated world as the focalized character turned focalizer perceives it. The spatial indications which we are given create the fictional character at the same time as they create the fictional world" (320). "Cat in the Rain" also depends upon a limited narrative point of view and spatial relationships to characterize its protagonist and her sense of confinement.

The first paragraph details the setting and establishes both the tone and underlying theme of the story by juxtaposing images of fertility and stagnation and by employing a vocabulary of spatial and geometric relationships:

There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel. They did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on their way to and from their room. Their room was on the second floor facing the sea. (129)

This passage establishes the isolation of the two Americans in the first sentence and then associates them with their room in the second and third sentences. They are alone, and the center of their existence is their room. Two important spatial characteristics of this room are its location on the second floor, which implies a sense of being "above," an important motif in the story, and the fact that it faces the sea, which provides the couple with a view of nature and freedom but shelters them when they are inside. The public garden and the war monument introduced in the first paragraph also contrast with the Americans' situation. Instead of artists absorbing the bright colors of the gardens and Italians visiting the war monument, the current rainstorm evokes a sense of stagnation as "water stood in pools on the garden path." Even the activity of the sea is limited by geometric terms that restrict its motion: "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." Here the sea seems confined by the imposed narrative boundaries of the two "long lines."(2) The paragraph ends, "The motor cars were gone from the square by the war monument. Across the square in the doorway of the cafe a waiter stood looking out at the empty square." This sentence repeats the word "square" three times, and it is the final word in the paragraph. The square's emptiness evokes isolation and implies confinement, especially in conjunction with the lonely waiter standing in the threshold of the doorway, a static figure trapped between outside and inside.(3)

The introduction of the American wife as an individual is also cast in terms that spatially characterize her relation to the outside world: "The American wife stood at the window looking out. Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables" (129). The wife stands behind the window, a barrier, and sees below her the cat, also under a barrier trying to protect itself from the rain. Unlike the cat, however, the wife wants to venture out into the rain, to transcend the barriers behind which she presently stands.(4) When she leaves her room, she "descends" to the lobby where she finds the padrone and the maid. Her "descent" not only defines the social relationships between these characters, with the girl being "above," but also depicts the girl's moving from one area of confinement to another, with the lobby presented as an area of relative freedom because of its proximity to the outside. The padrone and maid, therefore, seem to the wife to have more freedom than she does. Although they are confined to the interior of the hotel (except to escort her), they are closer to the outside world and, unlike her, do not feel sequestered.

The particulars of the spatial relationship between the girl and the padrone also clarify the nature and extent of their limited interaction: "The wife went downstairs and the hotel owner stood up and bowed to her as she passed the office. His desk was at the far end of the office.... He stood behind the desk in the far end of the dim room" (129-30). These sentences emphasize the distance between the two characters, a distance maintained by both despite the girl's positive feelings toward the padrone, feelings generated more by his dignified service to her than by any personal interaction. The padrone stands behind the desk in his office, placing a physical barrier and ample space between himself and his patron. The wife makes no attempt to cross this space, maintaining her course to the door.

The story then presents the second of four "threshold" images that, again, embody the relationships between the characters and the wife's relationship with the world outside the hotel. The wife's stopping in the doorway and watching a man protected by a rubber cape crossing "the empty square" emphasize her own desires for this same kind of protection, despite her conflicting desire to step outside the boundaries of the door and hotel. <…> On the two women's return to the hotel, the girl's spatial relationships with the maid and the padrone once again help to define her emotional entrapment. <> Then, "As the American girl passed the office, the padrone bowed from his desk" (130). Again, the girl is not able to intrude upon the padrone's space, nor is he able to move past the barrier that separates him from his customer.

The girl proceeds "on up the stairs. She opened the door of the room. George was on the bed, reading" (130).(6) These three sentences construct an intricate relationship of geometric spatial boundaries. The girl traverses the intermediate space between the lobby and the room, ascending from an area of lesser confinement to an area of greater confinement. She then opens the barrier between the stairs and the room, preparing to cross the threshold to entrapment as she had crossed it earlier on her way to relative freedom. George is still on the bed, his space in the story, reading the book that becomes the emblem of the emotional barrier between the couple.

George puts his book down upon her entry, however, momentarily dropping the boundaries between them. The resulting scene between the wife and husband represents the wife's single failed attempt to transcend the emotional walls of their marriage, an attempt characterized by the spatial dynamic of their interaction. The wife sits on the bed(7)--for the first and only time sharing the same plane as her husband--and tries to communicate her longing for the cat: in effect, her remorse over her own loneliness. George, however, begins reading again (130). In this moment, the wife attempts to break through the barriers that plague her marriage by sharing space and communicating with her husband. The boundaries remain despite her attempts, as he is either unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge her needs and desires.

The final paragraphs of the story are distinguished by the distance maintained between the wife and George. The wife retreats from the bed and sits in front of her mirror, studying herself. She faces away from George. By presenting her back to him, the wife establishes another barrier, concentrating on herself as he has on his own pursuits. The girl then moves to the window and looks out. The boundary of the window is reestablished, replacing the mirror that only projects an image of the self for the gift and reinforces her sense of being alone. The window offers no relief, however, as it still traps her inside, able only to see the freedom that she does not possess. Yet even this image of freedom is removed now, as darkness has fallen.

The final "threshold" image, which closes the story, comes when the maid ascends to the Americans' room and stands in the doorway holding a tortoise-shell cat. She does not cross the plane of the door, respecting the distance between the couple and herself. The story ends, "`Excuse me,' she said, `the padrone asked me to bring this for the Signora'" (131). With this sentence, the principal characters of the story are gathered into one area, each remaining distant from one another. The maid, and, by implication, the padrone, stand in the threshold between their relative freedom and the couple's entrapment, just as the waiter and the wife earlier stood on similar thresholds. The wife and husband each occupy the same space that they occupied when the story began: the wife by the window, the husband on the bed, each isolated, each confined by the boundaries of the window and the book, respectively.

The use of spatial relationships in "Cat in the Rain" clarifies and underscores the intricacy of emotional relationships in the story. The spatial emphases in the story serve to magnify the isolation that runs through the very texture of the work. Although the wife attempts to cross the boundaries that separate her from the outside world and from other people, she remains unable to transcend the physical, psychological, and emotional barriers that entrap every character in the story.