It matters a lot. If it's the same cat, then there's something sweet about what has happened. The padrone has understood the woman's impulse in the best possible light: she wanted to help a poor homeless kitty by giving it shelter from the storm. And he has gone to some lengths to fulfill that benevolent desire, demonstrating his respect for her and his comprehension of her goodness. If it's a different cat, then there's a definite element of the grotesque in the ending. If it's a different cat, then the padrone is more crudely (and maybe cynically) giving this foolish American a simulacrum of what she wanted. If she is delighted by this different cat, then the silliness of her initial quest is verified. If she disappointedly sees that this is a different cat, then this final moment is awkward and bathetic.
Yes, it seems like the padrone is saying, "I can see that any cat is a good as any other for you, Señora. You weren't saving that cat in the rain. You saw a cat and you wanted it just as you want to candlesticks. So here's a cat, any cat. You probably won't keep it for long."
I agree it matters a lot, and I agree it's not the same cat. "If it's a different cat, then there's a definite element of the grotesque in the ending" -- I definitely read the ending this way. The way the maid holds the cat suggests it's fat, heavy, inert, almost like holding a dead body. It's tortoise-shell, which for me called back to her desire for long hair and expensive things (tortoise-shell combs), but it's also ugly. So I see it as the padrone having a last laugh at the couples' expense -- he sees her boredom and foolish desires, he sees George's non-responsiveness, and gives them both this new problem to contend with. It calls out the ugliness of their wants and behaviors. Marital friction and wifely unhappiness are sure to ensue, which presumably the padrone knows. But he's blameless on the surface because he was just "giving the lady what she wants."
Thank you - you've redeemed the story for me! My first reaction to the end was 'this story is very pleased with itself' in the grotesque way you describe. You've reminded me of the empathy of her initial, perhaps more instinctual quest, before getting trapped in the hallway of mirrors.
>"If it's a different cat, then the padrone is more crudely (and maybe cynically) giving this foolish American a simulacrum of what she wanted. If she is delighted by this different cat, then the silliness of her initial quest is verified."
I agree that those are the approximate directions of the different cat-situations, but this interpretation doesn't sit well with me, because: is it foolish or wrong to want a cat? To want a cat when you feel that almost none of what you want in the world will be respected? And is it crude to give a person a cat, when you know they wanted a different cat under richer circumstances, but they also definitely do "want a cat", "want a cat now"? (i.e. in the end, she does not ask for 'the' cat.)
(But I can feel my own biasing desire to read the characters as good!)
Originally the woman wanted to protect this cat that was exposed to the elements. Arguably there was something tender and humane about that desire. If the padrone went and accomplished that rescue, it would indicate that he understood and respected her goal and wanted to help her achieve it. His respect for her would be ennobling, in a sense, and would provide her a measure of dignity. We would feel good for the now-dry kitty and happy that the woman could sit with it for a while. That might be a small good thing in this clean well-lighted place (to mix in some Raymond Carver with our Ernest Hemingway), even in the midst of the woman's larger discontent.
I'm now convinced, however, that the padrone instead sent her a big housecat that was never out in the rain. He heard from the maid that she wanted a kitty, or, rather, a "gatto"—the distinction got lost in translation, it seems—so that's what he gave her. Was that crude or cynical, as I previously suggested? I guess not. Maybe there was even something kind and attentive about it. But it's still a bit grotesque. This cat was not in need of rescue, nor does it seem like a cat that will readily submit to sitting on the woman's lap and being stroked.
The grotesqueness of the ending, to me, is a clue that the story doesn't want me to feel as much sympathy for the woman (I keep calling her "the woman," but in fact the story doesn't grant her that measure of adulthood, instead calling her "wife" and "girl") as I might have. It's not foolish to want a cat, but it is at least a little foolish to want a cat in the middle of a trip through a foreign country, and more foolish than it is to want to give a cat a temporary reprieve from the rain. The woman now seems a bit silly, whining that she wants a cat, and then being given one by the padrone (perhaps in a "padronizing" way). Her husband George did seem like an impatient jerk with her, but the ending now feels satirical and makes me wonder if maybe the story is implying that he's right to get a bit fed up with her childish whining.
I agree, but I think the story does give her an opportunity for insight before the knock on the door. It gives her more than what it gives to reading George.
It seems to me the light coming on and the knock on the door are in opposition to each other, exist as contrasting moments in the story.
George is reading, not listening. She's looking out of the window. A light comes on. She sees the empty square, the light possibly upon the wet bronze monument, and possibly has a feeling for her predicament, the particular context of her complaints (the rain, Italy, war, loss, futility of desire etc.). She's granted something before that knock, a little grace, before the grotesque room service.
Anyway, that's how I convinced myself to like the story after my first impression!
Good point. She seems to have gotten more out of their time at this place: she knows the padrone, ventures outside even in the rain, and witnesses a moment of illumination. George just has his nose in a book. How sad, to be spending all his time reading! ;-)
it matters because the large cat hanging off the maid seems content and in no need of rescue, where the earlier cat seemed vulnerable (rain) and skittish (quickly disappeared). The hotel staff tried to please the American(s), but instead made their lives more complicated. Nobody gets what they want. The ending changed the whole story for me; it is now also about wishes and good intentions backfiring and therefore tragic and funny.
But maybe also, given the context: Americans don't get what they want; think of the half-baked idea of a war to "make the world safe for democracy"; the Old World knows the value of a good-enough substitute, a modus vivendi, both in politics and in marriage. What an amazing end! Took my breath away.
But at first the wife wanted to rescue THE cat in the rain. Later, she shifts it to, "I want A cat." I think it's clear that it's not the same cat, as Robb said. But, she did get what she wanted.
I sort of have the feeling she also wanted to be the one to rescue that cat, and she didn't get that part of her wish: "I wanted that poor kitty. It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain.” She had an (imagined) relationship with that particular kitty.
I think it was the easiest way of creating a sense of sonder. She remains the central character by having her initial - and it seems most pressing need - being met. The cat may have preferred to stay in the rain....given where it has now ended up. Stuck with a whinging American who now wants her hair cut and to eat with fine cutlery.
Thank you, Varun, for reminding me of this context. I’ve just begun reading Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet with the #durrell22 group in twitter. When I read it in my 20’s I remember being very captivated by Durrell’s nostalgia for post colonial Alexandria with “five races, five languages, a dozen creeds” - now I read that quite differently. Who decides what language should be spoken in Alexandria…
Interesting, Sadie. Coming from the subcontinent, I can attest that colonial nostalgia is a thing, even for the colonized. Nice connecting with you again after #TolstoyTogether. Hope your Napoleon was as delicious as it looked!
And what's more what we do get is, often times, unexpected. And so the story making goes: "because this happens then what happens next is . . . not what I expected, not what I expected at all . . . but it makes sense . . . and I'm staying with this story, turning its pages . . . because I want to know what happens next."
Building on what you write takes me on to wonder, from the barely suppressed tensions that seem to have been escalating between George & Mrs George throughout the story, two things. First whether the arrival of the cat at the door will be a cathartic or an incendiary moment? Second whether this couple are on that road to hell that is paved with good intentions?
Hemingway titled the story A Cat in the Rain (rather than An American Wife, The American Couple, etc. ), which tells us that which cat is brought to the girl at the end is important.
We don't know the nature of the American couple's stay in the hotel. Are they there briefly, as part of a longer trip (most trips were long then, after all, since it required so much effort to travel so far), or are they expatriates, living in this hotel for a longer period (as Hemingway would have done himself)? The woman wears her hair short, as modern (liberated) women did at that time, and she and her husband are living transiently. She does not have a place that feels like it belongs to her. She has freedom, but possibly more freedom than she feels comfortable with. She does not want to be light, she wants heaviness. She wants her own silver, on her own table, in her own home. She wants to feel the weight of long hair tied at her neck, and the weight of a cat in her lap. When she says, "It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain,” she (thinks) she’s talking about herself.
The wife identifies with the cat in the rain and wants to rescue it. But the cat that’s brought to her is not the cat that she saw; it’s large, dry, and well fed. This is Hemingway (via the padrone, who sent this cat to her) saying, you don’t need to be rescued, you aren’t lost in the rain. You are one of haves, not one of the have nots.
Your last two sentences state so well the padrone's clear rebuke. While I, as a reader, do lean toward accepting the conflation of woman and cat, and her yearnings as a viable response to her marriage and era (thus, every cat at the end will be the wrong cat, a literal cat instead of an answer to her emptiness), this remains after all, a social narrative of class, privilege, and power, as well as of gender. She's a "have" not a "have not" and offends with her "poor me" metaphor as she dreams of silver candlesticks. As our teacher George earlier mentioned, both of these effects co-exist in in an interesting way: Lean one way, and the cat she gets is like her husband and life--not what she longs for, but the reality she gets; lean the other way, and the cat is a brilliant rebuke to her privileged belief that she's "poor" in any way. I think Hemingway's portrait/inclusion of the husband balances two implications simultaneously for us: EH seems both sympathetic to and repelled by this woman who is both a "have" AND a "have not." (A pretty good title, EH--) Thanks Beth.
Beth, I think you are spot on re: the transient freedom, her shorter, “liberated” hair, etc. and the wife’s desire for stability/“heaviness”. But Hem, for all his mastery as a writer, was not exactly known for his feminist sensibility (I’ve always been struck in For Whom the Bell Tolls at how much we know about Robert’s inner life, while Maria’s interior just consists of her thoughts for Roberto). Could it be that Hemingway is not-so-subtly suggesting that this is all women really should or can want? Admittedly not a generous interpretation, but one that squares with what we (think we) know about Ernest.
I found this line of thought interesting, but I don't know if the story could be great if the padrone was rebuking her for thinking herself powerless while she was obviously relatively well off, since—given that we are shown her actual lack of power, to even say choose her own hair style—the padrone would then seem to be in error, and it would be strange to end on that note, glorifying the thought that one cannot be interestingly trapped or genuinely hurting for power, while one's husband has a full bank account and palatial hotels to drag one to.
I think the ambiguity is what matters. The fact that Hemingway doesn't give us quite enough information to decide for certain is another way that the story expands. If he settled it, there are about one hundred fewer posts on this discussion board.
If it had been the original kitty, then our lonely wife would have cuddled and cooed at it. The story would lose its meaning, because momentarily she would be satisfied. But it's another cat--and the padrone has found it for her, or given her his own cat, because he is a good man and he is the padrone of the hotel, there to satisfy his guests' needs. And how sad that he went to this extra effort when the husband did nothing at all. Now the husband looks worse than ever. If it had been the original kitty, the husband may have been off the hook for the time being, and we would need another story to get the wife to this new place she is in when the wrong cat arrives. It has to be the wrong cat! Otherwise, the story--for me--doesn't shine the way it does. Oh, the delicious wrongness of the wrong cat. The sweet Padrone; the husband blind to his own wife's needs.
Yes, between this and what Frank K. said in the first comment, I can't think of anything to add. I rather like it being the wrong cat, that "delicious wrongness."
I think it has to be a different cat, the specificity isn't there at the beginning, so would it make sense dramatically to include it at the end if it wasn't for the purpose of differentiation? We're not going to learn any more about the cat, but we consolidate a lot of what we know about the characters through this presentation: the padrone / maid respecting their tradition of service (see a need, supply it); the passivity of the American couple, whether because of a holiday mood or not; the impossibility of satisfying the girl / wife, whose dissatisfaction attaches to a whole list of objects including the cat, but ultimately only reveal her lack of self-knowledge... So I don't know if that makes a case, but that's why I think it has to be a different cat! Does any of that chime with anyone? Happy New Year!
I thought the cat also shows how she doesn't get exactly what she wants out of her marriage, but she settles for something close enough to a loving marriage.
I agree. The description of the cat at the end signals to me that it’s a different cat and this makes the ending more poignant and cutting in a way that’s in line with so many other Hemingway stories.
In the beginning, you call the story “A cat in the rain” but the title lacks the article. The maid brings “a big tortoise-shell cat” not “the” cat. Throughout the story we have been talking about the shifts in modifiers (e.g “the American wife”), does she want “the” or “a” cat? Her exchange with the maid…
There was a cat,” said the American girl.
“A cat?”
“Si, il gatto.”
“A cat?” the maid laughed. “A cat in the rain?”
“Yes,” she said, “under the table.” Then, “Oh, I wanted it so much. I wanted a kitty.”
…it shifts from saving a particular cat to wanting any cat (and in Italian articles/determiners are more complicated). Again with the ambiguity making the story richer.
Good point, a compact cat and a big cat are not necessarily the same cat. When I think of tortoise-shell I am reminded of barrettes, combs and brushes.
This made me think about the fact that the American wife couldn't brush her hair into a ponytail or use beautiful tortoise-shell combs or barrettes because her hair was short, just like George liked it.
Good insight, your comment made me realize the change from AW to wife to AG to girl represent both how the .world sees her as well as how she sees herself - continually changing from one to another. I think this is a universal feeling, and one reason the story still has life 100 years after it was written.
I'm glad you culled this out. There is real humor in this passage when it is brought out on its own. The very typical difficulties of communicating over a language boundary are exploited here to emphasize how difficult it is for us to know what another person is talking about under any circumstance especially when it concerns want and longing. Certainly, though they share a common language, the husband and wife communicate no better. Gosh!
If it was the cat in the rain, the story would feel to me as though it was tying up a coming-full-circle end in a symmetrical little bow. It would feel basic.
Whereas if it is not the cat in the rain--or clearly written that we don't need to know if it is-- the ambiguity allows our emotions and thoughts to bounce around in the echo chamber of this relationship and these characters, their proximity to each other, the symbolism of the cat, class and hierarchy, the significance and contrasts, ie, frivolity of material desires to the gravity of war, etc,...all which I think a more intuitive and skilled writer would want from her reader.
Going back to read entirely, I noticed that wife/girl never tells or expresses anything about wanting to rescue the cat or wanting the kitty-- nothing at all about a cat to the padrone. So my inner detective deduces logic: what if the padrone asked the maid: what was that all about? why was our guest going out in the rain and coming back in so quickly? Maid would have replied "the lady wants a cat." She wouldn't have gone into much detail, it's all silly and she's wet now, and got work to do. Padrone then takes that info, and goes, ok, my job is to please the kooky american lady. He gets a cat. Any cat. Maybe his cat, maybe a mouse catching hotel cat, maybe the cat in the rain. I think the fact that it doesn't matter which cat it is, is what matters. This is fun.
It matters very much to this reader that the cat in the arms of the maid is not the cat under the table. Since the point in the story where there was no cat under the table, and the maid gave off the air of doubting that there would have been a cat in the rain, I had been increasingly dubious myself about its existence. If it was, indeed, a ploy to get out of the room, to have something, anything, happen, then the shock the reader experiences at the end of the story is nothing compared to the shock of the AW! It's terrific. That's her story (Hem's story) and I'm sticking to it.
I really appreciate the JD Salinger-like recognition that it may be a good idea to read and run while still facilitating learning and analysis. Thanks for that.
The ideas that come to me are:
1. It doesn't matter which cat it is, what matters is that she is seen and heard. That he sees and hears her is why she likes the Padrone.
2. It matters hugely: I felt that she wanted to be useful, contribute in some meaningful way and the cat in the rain was a potential avenue for meeting that need. She needs a needy cat who needs her. A fat assured cat just adds to her material, superficial wellbeing in a way that takes again from her deeper desire to matter.
Now I’m convinced that the iceberg of this story is about the tension in a marriage caused by trying and failing to have kids. Or more specifically about multiple miscarriages. I keep coming back to that line in the first graf: ‘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.’ Broke, slipped back down, come up, break again.
In this context, it matters that the cat at the end of the story is a different cat to the kitty in the rain. This second cat is almost a surrogate in the description with the maid (pressed tight against her and swung down against her body’). Perhaps the American couple can’t have children (the elusive kitty), so will need to consider their options, or attempt to find contentment in other things, like reading and wanting, wanting, wanting.
I really enjoyed this exercise, and Hemingway’s story. Looking forward to more!
This is where I’ve been leaning. If not literal then metaphorical need. I feel it in this line: “ Something felt very small and tight inside the girl.” It could be she needs to be seen as a woman by George rather than a wife, a girl, a she with close-cropped hair like a boy. Perhaps, she is taking his impotence for her own.
Yes, good call. I’ve been thinking about that scene with the mirror too. Following on from the miscarriage interpretation, George has made her ‘into a boy’ by cutting her hair—a symbol of femininity and fertility. She wants to grow the hair back and reclaim that aspect of her womanhood. I’ve also been pondering the first paragraph—the monument, the square, the waiter. Why is it there? You could go as far as arguing that the monument is a phallic symbol and the square a womb. The waiter represents their mindset, the waiting for life to return to the ‘empty square’. The constant rain is also a fertility symbol, but nothing is happening. I read an article online that viewed the man in a rubber cape as a symbol of contraception, protection. I’m not sure about this, but it’s interesting!
All this comes through for me too and yet I’d bet little of it was consciously chosen by Hemingway. When I write, I see everything and then try to describe what I see. And the more conscious I am of symbolism, the more my quality suffers.
An 'escalating pattern of unmet desires' is, your words help me to see, a very fair way of getting to grips with what the understory of 'Cat in the Rain' . . . Hemingway wrote long before The Rolling Stones wrote and performed the lyric that begins and repeatedly resounds with "I can't get no satisfaction . . ." but the story is, to some extent, surely the same?
I haven't read all the comments (wish I could!) but was struck by some saying the cat at the end was dry and fluffy. Hemingway didn't describe it that way. But even if he had, I don't believe that it would be evidence for it being a different cat. Cats are very, very good at staying dry when they want to. "A cat?" the maid laughed. "A cat in the rain?" She laughed for a reason. I believe the cat became tortoise-colored when it went from being the "idea" of a cat (which the signora thinks she wants to protect, maternally) to an actual, substantial cat (something for which she must be responsible--uh-oh!). Like thinking about having a child vs. actually having one.
Another layer might be what I understand is the reverence for cats in Italy. The maid and padrone might view the cat, and the wife's hankering for it, quite differently than the Americans do.
With your observation of the cat at the end of the story, some have assumed that the first view of the cat was that it was small. Hemingway wrote that the cat was trying to compact itself beneath the table, something that a small cat would not need to do.
Could that be a matter of physical proximity -- looking at the cat from across the room as opposed to looking down from above from the second floor, which is generally two floors above the ground level.
I haven't spotted, so couldn't be struck posts by positing the cat in maid's arms in the doorway to the American's room as being dry and fluffy. I am amongst those who have decided, pretty much on first reading the final extract in my case, that there is ample reason to conclude that the cat seen through the window and the cat brought to the door are not one and the same but definitely two different felines.
And surely this is the fascination that our close reading has unleashed: the interpretation of what's going on in the story is down to each reader; which is surely what in turn determines what meaning(s) we each will come to attach to the story.
I write 'will come to attach' intentionally, because for me the whole of the journey we've made in our working on and through 'Cat in the Rain' in pulses is not yet over, I'm expecting it will take some time for 'the dust kicked along the trail we've blazed to settle ' or 'the snow swirl shaken up in the water in which a Christmas Nativity is encased to clear'. What's more I'm open to, or rather I'm expecting, my understanding(s) of the story to shift over time as 'pennies drop' and I get a batter handle on Hemingway's way of writing.
Nice to be in a conversational framework that encourages and celebrates diversity of responses.
And what do they say about cats? A lie is like a cat: you need to stop it before it gets out the door or it's really hard to catch. A cat will be your friend, but never your slave.
The woman wants something! She is full of want. It's pretty clear that it's something more than anyone thing she mentions. I like the idea that the most important thing about this cat-in-the-hand is that it is not anything she had in mind.
It seems like a perfectly plausible attitude for the padrone to have, much like Europeans in the "hospitality" business in general, that he would know better than the girl / wife / woman what she wants and finds her a more perfect cat than any she could have imagined on her own, also significantly a more "mature" cat, a cat that is not going to be compacting itself for anybody, a self-possessed cat that doesn't need anybody's opinion to maintain a sense of self. As much as the analogy of the young wife and the cat holds rainwater, the padrone is metaphorically giving her the idea of herself he wants to her adopt for herself, now available symbolically in the form of this luxurious, well-fed, very probably pampered cat. It is also a snub at George and his unwillingness or interest in any concern of his wife's. His state of unmarriedness is profound and the padrone is calling him out.
It loops back on the idea introduced earlier in the story that the servant is in some significant way superior to his superiors.
When I start to think of the story in this way, I really start to like it.
While I may not agree exactly with your reading, John, I love your creative energy here & the way you slice this analysis . . . it certainly makes logical sense and definitely possible.
Awe shucks. I'm not sure I agree with my reading either :-). Best we can aim for, I feel, is hypothesis so "definitely plausible" is quite the compliment. Thank you, Wendy.
If I remember it correctly are tortoise-shell cats with three colors bringing you good luck. (At least my mother in Germany always said so.) Although it is not described any further in the story it might be a nice subtle hint to make the reader think about the way the story will evolve for the wife and the husband after the end of the text.
What if the maid had come knocking at the door bearing a 'ginger cat', or a 'tabby cat' or a 'black cat'?
I've felt that Hemingway has given us a series of enigmatic word-sketched snapshots which as a sequence start at 'a beginning' and finish at 'an end'. The beginning is not 'the beginning' and the end is not 'the end'. In terms of setting, character, dialogue and plot we have been given only the salient tip of a story iceberg whose arc of story, evolving over time from its aplha to its omega, lie substantially outwith the moments of our first seeing and of our final severing from the maid with the cat in the door.
And my oh my how the stroy will evolve will be so different if - ,whatever its cat-fur-coat, the cat at the second floor door, inside the hotel and out of the rain wet square and sea saturated shore - it be named as 'Gumbire' or 'Growltiger' or 'Gus'?
And, Bjorn, there's always the imaginable possibility that the old Padrone a writer choosing to extend the story beyond Hemingway;s final full stop (period, if you will) could reveal him to be none other than Old Possum 😺
Secondly I got to thinking about Old Possum in our close reading of Hemingway's 'Cat in the Rain' partly because cats do tend to be distincive characters but mostly because of realising that T S Eliot was both an acquantance and mentor of Hemingway, and both had strong interests in 'Imagism'. To some degree I think it was the case that Eliot was to Hemingway what Bill Buford was to George (Saunders). Eliot and Buford were both influential editors: Eliot at Faber & Faber and Buford at The New Yorker.
Two of the joys that I've found in participating in Story Club thus far are:
* the diversity of personal literary hinterlands that we each bring to bear in our engagement with George's invitations to read and write, share and compare
* discovering that what's often referred to as Hemingway's pared-back, minimalist writing actually overlaps in many ways with that of many poets.
And thanks for asking your question Natalie, its been another joy to reply.
Okay, really late to the table here but how can I sleep with the buzz in my brain?
I keep thinking about Downton Abbey — and the feeling of hovering between the Victorian Age and whatever modern life will be. And that sense of suspension in the story — the sea moving in and out, the rain, the watching, the waiting.
The American Wife sees the cat and takes action. And the hotel staff quickly shepherd her back to her old life. Don’t get wet. Don’t go out. Don’t try. Is the maid with the umbrella an example of privilege or an overseer? The American girl feels small but even that moment of recognition is overshadowed by feeling important but for what reason? Because she is wrapped in cotton wool? Being protected and cosseted can be stifling.
I hear the yearning as she lists what she wants. As if physical things can give her life meaning. The physical silver that tells people you are important. The inspection in the mirror that is the only time her husband is interested in her. Because she is only there as an object? Why is he interested? And why doesn’t he act on the subtle connection that might become sexual tension but doesn’t?
The maid bringing in the cat, the heavy, indolent, not minding being dragged around cat, removes any agency the girl might have had. Here—pet the cat and stay where you belong, and be content and stop disturbing the peace. How many days will she have that are like this? Like the tide rolling in and rolling out.
Your opening line 'Okay, really late to the table here but how can I sleep with the buzz in my brain?' prompts me to respond:
"Hello Elizabeth and please know it really is okay to be late - or returning long after first reading and writing, for whatever reason(s) - to this thread of online conversation . . . which lies here set out under a Substack sky under which there is no sun that's ever set, as yet. There's a lot of points bundled nicely and packaged neatly in your post, which is as with others in Story C lub a welcome 🎁 The particular thought emanating from that that brain of yours that’s been set buzz buzz buzzing that’s struck a particular chord with me is the reference to Downton Abbey and set me wondering: which of the three Crawley siblings – Lady Mary, Lady Edith, Lady Sybil – do you think of as fitting the bill as ‘The American Wife’ in Hemingway’s story?“
okay, so the padrone offers "his wife" a cat, a big fat cat that is so big it curls against the maid's body, like a child curls in the womb. let's get that out of the way. he also offers her solace. and he offers her service.
i'm hung up on the padrone in this story and have been all along. i'm stuck on his solitude. can you imagine being an old man, serving patrons in a good hotel in the years following WW1? your country is a fucking mess in the aftermath and the tourists come visiting, particularly the american tourists who, although they entered the war late, didn't fight on their own land? europe was flattened in WW1.
then there's how the padrone is pinned at his post--there's no one to take his position. all the young men are dead and there's an entire generation missing from the social strata. what can he do? he sits at his post and he watches. he's a soldier. he's doing his duty. i could cry.
my thoughts are with the padrone. i love a strong secondary character. i think they're often the subconscious of the story. think of Georgie in 'Emergency' by Denis Johnson. he functions in a lot of different ways and, in some ways, carries the whole story by introducing hope at the end when he says "I save lives."
i don't know what i'm saying. i haven't had my coffee. it's NYD. happy new year!
Rea, I keep wondering myself about how I might understand the context of this story differently had I been alive when it was first published--what, nearly 100 years ago? There is so much left unsaid about the padrone, about the maid, and just lightly implied by the war monument to remind us that these Italians were flattened, as you mentioned, by WWI. When the maid's face "tightened" after the wife expressed she wanted the cat, I pictured her momentarily disgusted by such a silly request from a silly American. What does the wife know of loss and loneliness? (P.S. I love Denis Johnson/Georgie/how you've described him as the "subconscious of the story")
I don't know what I'm saying, either. It's 10AM and I've had my coffee, but I may have slipped a little whiskey in it. HNY!
it's all so open for interpretation, isn't it? i mean, i thought that the maid's face tightened for a different reason--before that the woman was speaking in italian and then she switched to english. this created a distance between the two women, a language barrier.
i wouldn't assume the woman did so deliberately, nor would i assume the maid disliked her for it. but a distancing occurred. this indicated class to me, but that's just my reading.
Perhaps like you, Manami, I often find myself looking for (hoping for) some historical context to better understand or engage with stories from another time/place like this one. For instance, I find myself trying to understand the 'standing' of the main characters (American wife & George) ie. are they part of (do they represent) a post-war development, of Americans visiting post-war Europe? Is it for vacation? Are they elites, or were such trips feasible for 'ordinary' folks? As Hemingway, given his journalist p.o.v. would likely be commenting on (or exposing?) a 'type' or a 'movement' that was somewhat typical of the times, but may be hard for us to relate to now.
Yes! Even the smaller details, like the wife's hairstyle, might be better understood within their context--I actually looked up women's hairstyles in the 1920's and learned that short cuts became popular as a form of social and cultural rebellion (perhaps the act of rebellion didn't suit the wife).
I'm not a fan of this reading because it seems to cheapen the kindness of the staff at the hotel. The hotel keeper's kind chat to her and the maid's fetching of the cat become only a way to get a better tip. I prefer the idea that they act out of genuine kindness.
this remains ambiguous, in my reading, and I don't feel that has to be resolved one way or the other. The padrone may have offered the cat out of neutral, professional hospitality, or because he empathizes with the girl and has made a connection. The most cynical interpretation I suppose (I think the story provides the least amount of support for this) is that this gesture is purely transactional, and that this is the sort of thing you have to do for Americans.
I'm a bit shocked by both of these readings (Stephen and John). Multiple things can be true at the same time. Those who give good service generally ARE kind people, empathetic people, because that inner knowledge of how others might be feeling guides them in HOW to care well for their clientele. Being 'professional' in any of the caring professions (hospitality, healthcare, etc) is not a synonym for being cold and clinical. Or perhaps it is these days, and that is where the world has gone badly astray.
rea has raised some really important background issues and I agree, the padrone is doing his duty. But it is clearly not a duty that lacks warmth.
Yes, exactly! What's amazing is that the story works on both levels: what's happening between the couple, these American tourists, as they travel around Europe, and the larger context of the Americans touring Europe after the war. At the opening, the mention of how the square usually looked--the way American tourists think of Europe: little squares, cafes, artists, colorful hotels--versus the square in the rain, and the war monument (that only Italians come to see). And I can see him telling the maid, "Then get her a cat," and so the maid goes out and scoops up a cat (they are everywhere) and takes it to the wife. The economics and the service angles are so important, as they were after WWII as well. And they still are. I live in Europe, and much of the economy relies heavily on tourists, especially American tourists, who spend a lot of money and are still often seen as rich and spoiled in a general sort of way.
You piqued my curiosity, Rea, so I just read "Emergency," by Johnson, and yes, Georgie carries the story. I would agree with that. This is a totally different story, too, but I'm now recalling "Good Country People" by O'Connor. Mrs. Freeman is not a main character, but the story is framed by what she is looking at, her "gaze." And as it turns out, she is an intriguing secondary character who may have supernatural ties to one of the protagonists. Good stuff.
Oh, absolutely, Kemba. And the American gaze tends to be glossier, in my humble opinion. I think this is important, to note the historical environment of where a story is taking place in order to contextualize it more carefully. Thanks for the question!
This is such a great perspective. I hadn't thought that deeply about the padrone but this gives me more to ponder. And, like Nancy, I'm now curious about 'Emergency' by Denis Johnson, which I'm off to read. Thank you.
Wow, you are so right. I wonder if Hemingway used Padre as a symbol of "the forgotten people" of the war. A symbol only close readers will find. Also the fact you mentioned Denis Johnson in this comment made me leap with joy!
What a terrific ending. She has, in the end, obtained her putative desire, but in the midst of searching it out, we've learned it isn't really the cat she wants, but rather what the cat represents: namely, to be living a different life than the one she is presently living and to have some agency in effecting that reality. The cat's arrival therefore highlights how woefully inadequate the cat itself is. The fact that it was brought to her by the hotel employees and still, I think, won't really make her happy, highlights to me how there is no way any amount of money or status can buy her happiness; her life needs a more fundamental or elemental change.
I agree with you too Chris. There's a rather terrible irony for me in that it's the hotel employees who have brought her what she has declared all along she wants - 'a'/'the' cat (I feel it's NOT the original cat or Hem wouldn't have taken such pains to tell us it was a big tortoiseshell which is so specific in comparison with the opening non-description). I can see the staff having a whispered conversation in the reception; 'that poor lonely young American girl upstairs wants to rescue a cat. They must be having a pretty dry honeymoon. Let's be kind and find her a cat, any cat, and see if that cheers her up.' That possibility makes me laugh but also feel rather sad too. It's the resolution of the wife's driving goal but it's a total let down because she did nothing to a) earn it or b) make it happen. So it's a brilliant ending which drives the final metaphorical nail in the coffin that is her imprisonment. I have also belatedly realized after a few days niggling that the previous para of the story reminds me of the Joni Mitchell song 'Carey' where she longs for her clean white linen and fancy French cologne. Somehow that redolence gives me a very personal reading of the story where I'm mentally juxtaposing Joni's Swinging Sixties' heroine, who isn't tied to a husband who makes her cut her hair off; and this American wife who is so much more trapped by her era and her youth and her idealism - which this trip has killed off. Sad but beautiful. Happy new year from London everyone : )
That's a really excellent point too! The hotel staff's agency contrasts richly against her husband's inaction and passivity. I feel as though some of the things she is asking for earlier are representative of being seen, heard, and valued by her husband and being an equal partner in the relationship. I wonder how the feeling of the ending might be different if the cat still arrived in the end, but was brought in by her husband who snuck out on a pretense and came back with it for her?
It would definitely be a different story if the husband had brought her the cat. I am inclined to say that I would have had a difficult time buying into such an ending. It doesn't seem like "earned" behavior on the husband's part. In other words, there was no a+b to equal c, if that isn't too mathmatical. Also, to co-opt Hem's way of putting it, it would not seem true, not to me anyway. But perhaps an interesting writing exercise. To finish the story with a different ending. Or perhaps writing the ending before ever reading it, to see how one's own ending matches up.
I totally agree with you on all your points. To me it was an interesting mental exercise to think about what the cat itself means versus what the actions of the characters mean.
That's interesting - it would be a totally different feeling, don't you think? It would be a 'nicer/better' ending for the husband to supply the cat, as far as the wants of the reader goes (depending on our individual reading of the story and investment in the wife's desires) but Hemingway is not as simple or sentimental as that. That beautiful 'energetic ambiguity' George mentions (love that concept BTW) would be weakened by the husband suddenly 'seeing' his wife and reaching out to fulfil her by bringing her the cat. The cat would then just be a prop, somehow, and not a metaphor. Not quite sure what I mean by that exactly...
I agree. I think the feeling would be totally different if the husband supplied the cat, which to me really highlights the symbolic nature of the cat. I think you’re also right to say it wouldn’t be nearly as compelling an ending!
I thought of that line from "Carey," too! He may not have made Joni cut her hair, but he did keep her camera to sell :) (And strangely, just around the same time an article popped up in my newsfeed about how the real Cary Raditz didn't want anyone to know the song was about him. How Google knows what I'm thinking about I'll never understand).
Your reply of Joni Mitchell not married makes me think - if a persons inherent tendency is to be subjugated(for lack of a better word coming to me now) , a husband is just an excuse for being lazy and dependent ?
Hmm that's a big question! I guess the lyric echo just made me think about those two traveller girls from different eras, both acting out their impulses with different sets of constraints. I mean, Joni's girl is anything but dependent and I guess you could read the Wife as that. I actually started off feeling the Wife was petulant, spoiled and bored, like others here, but warmed to her as a the story unfolded and the complexities increased. By the end I feel her subjugation all the more strongly, but now I feel tender and sorry for her. And - this might sound nuts; that's partly because the cat turns out to be big, tortoiseshell and hanging halfway down the maid's body like some sort of indolent furry toddler. If the cat had been 'a small delicate tabby' or 'squirming in the maid's arms' I could have felt quite differently about the Wife. But the cat's somehow more at home in this world than the Wife, just hanging there, 'not bovvered' as we might say in England, and that juxtaposition is so human and sort of funny and full of pathos.
Interesting how you pay attention to the cat’s description. For me it’s descriptions signified a sumptuous and heartening end and nothing more.
I think Hemmingway himself was pretty young when he wrote this and I amaze at how much he could read. Maybe he watched his parents and others closely while being brought up and ofcourse he read a lot but without practical experience, one cannot write with just bookish knowledge (?).
Joni!! She’s always bemoaning her expat status but using creation and art as her milieu not searching for agency using an external creature. Great parallel!
Exactly. Through no agency of their own, merely by being privileged, they have both gotten what they want. She the cat, and he to be left alone. But the privilege has cost them the opportunity to grow. When the novelty of the cat wears off, they will be in the exact same place. The moment for true connection was lost.
I think you're spot on with the idea privilege at the cost of self, Elizabeth. What use is it getting what you want (or maybe even need?), when you don't have the agency to obtain it yourself.
Spoiler alert, Elizabeth is my wife. But, at least this time, I agree. The cat was given and nothing will change. The wife wants something the husband will not, or cannot, or cannot see to give. Which cat doesn't matter. In the long run the cat changes nothing. Interestingly though, to George's question, for me the story could have ended without the last grafs, and maybe (I hope) I would have come to the same conclusion. But, the last grafs, forced me to consider: OK she got what she wanted, what changes. Well, given the story, nothing. The last grafs added to this conclusion, reinforced the ending, made the story stronger.
One minute the cat is there, the next it is not. Next minute there is a cat, but is it the cat or a cat? Which way is the female American's mood going to swing? The needle on the mood meter is oscillating wildly: she will be happy, she won't be happy; happy, not happy; very happy, very not happy; very happy indeed, very unhappy indeed?
"Cut! That's a wrap. Thanks everyone" the Director says.
As a reader, or viewer, I feel that the two judgement calls are mine to make. The same cat or not the same cat; happy or not happy; okay, I think to go plump for any of the four options in the matrix. Each is meaningful.
I’m thinking it’s a big dry tortie to represent the fat cat Americans getting everything they want. The other cat would have been smaller bedraggled and wet. But like others are saying Papa leaves it open— and no this husband in this story wouldn’t rouse himself to fulfill what he would see as a fanciful request.
You're right. I might be wrong, but from what's given in the text, I don't think it's possible to say for certain whether it is "the" cat or "a" cat. To me though, it doesn't really change things. In the section where she articulates all the things she wants, she repeatedly says she wants “a” cat rather than “the” cat, which I believe again highlights how the cat symbolized a more idealized life rather than necessarily being in and of itself an object of desire. Whether she was given “the” cat she sought or another "replacement cat", I don't think she'd be happy.
i'm thinking if it was the same cat, it would perhaps have been described as wet. Anyway, the absense of "wetness" in the description of this big cat is striking.
The cat sounds beautiful and big and independent - not a cat in need of saving. This wife/woman could be beautiful and big and independent under different circumstances.
Ooof, I did not expect my reaction when the cat arrived at their door. First i wondered: is this the same cat? It has to be the same cat, or it doesn't count. The American wife didn't want just any cat, she wanted the cat she felt connected to.
Then I got a sinking feeling. Wanting a cat is one thing, getting a cat is another. Just like she had wanted the short hair (maybe), and the husband, and the trip to Italy... and those things turned out not to satisfy the real need. I expect the cat will turn out to be a nuisance, complicating their travel plans and their ex-pat lives. A disappointment, just like everything else that was supposed to be good and is not.
The ending feels satisfying and unsatisfying at the same time - I got what I wanted from the story, but now I'm not sure I want it.
Interesting thought that "it has to be the same cat, or it doesn't count." I read her dialogue about how much she wants a cat to sort of reveal that it isn't about this cat at all, but "a cat", any cat; but also, ultimately, not really about any cat or any one thing at all.
Yes — how I saw it was that she wanted to SAVE the cat in the rain and having someone else get her even the same cat won’t do because once again, this is something someone has done for her vs her doing it for herself.
I got the impression that the husband initially thought her vague cat desires were about having a baby, which he was on board for, but as she kept talking he realized it was more about more nebulous desires and dissatisfaction— that’s why he lost interest.
I agree that saving a wet cat (being the savior/doing good works) is very different than being gifted a big fluffy cat. But since the wife seems to be so unheard by the husband and so unhappy with her life, I got satisfaction as a reader, that she was heard and helped by the staff of the hotel and that the big fluffy cat will purr and give her snuggles, albeit it may pee and poop all over the room. All that aside, I didn't get very pulled in to this story. Maybe that's not the point of the expertise. It is really interesting to break it down and look behind the hood, so to speak, and read what everyone else thinks.
Both interesting points! Presumably this kitty was also out in the rain? And how would the maid know which cat was THE cat since she never saw the original.
I had the same emotional up and down, one after the other. And I kept seeing other ways for things to turn out. By throwing us this curveball at the end, Hemingway makes me feel like the story of this couple can go a lot of different ways. And my own life can, too.
What a weirdly epic ending. As a medical student, I'm skewed towards reading this short story through the lens of service. There are a few primary service relationships at work: padrone-wife, maid-wife, wife-cat (she wants to save the kitty), and wife-husband (she cuts her hair for him, he "offers" to rescue the cat for her). Implied service relationships are also playing out, like commitment of the artists to their paintings and the nationalism symbolized by the war monument. Until the story's end, none of relationships have any pathos for me. As George writes, there are many places where we can read these moments of people doing things for others as artificial and fundamentally selfish. (E.g. The maid and padrone are nice to the wife because of money, husband cares more about wife's looks than her as a person, wife only cares about the cat because it's cute/she's needy.)
There's something about the image of the cat struggling in the maid's arms that activates a feeling that I only get in the hospital, like when a dying patient asked me to steal an Uncrustables for them or when an attending read a poem out loud for a patient recently diagnosed with dementia. Service, going above and beyond to help a vulnerable other, is a beautiful human thing. Sorry for being a kiss-up, but it's why Morse needs to jump in the water at the end of "The Falls."
With the pandemic, people are rethinking their relationship to service industries. As someone who is on leave from medical school to pursue an MFA, I certainly am. This padrone and maid are in a situation where they can by all means do the bare minimum required of their work. Yet, how do they respond when they see a woman run into the rain to save a random cat? Why does the maid's face tighten? Why should we make people feel that they are of "supreme importance," and how is that accomplished?
Richard-I like this "lens of service" very much as it connects to the story. One night, we were in a small town in the south of Spain waiting for our daughter to arrive on a bus. We were standing, bewildered, in the middle of a square as the bus pulled away and she had not emerged. A few minutes later, the desk clerk from our hotel arrived on his motorbike, smiling broadly, saying, "Are you missing something? A daughter perhaps?" She had gotten off at the wrong town and arrived by taxi. After he poured her a glass of wine he hopped on his moto to come find us. He certainly didn't need to-- it was an unexpected act of kindness. We did feel of "supreme importance" -- we were saved from a longer time of worrying about her-- but it wasn't as complicated as money or privilege. As you say, a beautiful, human thing.
"...going above and beyond to help a vulnerable other, is a beautiful human thing." I'm reminded of the passage where Alosha the Pot, in the Tolstoy story, realises that relationships aren't all transactional.
Great response, Richard! I love the examples you gave from your own life. I agree but would go further and say that the service relationships don't matter so much as the kindness. In a way, we're all in service relationships to each other (or can be at any time). I don't really care about the padrone's motives. What hit me was that he did something kind. Finally, someone did something unambiguously kind. End of story (literally).
There is a vast chasm between the cat and the idea of the cat, the fact and the fantasy of it, which the American Wife is now forced to confront. She gets what she wanted, but there is no way it can live up to her expectations. I smile at the ending, but also somehow hurt for her.
My thoughts exactly! And also, it feels like there's another twist of the knife with her having wanted to go out and get it herself but now simply being brought (what I'm pretty convinced is) a different cat. There's something so moving in the maid and padrone trying to do *something* for her, but also so sad in her still being passive in this last moment, still inevitably unfulfilled.
Mostly I am boggled that so many people can read the same short story and experience it so differently. Who are these characters in this story? What are they thinking? What are they like? What is this story about? What is the author saying? What an illuminating exercise to see how our experience of life (or a story) is so varied. I find this a bit scary -- and also very interesting. The story (or life) means what it means to each of us and it's by communicating to each other about our perspectives that we discover our differences -- and sometimes our similarities. No one is right or wrong. There is not a definitive answer. This experience has helped me see this more clearly than I have before. For me it reinforces how important it is to be curious and to listen to each other. Thank you, George, and everyone.
I keep thinking about a quote from Andrei Tarkovsky: "A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books." Or in our case, a short story (or even paragraph).
It feels almost like a punchline, this big swinging tortoiseshell cat that I’d been picturing as small (because “kitty”) and plain black (I don’t know why) and somehow elegant (because of its identification with the woman).
As others have noted, this may be a different cat altogether, but even if it’s the same cat it’s a different cat—no longer out there, helpless, an idea, an object of projection, but real, here, now, needing milk and a litter-box.
And really what she wanted was to save the cat herself, to be a protector and a savior, rather than the saved. But in the end she remains the saved, the protected, as the paternalistic padrone has the cat brought up to her, and she is still a child, not the woman she wanted to be.
Why was it so important that she not get wet? Because rain could lead to a cold, maybe, and she is unalterably in the role of the protected, the sheltered—not one to run through the rain in a cape, the hero.
The most interesting aspect, to me, is that she is complicit—she likes that the padrone fusses over her and serves her. Hemingway could have easily made her dislike all the fuss, but she would have been a more one-dimensional character.
She is trapped, and part of the trap is her own desire.
And since we’re tracking names for the American wife, it seems noteworthy that Hemingway ends on the word Signora. The bitter irony here, I think, is that Signora is the Italian word for a grown married woman, but in this context, it is a word of the politeness and faux-respect that a worker grants a customer—in this case, a customer who couldn’t even retrieve a cat on her own.
"...really what she wanted was to save the cat herself, to be a protector and a savior, rather than the saved. But in the end she remains the saved, the protected, as the paternalistic padrone has the cat brought up to her, and she is still a child, not the woman she wanted to be" -- I like this; thank you.
Yes, that is the impression I'm left with. It makes me think about the novel, The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, of things outside the realm of this story. I loved Hemingway as a teen and he was the number one reason that I wanted to be a writer then. But as an adult woman, though I still love his writing, I wonder what kind of slander this might be to Hadley Hemingway, the real person that the American Wife character is based on. Totally not a fair thing to be wondering, I admit, in an arena of literary criticism. I've left the ring and wandered off...
First, Happy New Year, George! What a lovely way to begin 365 days.
Second, "what else does this [ending] give us?" In the first truncated version, it's unsatisfyingly ambiguous: outside of, as you mention, the symmetry. What happened to the cat? Why did we go through all that for "symmetry"?
At least for me, the final version satisfies with a beat that I'm curious if any of my fellow Story Clubbers also felt: Damn do I want to see the look on the wife's face after the maid delivers the cat! Does she smile and then stick her tongue out at her husband?
Because Hemingway doesn't write it, it's left for each reader to imagine for themselves. It's almost a form of co-creation, and that's a delicious feeling.
I had noticed also that Hemingway does not give us, the reader, any reactions, which I too desperately wanted to know, especially George’s! I found the ending satisfying. But what I didn’t know I had missed was the element of “co-creation” as Michael points out (thanks). It can be any way I want it to be, and other scenarios can keep popping up, and I can keep playing with it.
I knew there had to be more. This ending feels exactly right; the wife's expression of her desire is answered not by George but by the Padrone and the maid. It may or may not be the same cat, but at least the Padrone acknowledges her desire. It feels like a different cat because it is large, not a shivering wet kitty. We don't really know. The maid bringing the kitty feels both like gift and a rebuke, somehow, of her earlier whining. Now she has to own the things she wants.
My first impression is that this is 'the' cat, because the first look at the cat is from a second story window, which also has views of the palm trees, which also would make the cat appear small. And the description of the cat is that she is trying to make herself compact enough to avoid the rain, not that she was so tiny that she fit in a spot beneath the table that would not get wet. Thus, when we see the cat at the end, its proximity now reveals the cat's actual size.
She wants and wants and wants. How many times is that verb deployed? And she gets what she originally wanted. Sort of. And then the cycle of want starts again.
Yes, she gets what she said she wanted (well, one of the things she wanted and the focus of the story), but her life has changed little. She still has the short hair, she still doesn't have the silverware she wants, and her husband has probably already gone back to reading his book and ignoring her. Would the Buddhist answer be: her wanting is the cause of her suffering?
I’ve posed the question to Mary Ellis- we just read the story together. She’s 13. She says “yes it does matter.” “The cat that the American wife originally saw was most likely abandoned and in need, whereas the big, tortoise shell cat brought to her most likely has a loving home. If the cat that is brought to her has a home, then the abandoned cat will still be in need. And this leaves the American wife with the same longing she had at the beginning.”
Also - the original stray cat is compact, small identified by H. as 'herself'- a female. The 'big tortoiseshell cat' is likely male. The wife wanted that female companionship in this paternal world. It also felt like the wife is the unloved stray in the story, her husband the satisfied fat cat. The author gives us no idea as to her response because he ends it here- for me she remains unsatisfied because all the men (George, padrone, Hemingway) have decided what she needs (nothing, or any cat: not what she actually wants).
I feel terrible saying this, but the ending feels almost sarcastic to me. "Oh, you wanted a cat? Well, here it is, or "a" cat, anyway. Maybe it's the same one. Maybe it isn't. Oh and by the way, the maid got soaked getting it for you, your husband doesn't want it, and here you are in a hotel room with a soaking wet cat."
I mean, it's sort of "gotcha" to me. Very unsettling.
So those are my first thoughts. Will read over to see if I can get to a more satisfied reading of it.
Editing to add: and maybe that's what life often is. Giving you responses, but not the ones you were expecting (both me and the woman).
Wow, what a great ending! The wife is actually offered the chance to take some responsibility—she’s faced with taking care of a cat. And a big cat, too! And who knows how that will work out? Maybe she will find out whether it was really the cat she wanted or whether it was something else—maybe a different life, a different way of being, a different husband—or maybe something indefinable that will always keep her in a state of yearning and neediness. I’ve softened my attitude toward the woman (even though at the same time I also feel more exasperated by her) because we’ve all experienced that feeling of yearning for something when we have no idea what that something is—and we grasp at all kinds of things we think we want, and none of them turns out to be it—kind of like the general angst and pining of being alive. (And it’s so interesting to see the absence of yearning in the husband—he’s content to be in his own imaginary world, probably reading about other people who are yearning. And he’s annoyed by his wife’s yearning in real life.) So it’s possible she won’t really want the cat at all. Or maybe she’ll discover that what she was yearning for is to have more agency, to be more herself, to become a woman, so that maybe taking on the responsibility of the cat and feeling the joy of being with the cat will help her finally grow into a whole person—not just an image of what her husband wants her to be, and not just a child who needs to be cared for.
The padrone (who went from being called a “hotel owner” to a “hotel-keeper” to a “padrone”—moving more and more toward the paternal) and the maid (who stays a “maid”—women may sometimes have less patience for childlike women like the American wife) seem to be a kind of father-and-mother pair—they’ve taken the young woman under their wing(s) (even though the maid may be a bit more reluctant to do so), and together they actually give the young woman what she says she wants, which turns out to also be what she actually may need—responsibility.
At the end the American wife is now the “Signora”—“a married Italian woman, usually of rank or gentility,” according to Webster’s—so maybe the padrone and maid have decided to view her with more respect, or to see her potential as a mature woman. Or maybe the wife is finally thinking of herself more that way, and, as she says, she wants to no longer look like a boy—meaning she wants to be a woman.
The Signora also now realizes that if she walks around saying she wants something then she should be prepared to actually get it. Sometimes getting what we want is the biggest lesson we have to learn in life, in part because things never turn out the way we imagine them, and in part because we will then have to live up to the responsibility of our dreams—it’s a test of our commitment.
The ending is perfect—it’s so human. It’s funny (we’re thinking “Ha, ha, now what will you do now that you have this big cat?”) and it’s hopeful (maybe the wife will come into her own because maybe she’ll take on the challenge and be happier).
The ending also surprises us by giving us (as readers) what we wanted, even though we weren’t sure what that was. In reading the story, we imagine all the things we want from it (just as the wife imagines all the things she wants), and then there’s the ending. As soon as I read the ending, I knew that was the ending I wanted. So the story embodies what a reader does in the act of reading.
And the ending is so accepting of life and all its yearning. It’s an affirmation—or at least an acceptance—of yearning, at the same time it’s an affirmation or acceptance of its opposite—peace and contentment. So it’s an affirmation of opposites. It’s an acceptance of all of life.
Thanks for giving us this story to read, George. That was great. I totally see now why this is a masterpiece.
So the agency here, at the end, is given to the males. George stops reading and gives the order to whoever has knocked, to come in. The wife says nothing. The padrone has ordered the maid to bring a cat to the signora. One woman is doing what she is told, the other is silent - having just poured out her thoughts (and yes, I found myself warming to her a little - about one degree above freezing). The maid speaks, at least. The only silent one in the scene is 'the wife.'
And that hulking awkward cat - insistent of my attention in both its shape, weight and colour - hanging as it is down the maid. Isn't it wonderful! Wonderful in that THIS cat is almost comic, certainly bathetic - a complete contrast to the sheltering, shivering little mite that we envisage stuck under that table? What on earth will she do with it? I am reminded of the allegedly 'Chinese' curse (or one of them) - 'May you find what you are looking for." or 'Be careful what you wish for - you may get it...'
Wow. There's so much to unpack here. It is extraordinary.
Why is this better than truncating the story at the light coming on in the square? The light is really nice but it’s also a static thing. It’s not going to do anything but hang out there being a pleasant contrast to the dark and the rain.
The arrival of the cat in the hands of the maid delivers many possibilities and questions in one living, unpredictable parcel. Things are about to pop off, and that’s all we know. And we get to feel and wonder about a lot of things on our own without being spoon fed.
(Like: “Is the wife happy? How long will she be happy? What will George do? Why did the maid find and deliver that cat instead of giving up and going back in when the wife did? Was it of her own volition, in some kind of act of recognition and kindness? If so, will our girl recognize this on any level and be warmed by it? Is this a good thing, this cat showing up?” And probably more things, too, but none of that in so many words while reading it. This is all blended together in one quick dose of a complicated feeling. Wonder and satisfaction are there but more, too.
I liked the light a lot but the light was a pleasing note. This is not only a chord with a lot of harmonizing (and pleasingly dissonant) notes in it, it’s a chord progression, making a feeling.
I remember learning from Leonid (that wonderful Russian acting teacher I had once) the difference between emotion and feeling. Emotion, he said, is like one simple note, and you can stir it up pretty easily. Feeling is more complex, like a symphony, and all you can do is make the conditions for it to arrive and hope not to scare it away.
Oh: and I think, instinctively, that a preponderance of one-note things and cheaply stirred-up emotion in the world makes us a little dumber and more reactive, whereas the complexity of feeling refines us, opens us and makes us wiser and better in ways we might not even understand, that might be beyond human understanding, even.
A challenge: make the case for it mattering, which cat it is at the end. (Extra credit). 😉
It matters a lot. If it's the same cat, then there's something sweet about what has happened. The padrone has understood the woman's impulse in the best possible light: she wanted to help a poor homeless kitty by giving it shelter from the storm. And he has gone to some lengths to fulfill that benevolent desire, demonstrating his respect for her and his comprehension of her goodness. If it's a different cat, then there's a definite element of the grotesque in the ending. If it's a different cat, then the padrone is more crudely (and maybe cynically) giving this foolish American a simulacrum of what she wanted. If she is delighted by this different cat, then the silliness of her initial quest is verified. If she disappointedly sees that this is a different cat, then this final moment is awkward and bathetic.
This interpretation certainly makes more sense of why the war memorial was mentioned in the first paragraph: a signifier of loss from the start.
Ah yes... when the light comes on in the square it illuminates the memorial.
Yes, it seems like the padrone is saying, "I can see that any cat is a good as any other for you, Señora. You weren't saving that cat in the rain. You saw a cat and you wanted it just as you want to candlesticks. So here's a cat, any cat. You probably won't keep it for long."
I agree it matters a lot, and I agree it's not the same cat. "If it's a different cat, then there's a definite element of the grotesque in the ending" -- I definitely read the ending this way. The way the maid holds the cat suggests it's fat, heavy, inert, almost like holding a dead body. It's tortoise-shell, which for me called back to her desire for long hair and expensive things (tortoise-shell combs), but it's also ugly. So I see it as the padrone having a last laugh at the couples' expense -- he sees her boredom and foolish desires, he sees George's non-responsiveness, and gives them both this new problem to contend with. It calls out the ugliness of their wants and behaviors. Marital friction and wifely unhappiness are sure to ensue, which presumably the padrone knows. But he's blameless on the surface because he was just "giving the lady what she wants."
Thank you - you've redeemed the story for me! My first reaction to the end was 'this story is very pleased with itself' in the grotesque way you describe. You've reminded me of the empathy of her initial, perhaps more instinctual quest, before getting trapped in the hallway of mirrors.
Jane, now that you mention this
'this story is very pleased with itself' in the grotesque way you describe.
-- i totally feel that. ewww.
And your interpretation draws out the inner subtlety and sophistication of the story, which I now realize, after reading your comments. Thank you .
That's kind of you to say Radhika. I gleaned my understanding from reading others' comments too.
>"If it's a different cat, then the padrone is more crudely (and maybe cynically) giving this foolish American a simulacrum of what she wanted. If she is delighted by this different cat, then the silliness of her initial quest is verified."
I agree that those are the approximate directions of the different cat-situations, but this interpretation doesn't sit well with me, because: is it foolish or wrong to want a cat? To want a cat when you feel that almost none of what you want in the world will be respected? And is it crude to give a person a cat, when you know they wanted a different cat under richer circumstances, but they also definitely do "want a cat", "want a cat now"? (i.e. in the end, she does not ask for 'the' cat.)
(But I can feel my own biasing desire to read the characters as good!)
Originally the woman wanted to protect this cat that was exposed to the elements. Arguably there was something tender and humane about that desire. If the padrone went and accomplished that rescue, it would indicate that he understood and respected her goal and wanted to help her achieve it. His respect for her would be ennobling, in a sense, and would provide her a measure of dignity. We would feel good for the now-dry kitty and happy that the woman could sit with it for a while. That might be a small good thing in this clean well-lighted place (to mix in some Raymond Carver with our Ernest Hemingway), even in the midst of the woman's larger discontent.
I'm now convinced, however, that the padrone instead sent her a big housecat that was never out in the rain. He heard from the maid that she wanted a kitty, or, rather, a "gatto"—the distinction got lost in translation, it seems—so that's what he gave her. Was that crude or cynical, as I previously suggested? I guess not. Maybe there was even something kind and attentive about it. But it's still a bit grotesque. This cat was not in need of rescue, nor does it seem like a cat that will readily submit to sitting on the woman's lap and being stroked.
The grotesqueness of the ending, to me, is a clue that the story doesn't want me to feel as much sympathy for the woman (I keep calling her "the woman," but in fact the story doesn't grant her that measure of adulthood, instead calling her "wife" and "girl") as I might have. It's not foolish to want a cat, but it is at least a little foolish to want a cat in the middle of a trip through a foreign country, and more foolish than it is to want to give a cat a temporary reprieve from the rain. The woman now seems a bit silly, whining that she wants a cat, and then being given one by the padrone (perhaps in a "padronizing" way). Her husband George did seem like an impatient jerk with her, but the ending now feels satirical and makes me wonder if maybe the story is implying that he's right to get a bit fed up with her childish whining.
I agree, but I think the story does give her an opportunity for insight before the knock on the door. It gives her more than what it gives to reading George.
It seems to me the light coming on and the knock on the door are in opposition to each other, exist as contrasting moments in the story.
George is reading, not listening. She's looking out of the window. A light comes on. She sees the empty square, the light possibly upon the wet bronze monument, and possibly has a feeling for her predicament, the particular context of her complaints (the rain, Italy, war, loss, futility of desire etc.). She's granted something before that knock, a little grace, before the grotesque room service.
Anyway, that's how I convinced myself to like the story after my first impression!
Good point. She seems to have gotten more out of their time at this place: she knows the padrone, ventures outside even in the rain, and witnesses a moment of illumination. George just has his nose in a book. How sad, to be spending all his time reading! ;-)
Ha! ...oh dear, yes...
it matters because the large cat hanging off the maid seems content and in no need of rescue, where the earlier cat seemed vulnerable (rain) and skittish (quickly disappeared). The hotel staff tried to please the American(s), but instead made their lives more complicated. Nobody gets what they want. The ending changed the whole story for me; it is now also about wishes and good intentions backfiring and therefore tragic and funny.
Yes, I agree - no one ever gets what they want! And that is the story.
But maybe also, given the context: Americans don't get what they want; think of the half-baked idea of a war to "make the world safe for democracy"; the Old World knows the value of a good-enough substitute, a modus vivendi, both in politics and in marriage. What an amazing end! Took my breath away.
But at first the wife wanted to rescue THE cat in the rain. Later, she shifts it to, "I want A cat." I think it's clear that it's not the same cat, as Robb said. But, she did get what she wanted.
I sort of have the feeling she also wanted to be the one to rescue that cat, and she didn't get that part of her wish: "I wanted that poor kitty. It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain.” She had an (imagined) relationship with that particular kitty.
I think it was the easiest way of creating a sense of sonder. She remains the central character by having her initial - and it seems most pressing need - being met. The cat may have preferred to stay in the rain....given where it has now ended up. Stuck with a whinging American who now wants her hair cut and to eat with fine cutlery.
She got what she asked for…but was it really what she wanted???
Thank you, Varun, for reminding me of this context. I’ve just begun reading Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet with the #durrell22 group in twitter. When I read it in my 20’s I remember being very captivated by Durrell’s nostalgia for post colonial Alexandria with “five races, five languages, a dozen creeds” - now I read that quite differently. Who decides what language should be spoken in Alexandria…
Interesting, Sadie. Coming from the subcontinent, I can attest that colonial nostalgia is a thing, even for the colonized. Nice connecting with you again after #TolstoyTogether. Hope your Napoleon was as delicious as it looked!
The one I made in my imagination was delicious!!!! Sadly I am not that good a pastry chef!
Wow, i love that ending for this story, that no one ever gets exactly what they want.
And what's more what we do get is, often times, unexpected. And so the story making goes: "because this happens then what happens next is . . . not what I expected, not what I expected at all . . . but it makes sense . . . and I'm staying with this story, turning its pages . . . because I want to know what happens next."
Building on what you write takes me on to wonder, from the barely suppressed tensions that seem to have been escalating between George & Mrs George throughout the story, two things. First whether the arrival of the cat at the door will be a cathartic or an incendiary moment? Second whether this couple are on that road to hell that is paved with good intentions?
Hemingway titled the story A Cat in the Rain (rather than An American Wife, The American Couple, etc. ), which tells us that which cat is brought to the girl at the end is important.
We don't know the nature of the American couple's stay in the hotel. Are they there briefly, as part of a longer trip (most trips were long then, after all, since it required so much effort to travel so far), or are they expatriates, living in this hotel for a longer period (as Hemingway would have done himself)? The woman wears her hair short, as modern (liberated) women did at that time, and she and her husband are living transiently. She does not have a place that feels like it belongs to her. She has freedom, but possibly more freedom than she feels comfortable with. She does not want to be light, she wants heaviness. She wants her own silver, on her own table, in her own home. She wants to feel the weight of long hair tied at her neck, and the weight of a cat in her lap. When she says, "It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain,” she (thinks) she’s talking about herself.
The wife identifies with the cat in the rain and wants to rescue it. But the cat that’s brought to her is not the cat that she saw; it’s large, dry, and well fed. This is Hemingway (via the padrone, who sent this cat to her) saying, you don’t need to be rescued, you aren’t lost in the rain. You are one of haves, not one of the have nots.
Your last two sentences state so well the padrone's clear rebuke. While I, as a reader, do lean toward accepting the conflation of woman and cat, and her yearnings as a viable response to her marriage and era (thus, every cat at the end will be the wrong cat, a literal cat instead of an answer to her emptiness), this remains after all, a social narrative of class, privilege, and power, as well as of gender. She's a "have" not a "have not" and offends with her "poor me" metaphor as she dreams of silver candlesticks. As our teacher George earlier mentioned, both of these effects co-exist in in an interesting way: Lean one way, and the cat she gets is like her husband and life--not what she longs for, but the reality she gets; lean the other way, and the cat is a brilliant rebuke to her privileged belief that she's "poor" in any way. I think Hemingway's portrait/inclusion of the husband balances two implications simultaneously for us: EH seems both sympathetic to and repelled by this woman who is both a "have" AND a "have not." (A pretty good title, EH--) Thanks Beth.
I agree wholeheartedly with "clear rebuke".
Beth, I think you are spot on re: the transient freedom, her shorter, “liberated” hair, etc. and the wife’s desire for stability/“heaviness”. But Hem, for all his mastery as a writer, was not exactly known for his feminist sensibility (I’ve always been struck in For Whom the Bell Tolls at how much we know about Robert’s inner life, while Maria’s interior just consists of her thoughts for Roberto). Could it be that Hemingway is not-so-subtly suggesting that this is all women really should or can want? Admittedly not a generous interpretation, but one that squares with what we (think we) know about Ernest.
I found this line of thought interesting, but I don't know if the story could be great if the padrone was rebuking her for thinking herself powerless while she was obviously relatively well off, since—given that we are shown her actual lack of power, to even say choose her own hair style—the padrone would then seem to be in error, and it would be strange to end on that note, glorifying the thought that one cannot be interestingly trapped or genuinely hurting for power, while one's husband has a full bank account and palatial hotels to drag one to.
I think the ambiguity is what matters. The fact that Hemingway doesn't give us quite enough information to decide for certain is another way that the story expands. If he settled it, there are about one hundred fewer posts on this discussion board.
If it had been the original kitty, then our lonely wife would have cuddled and cooed at it. The story would lose its meaning, because momentarily she would be satisfied. But it's another cat--and the padrone has found it for her, or given her his own cat, because he is a good man and he is the padrone of the hotel, there to satisfy his guests' needs. And how sad that he went to this extra effort when the husband did nothing at all. Now the husband looks worse than ever. If it had been the original kitty, the husband may have been off the hook for the time being, and we would need another story to get the wife to this new place she is in when the wrong cat arrives. It has to be the wrong cat! Otherwise, the story--for me--doesn't shine the way it does. Oh, the delicious wrongness of the wrong cat. The sweet Padrone; the husband blind to his own wife's needs.
I couldn't agree more! Any cat is better than no cat!
Yes, between this and what Frank K. said in the first comment, I can't think of anything to add. I rather like it being the wrong cat, that "delicious wrongness."
Yes I agree!
I think it has to be a different cat, the specificity isn't there at the beginning, so would it make sense dramatically to include it at the end if it wasn't for the purpose of differentiation? We're not going to learn any more about the cat, but we consolidate a lot of what we know about the characters through this presentation: the padrone / maid respecting their tradition of service (see a need, supply it); the passivity of the American couple, whether because of a holiday mood or not; the impossibility of satisfying the girl / wife, whose dissatisfaction attaches to a whole list of objects including the cat, but ultimately only reveal her lack of self-knowledge... So I don't know if that makes a case, but that's why I think it has to be a different cat! Does any of that chime with anyone? Happy New Year!
I thought the cat also shows how she doesn't get exactly what she wants out of her marriage, but she settles for something close enough to a loving marriage.
I agree. The description of the cat at the end signals to me that it’s a different cat and this makes the ending more poignant and cutting in a way that’s in line with so many other Hemingway stories.
Articles and determiners and modifiers, Oh my!
In the beginning, you call the story “A cat in the rain” but the title lacks the article. The maid brings “a big tortoise-shell cat” not “the” cat. Throughout the story we have been talking about the shifts in modifiers (e.g “the American wife”), does she want “the” or “a” cat? Her exchange with the maid…
There was a cat,” said the American girl.
“A cat?”
“Si, il gatto.”
“A cat?” the maid laughed. “A cat in the rain?”
“Yes,” she said, “under the table.” Then, “Oh, I wanted it so much. I wanted a kitty.”
…it shifts from saving a particular cat to wanting any cat (and in Italian articles/determiners are more complicated). Again with the ambiguity making the story richer.
Good point, a compact cat and a big cat are not necessarily the same cat. When I think of tortoise-shell I am reminded of barrettes, combs and brushes.
This made me think about the fact that the American wife couldn't brush her hair into a ponytail or use beautiful tortoise-shell combs or barrettes because her hair was short, just like George liked it.
Good insight, your comment made me realize the change from AW to wife to AG to girl represent both how the .world sees her as well as how she sees herself - continually changing from one to another. I think this is a universal feeling, and one reason the story still has life 100 years after it was written.
I'm glad you culled this out. There is real humor in this passage when it is brought out on its own. The very typical difficulties of communicating over a language boundary are exploited here to emphasize how difficult it is for us to know what another person is talking about under any circumstance especially when it concerns want and longing. Certainly, though they share a common language, the husband and wife communicate no better. Gosh!
If it was the cat in the rain, the story would feel to me as though it was tying up a coming-full-circle end in a symmetrical little bow. It would feel basic.
Whereas if it is not the cat in the rain--or clearly written that we don't need to know if it is-- the ambiguity allows our emotions and thoughts to bounce around in the echo chamber of this relationship and these characters, their proximity to each other, the symbolism of the cat, class and hierarchy, the significance and contrasts, ie, frivolity of material desires to the gravity of war, etc,...all which I think a more intuitive and skilled writer would want from her reader.
Going back to read entirely, I noticed that wife/girl never tells or expresses anything about wanting to rescue the cat or wanting the kitty-- nothing at all about a cat to the padrone. So my inner detective deduces logic: what if the padrone asked the maid: what was that all about? why was our guest going out in the rain and coming back in so quickly? Maid would have replied "the lady wants a cat." She wouldn't have gone into much detail, it's all silly and she's wet now, and got work to do. Padrone then takes that info, and goes, ok, my job is to please the kooky american lady. He gets a cat. Any cat. Maybe his cat, maybe a mouse catching hotel cat, maybe the cat in the rain. I think the fact that it doesn't matter which cat it is, is what matters. This is fun.
It matters very much to this reader that the cat in the arms of the maid is not the cat under the table. Since the point in the story where there was no cat under the table, and the maid gave off the air of doubting that there would have been a cat in the rain, I had been increasingly dubious myself about its existence. If it was, indeed, a ploy to get out of the room, to have something, anything, happen, then the shock the reader experiences at the end of the story is nothing compared to the shock of the AW! It's terrific. That's her story (Hem's story) and I'm sticking to it.
And I think the light coming on in the square is an "all shall be revealed" signal.
I really appreciate the JD Salinger-like recognition that it may be a good idea to read and run while still facilitating learning and analysis. Thanks for that.
The ideas that come to me are:
1. It doesn't matter which cat it is, what matters is that she is seen and heard. That he sees and hears her is why she likes the Padrone.
2. It matters hugely: I felt that she wanted to be useful, contribute in some meaningful way and the cat in the rain was a potential avenue for meeting that need. She needs a needy cat who needs her. A fat assured cat just adds to her material, superficial wellbeing in a way that takes again from her deeper desire to matter.
Her husband is also a metaphorical fat cat. The one they brought her may let her interact with it more than George does.
Now I’m convinced that the iceberg of this story is about the tension in a marriage caused by trying and failing to have kids. Or more specifically about multiple miscarriages. I keep coming back to that line in the first graf: ‘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.’ Broke, slipped back down, come up, break again.
In this context, it matters that the cat at the end of the story is a different cat to the kitty in the rain. This second cat is almost a surrogate in the description with the maid (pressed tight against her and swung down against her body’). Perhaps the American couple can’t have children (the elusive kitty), so will need to consider their options, or attempt to find contentment in other things, like reading and wanting, wanting, wanting.
I really enjoyed this exercise, and Hemingway’s story. Looking forward to more!
This is where I’ve been leaning. If not literal then metaphorical need. I feel it in this line: “ Something felt very small and tight inside the girl.” It could be she needs to be seen as a woman by George rather than a wife, a girl, a she with close-cropped hair like a boy. Perhaps, she is taking his impotence for her own.
Yes, good call. I’ve been thinking about that scene with the mirror too. Following on from the miscarriage interpretation, George has made her ‘into a boy’ by cutting her hair—a symbol of femininity and fertility. She wants to grow the hair back and reclaim that aspect of her womanhood. I’ve also been pondering the first paragraph—the monument, the square, the waiter. Why is it there? You could go as far as arguing that the monument is a phallic symbol and the square a womb. The waiter represents their mindset, the waiting for life to return to the ‘empty square’. The constant rain is also a fertility symbol, but nothing is happening. I read an article online that viewed the man in a rubber cape as a symbol of contraception, protection. I’m not sure about this, but it’s interesting!
All this comes through for me too and yet I’d bet little of it was consciously chosen by Hemingway. When I write, I see everything and then try to describe what I see. And the more conscious I am of symbolism, the more my quality suffers.
Love this take on it. Thanks!
It matters that it's not the cat she wanted because of the escalating pattern of unmet desires.
An 'escalating pattern of unmet desires' is, your words help me to see, a very fair way of getting to grips with what the understory of 'Cat in the Rain' . . . Hemingway wrote long before The Rolling Stones wrote and performed the lyric that begins and repeatedly resounds with "I can't get no satisfaction . . ." but the story is, to some extent, surely the same?
How about "you can't always get what you want"?
I haven't read all the comments (wish I could!) but was struck by some saying the cat at the end was dry and fluffy. Hemingway didn't describe it that way. But even if he had, I don't believe that it would be evidence for it being a different cat. Cats are very, very good at staying dry when they want to. "A cat?" the maid laughed. "A cat in the rain?" She laughed for a reason. I believe the cat became tortoise-colored when it went from being the "idea" of a cat (which the signora thinks she wants to protect, maternally) to an actual, substantial cat (something for which she must be responsible--uh-oh!). Like thinking about having a child vs. actually having one.
Another layer might be what I understand is the reverence for cats in Italy. The maid and padrone might view the cat, and the wife's hankering for it, quite differently than the Americans do.
With your observation of the cat at the end of the story, some have assumed that the first view of the cat was that it was small. Hemingway wrote that the cat was trying to compact itself beneath the table, something that a small cat would not need to do.
Also, the way the woman in the doorway of the room held it indicated a large cat.
Could that be a matter of physical proximity -- looking at the cat from across the room as opposed to looking down from above from the second floor, which is generally two floors above the ground level.
Interesting Jennifer.
I haven't spotted, so couldn't be struck posts by positing the cat in maid's arms in the doorway to the American's room as being dry and fluffy. I am amongst those who have decided, pretty much on first reading the final extract in my case, that there is ample reason to conclude that the cat seen through the window and the cat brought to the door are not one and the same but definitely two different felines.
And surely this is the fascination that our close reading has unleashed: the interpretation of what's going on in the story is down to each reader; which is surely what in turn determines what meaning(s) we each will come to attach to the story.
I write 'will come to attach' intentionally, because for me the whole of the journey we've made in our working on and through 'Cat in the Rain' in pulses is not yet over, I'm expecting it will take some time for 'the dust kicked along the trail we've blazed to settle ' or 'the snow swirl shaken up in the water in which a Christmas Nativity is encased to clear'. What's more I'm open to, or rather I'm expecting, my understanding(s) of the story to shift over time as 'pennies drop' and I get a batter handle on Hemingway's way of writing.
Nice to be in a conversational framework that encourages and celebrates diversity of responses.
And what do they say about cats? A lie is like a cat: you need to stop it before it gets out the door or it's really hard to catch. A cat will be your friend, but never your slave.
The woman wants something! She is full of want. It's pretty clear that it's something more than anyone thing she mentions. I like the idea that the most important thing about this cat-in-the-hand is that it is not anything she had in mind.
It seems like a perfectly plausible attitude for the padrone to have, much like Europeans in the "hospitality" business in general, that he would know better than the girl / wife / woman what she wants and finds her a more perfect cat than any she could have imagined on her own, also significantly a more "mature" cat, a cat that is not going to be compacting itself for anybody, a self-possessed cat that doesn't need anybody's opinion to maintain a sense of self. As much as the analogy of the young wife and the cat holds rainwater, the padrone is metaphorically giving her the idea of herself he wants to her adopt for herself, now available symbolically in the form of this luxurious, well-fed, very probably pampered cat. It is also a snub at George and his unwillingness or interest in any concern of his wife's. His state of unmarriedness is profound and the padrone is calling him out.
It loops back on the idea introduced earlier in the story that the servant is in some significant way superior to his superiors.
When I start to think of the story in this way, I really start to like it.
While I may not agree exactly with your reading, John, I love your creative energy here & the way you slice this analysis . . . it certainly makes logical sense and definitely possible.
Awe shucks. I'm not sure I agree with my reading either :-). Best we can aim for, I feel, is hypothesis so "definitely plausible" is quite the compliment. Thank you, Wendy.
If I remember it correctly are tortoise-shell cats with three colors bringing you good luck. (At least my mother in Germany always said so.) Although it is not described any further in the story it might be a nice subtle hint to make the reader think about the way the story will evolve for the wife and the husband after the end of the text.
Ah! A dimension to consider indeed Bjorn.
What if the maid had come knocking at the door bearing a 'ginger cat', or a 'tabby cat' or a 'black cat'?
I've felt that Hemingway has given us a series of enigmatic word-sketched snapshots which as a sequence start at 'a beginning' and finish at 'an end'. The beginning is not 'the beginning' and the end is not 'the end'. In terms of setting, character, dialogue and plot we have been given only the salient tip of a story iceberg whose arc of story, evolving over time from its aplha to its omega, lie substantially outwith the moments of our first seeing and of our final severing from the maid with the cat in the door.
And my oh my how the stroy will evolve will be so different if - ,whatever its cat-fur-coat, the cat at the second floor door, inside the hotel and out of the rain wet square and sea saturated shore - it be named as 'Gumbire' or 'Growltiger' or 'Gus'?
And, Bjorn, there's always the imaginable possibility that the old Padrone a writer choosing to extend the story beyond Hemingway;s final full stop (period, if you will) could reveal him to be none other than Old Possum 😺
Okay, Rob, I will bite . . . who is "Old Possum"?
What a gentle bite Wendy. I'll answer in two ways:
Firstly here are three links that will explain 'Old Possum'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Possum%27s_Book_of_Practical_Cats#:~:text=First%20edition%20cover%20%20%20Language%20%20,%20%20Print%20%202%20more%20rows%20
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Possums-Book-Practical-Cats-illustrations/dp/0571311865/ref=pd_sbs_3/260-3533671-9690866?pd_rd_w=VXFhQ&pf_rd_p=b3232d54-1e37-435b-b370-81046eef630a&pf_rd_r=MYJ1Q4BHER4PB842EK83&pd_rd_r=218025e4-c01b-42e0-9755-b87dc95d2f77&pd_rd_wg=NngAP&pd_rd_i=0571311865&psc=1
https://poets.org/book/old-possums-book-practical-cats
Secondly I got to thinking about Old Possum in our close reading of Hemingway's 'Cat in the Rain' partly because cats do tend to be distincive characters but mostly because of realising that T S Eliot was both an acquantance and mentor of Hemingway, and both had strong interests in 'Imagism'. To some degree I think it was the case that Eliot was to Hemingway what Bill Buford was to George (Saunders). Eliot and Buford were both influential editors: Eliot at Faber & Faber and Buford at The New Yorker.
Two of the joys that I've found in participating in Story Club thus far are:
* the diversity of personal literary hinterlands that we each bring to bear in our engagement with George's invitations to read and write, share and compare
* discovering that what's often referred to as Hemingway's pared-back, minimalist writing actually overlaps in many ways with that of many poets.
And thanks for asking your question Natalie, its been another joy to reply.
I may reply later, more fully, to this heady drop of info, but headed into work/work 4 conference call -- love, love, love your reply.
Okay, really late to the table here but how can I sleep with the buzz in my brain?
I keep thinking about Downton Abbey — and the feeling of hovering between the Victorian Age and whatever modern life will be. And that sense of suspension in the story — the sea moving in and out, the rain, the watching, the waiting.
The American Wife sees the cat and takes action. And the hotel staff quickly shepherd her back to her old life. Don’t get wet. Don’t go out. Don’t try. Is the maid with the umbrella an example of privilege or an overseer? The American girl feels small but even that moment of recognition is overshadowed by feeling important but for what reason? Because she is wrapped in cotton wool? Being protected and cosseted can be stifling.
I hear the yearning as she lists what she wants. As if physical things can give her life meaning. The physical silver that tells people you are important. The inspection in the mirror that is the only time her husband is interested in her. Because she is only there as an object? Why is he interested? And why doesn’t he act on the subtle connection that might become sexual tension but doesn’t?
The maid bringing in the cat, the heavy, indolent, not minding being dragged around cat, removes any agency the girl might have had. Here—pet the cat and stay where you belong, and be content and stop disturbing the peace. How many days will she have that are like this? Like the tide rolling in and rolling out.
🤣 Your post has made me!
Your opening line 'Okay, really late to the table here but how can I sleep with the buzz in my brain?' prompts me to respond:
"Hello Elizabeth and please know it really is okay to be late - or returning long after first reading and writing, for whatever reason(s) - to this thread of online conversation . . . which lies here set out under a Substack sky under which there is no sun that's ever set, as yet. There's a lot of points bundled nicely and packaged neatly in your post, which is as with others in Story C lub a welcome 🎁 The particular thought emanating from that that brain of yours that’s been set buzz buzz buzzing that’s struck a particular chord with me is the reference to Downton Abbey and set me wondering: which of the three Crawley siblings – Lady Mary, Lady Edith, Lady Sybil – do you think of as fitting the bill as ‘The American Wife’ in Hemingway’s story?“
okay, so the padrone offers "his wife" a cat, a big fat cat that is so big it curls against the maid's body, like a child curls in the womb. let's get that out of the way. he also offers her solace. and he offers her service.
i'm hung up on the padrone in this story and have been all along. i'm stuck on his solitude. can you imagine being an old man, serving patrons in a good hotel in the years following WW1? your country is a fucking mess in the aftermath and the tourists come visiting, particularly the american tourists who, although they entered the war late, didn't fight on their own land? europe was flattened in WW1.
then there's how the padrone is pinned at his post--there's no one to take his position. all the young men are dead and there's an entire generation missing from the social strata. what can he do? he sits at his post and he watches. he's a soldier. he's doing his duty. i could cry.
my thoughts are with the padrone. i love a strong secondary character. i think they're often the subconscious of the story. think of Georgie in 'Emergency' by Denis Johnson. he functions in a lot of different ways and, in some ways, carries the whole story by introducing hope at the end when he says "I save lives."
i don't know what i'm saying. i haven't had my coffee. it's NYD. happy new year!
Rea, I keep wondering myself about how I might understand the context of this story differently had I been alive when it was first published--what, nearly 100 years ago? There is so much left unsaid about the padrone, about the maid, and just lightly implied by the war monument to remind us that these Italians were flattened, as you mentioned, by WWI. When the maid's face "tightened" after the wife expressed she wanted the cat, I pictured her momentarily disgusted by such a silly request from a silly American. What does the wife know of loss and loneliness? (P.S. I love Denis Johnson/Georgie/how you've described him as the "subconscious of the story")
I don't know what I'm saying, either. It's 10AM and I've had my coffee, but I may have slipped a little whiskey in it. HNY!
it's all so open for interpretation, isn't it? i mean, i thought that the maid's face tightened for a different reason--before that the woman was speaking in italian and then she switched to english. this created a distance between the two women, a language barrier.
i wouldn't assume the woman did so deliberately, nor would i assume the maid disliked her for it. but a distancing occurred. this indicated class to me, but that's just my reading.
I thought the maid did not like the American wife not trying to speak in Italian and assuming everyone should just speak English. When in Rome....
Funny
Perhaps like you, Manami, I often find myself looking for (hoping for) some historical context to better understand or engage with stories from another time/place like this one. For instance, I find myself trying to understand the 'standing' of the main characters (American wife & George) ie. are they part of (do they represent) a post-war development, of Americans visiting post-war Europe? Is it for vacation? Are they elites, or were such trips feasible for 'ordinary' folks? As Hemingway, given his journalist p.o.v. would likely be commenting on (or exposing?) a 'type' or a 'movement' that was somewhat typical of the times, but may be hard for us to relate to now.
Yes! Even the smaller details, like the wife's hairstyle, might be better understood within their context--I actually looked up women's hairstyles in the 1920's and learned that short cuts became popular as a form of social and cultural rebellion (perhaps the act of rebellion didn't suit the wife).
I'm not a fan of this reading because it seems to cheapen the kindness of the staff at the hotel. The hotel keeper's kind chat to her and the maid's fetching of the cat become only a way to get a better tip. I prefer the idea that they act out of genuine kindness.
this remains ambiguous, in my reading, and I don't feel that has to be resolved one way or the other. The padrone may have offered the cat out of neutral, professional hospitality, or because he empathizes with the girl and has made a connection. The most cynical interpretation I suppose (I think the story provides the least amount of support for this) is that this gesture is purely transactional, and that this is the sort of thing you have to do for Americans.
I'm a bit shocked by both of these readings (Stephen and John). Multiple things can be true at the same time. Those who give good service generally ARE kind people, empathetic people, because that inner knowledge of how others might be feeling guides them in HOW to care well for their clientele. Being 'professional' in any of the caring professions (hospitality, healthcare, etc) is not a synonym for being cold and clinical. Or perhaps it is these days, and that is where the world has gone badly astray.
rea has raised some really important background issues and I agree, the padrone is doing his duty. But it is clearly not a duty that lacks warmth.
Me too!
And the wife (who is treated like a girl) does not get much kindness in her life with George.
I like the additional WWI context that adds sadness and depth to the story. Surely Hemingway felt the same given his WWI experience.
Yes, exactly! What's amazing is that the story works on both levels: what's happening between the couple, these American tourists, as they travel around Europe, and the larger context of the Americans touring Europe after the war. At the opening, the mention of how the square usually looked--the way American tourists think of Europe: little squares, cafes, artists, colorful hotels--versus the square in the rain, and the war monument (that only Italians come to see). And I can see him telling the maid, "Then get her a cat," and so the maid goes out and scoops up a cat (they are everywhere) and takes it to the wife. The economics and the service angles are so important, as they were after WWII as well. And they still are. I live in Europe, and much of the economy relies heavily on tourists, especially American tourists, who spend a lot of money and are still often seen as rich and spoiled in a general sort of way.
Oh, but you do know what you are saying! And you say it well. Such intriguing observations and interpretation of the story.
You piqued my curiosity, Rea, so I just read "Emergency," by Johnson, and yes, Georgie carries the story. I would agree with that. This is a totally different story, too, but I'm now recalling "Good Country People" by O'Connor. Mrs. Freeman is not a main character, but the story is framed by what she is looking at, her "gaze." And as it turns out, she is an intriguing secondary character who may have supernatural ties to one of the protagonists. Good stuff.
Isn't it interesting how Post-WWI Italy looked from the American gaze versus the experience of those who lived through it?
Oh, absolutely, Kemba. And the American gaze tends to be glossier, in my humble opinion. I think this is important, to note the historical environment of where a story is taking place in order to contextualize it more carefully. Thanks for the question!
really appreciate your read, rea tarvydas! Made me consider things I hadn't through about.
I agree. Somewhat silent. Attentive. Will deliver in almost every situation.
This is such a great perspective. I hadn't thought that deeply about the padrone but this gives me more to ponder. And, like Nancy, I'm now curious about 'Emergency' by Denis Johnson, which I'm off to read. Thank you.
Wow, you are so right. I wonder if Hemingway used Padre as a symbol of "the forgotten people" of the war. A symbol only close readers will find. Also the fact you mentioned Denis Johnson in this comment made me leap with joy!
What a terrific ending. She has, in the end, obtained her putative desire, but in the midst of searching it out, we've learned it isn't really the cat she wants, but rather what the cat represents: namely, to be living a different life than the one she is presently living and to have some agency in effecting that reality. The cat's arrival therefore highlights how woefully inadequate the cat itself is. The fact that it was brought to her by the hotel employees and still, I think, won't really make her happy, highlights to me how there is no way any amount of money or status can buy her happiness; her life needs a more fundamental or elemental change.
I agree with you too Chris. There's a rather terrible irony for me in that it's the hotel employees who have brought her what she has declared all along she wants - 'a'/'the' cat (I feel it's NOT the original cat or Hem wouldn't have taken such pains to tell us it was a big tortoiseshell which is so specific in comparison with the opening non-description). I can see the staff having a whispered conversation in the reception; 'that poor lonely young American girl upstairs wants to rescue a cat. They must be having a pretty dry honeymoon. Let's be kind and find her a cat, any cat, and see if that cheers her up.' That possibility makes me laugh but also feel rather sad too. It's the resolution of the wife's driving goal but it's a total let down because she did nothing to a) earn it or b) make it happen. So it's a brilliant ending which drives the final metaphorical nail in the coffin that is her imprisonment. I have also belatedly realized after a few days niggling that the previous para of the story reminds me of the Joni Mitchell song 'Carey' where she longs for her clean white linen and fancy French cologne. Somehow that redolence gives me a very personal reading of the story where I'm mentally juxtaposing Joni's Swinging Sixties' heroine, who isn't tied to a husband who makes her cut her hair off; and this American wife who is so much more trapped by her era and her youth and her idealism - which this trip has killed off. Sad but beautiful. Happy new year from London everyone : )
That's a really excellent point too! The hotel staff's agency contrasts richly against her husband's inaction and passivity. I feel as though some of the things she is asking for earlier are representative of being seen, heard, and valued by her husband and being an equal partner in the relationship. I wonder how the feeling of the ending might be different if the cat still arrived in the end, but was brought in by her husband who snuck out on a pretense and came back with it for her?
It would definitely be a different story if the husband had brought her the cat. I am inclined to say that I would have had a difficult time buying into such an ending. It doesn't seem like "earned" behavior on the husband's part. In other words, there was no a+b to equal c, if that isn't too mathmatical. Also, to co-opt Hem's way of putting it, it would not seem true, not to me anyway. But perhaps an interesting writing exercise. To finish the story with a different ending. Or perhaps writing the ending before ever reading it, to see how one's own ending matches up.
I totally agree with you on all your points. To me it was an interesting mental exercise to think about what the cat itself means versus what the actions of the characters mean.
That's interesting - it would be a totally different feeling, don't you think? It would be a 'nicer/better' ending for the husband to supply the cat, as far as the wants of the reader goes (depending on our individual reading of the story and investment in the wife's desires) but Hemingway is not as simple or sentimental as that. That beautiful 'energetic ambiguity' George mentions (love that concept BTW) would be weakened by the husband suddenly 'seeing' his wife and reaching out to fulfil her by bringing her the cat. The cat would then just be a prop, somehow, and not a metaphor. Not quite sure what I mean by that exactly...
I agree. I think the feeling would be totally different if the husband supplied the cat, which to me really highlights the symbolic nature of the cat. I think you’re also right to say it wouldn’t be nearly as compelling an ending!
I thought of that line from "Carey," too! He may not have made Joni cut her hair, but he did keep her camera to sell :) (And strangely, just around the same time an article popped up in my newsfeed about how the real Cary Raditz didn't want anyone to know the song was about him. How Google knows what I'm thinking about I'll never understand).
How Google knows what you are thinking about:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/20/what-does-google-know-about-me.html
And be sure to replace Google with Duck Duck Go (or some other search engine)!
I love that metaphorical nail - where she can go back to being buried for a while at least
Your reply of Joni Mitchell not married makes me think - if a persons inherent tendency is to be subjugated(for lack of a better word coming to me now) , a husband is just an excuse for being lazy and dependent ?
Hmm that's a big question! I guess the lyric echo just made me think about those two traveller girls from different eras, both acting out their impulses with different sets of constraints. I mean, Joni's girl is anything but dependent and I guess you could read the Wife as that. I actually started off feeling the Wife was petulant, spoiled and bored, like others here, but warmed to her as a the story unfolded and the complexities increased. By the end I feel her subjugation all the more strongly, but now I feel tender and sorry for her. And - this might sound nuts; that's partly because the cat turns out to be big, tortoiseshell and hanging halfway down the maid's body like some sort of indolent furry toddler. If the cat had been 'a small delicate tabby' or 'squirming in the maid's arms' I could have felt quite differently about the Wife. But the cat's somehow more at home in this world than the Wife, just hanging there, 'not bovvered' as we might say in England, and that juxtaposition is so human and sort of funny and full of pathos.
Interesting how you pay attention to the cat’s description. For me it’s descriptions signified a sumptuous and heartening end and nothing more.
I think Hemmingway himself was pretty young when he wrote this and I amaze at how much he could read. Maybe he watched his parents and others closely while being brought up and ofcourse he read a lot but without practical experience, one cannot write with just bookish knowledge (?).
that doesn't sound nuts at all! felt the same but couldn't articulate it.
Joni!! She’s always bemoaning her expat status but using creation and art as her milieu not searching for agency using an external creature. Great parallel!
Exactly. Through no agency of their own, merely by being privileged, they have both gotten what they want. She the cat, and he to be left alone. But the privilege has cost them the opportunity to grow. When the novelty of the cat wears off, they will be in the exact same place. The moment for true connection was lost.
I think you're spot on with the idea privilege at the cost of self, Elizabeth. What use is it getting what you want (or maybe even need?), when you don't have the agency to obtain it yourself.
Spoiler alert, Elizabeth is my wife. But, at least this time, I agree. The cat was given and nothing will change. The wife wants something the husband will not, or cannot, or cannot see to give. Which cat doesn't matter. In the long run the cat changes nothing. Interestingly though, to George's question, for me the story could have ended without the last grafs, and maybe (I hope) I would have come to the same conclusion. But, the last grafs, forced me to consider: OK she got what she wanted, what changes. Well, given the story, nothing. The last grafs added to this conclusion, reinforced the ending, made the story stronger.
And is it "the" cat or "a" cat"?
It seems very inentional that is not clear. I am inclined to say that is a cat and NOT the cat but I could not do so to a hundred percent certainty
Schrodinger's cat! LOL
Love that!
One minute the cat is there, the next it is not. Next minute there is a cat, but is it the cat or a cat? Which way is the female American's mood going to swing? The needle on the mood meter is oscillating wildly: she will be happy, she won't be happy; happy, not happy; very happy, very not happy; very happy indeed, very unhappy indeed?
"Cut! That's a wrap. Thanks everyone" the Director says.
As a reader, or viewer, I feel that the two judgement calls are mine to make. The same cat or not the same cat; happy or not happy; okay, I think to go plump for any of the four options in the matrix. Each is meaningful.
I’m thinking it’s a big dry tortie to represent the fat cat Americans getting everything they want. The other cat would have been smaller bedraggled and wet. But like others are saying Papa leaves it open— and no this husband in this story wouldn’t rouse himself to fulfill what he would see as a fanciful request.
You're right. I might be wrong, but from what's given in the text, I don't think it's possible to say for certain whether it is "the" cat or "a" cat. To me though, it doesn't really change things. In the section where she articulates all the things she wants, she repeatedly says she wants “a” cat rather than “the” cat, which I believe again highlights how the cat symbolized a more idealized life rather than necessarily being in and of itself an object of desire. Whether she was given “the” cat she sought or another "replacement cat", I don't think she'd be happy.
i'm thinking if it was the same cat, it would perhaps have been described as wet. Anyway, the absense of "wetness" in the description of this big cat is striking.
The cat sounds beautiful and big and independent - not a cat in need of saving. This wife/woman could be beautiful and big and independent under different circumstances.
exactly what I asked, Sarah!
The cat, as a sentient being, has no agency in this story. It is treated as a object to satisfy the wife's selfish fantasy
I think the cat does have agency. The maid is pressing her tightly to her body- this makes me think the cat is actively resisting.
I like the extrapolation to money and status meaning little for her in the situation.
Well said Chris. After a couple of months, it will be a another new hobby. Reminds me of too much of myself ;)
Love your articulation of this, Chris!
very well said!
Totally agree with this assessment- well said!
Ooof, I did not expect my reaction when the cat arrived at their door. First i wondered: is this the same cat? It has to be the same cat, or it doesn't count. The American wife didn't want just any cat, she wanted the cat she felt connected to.
Then I got a sinking feeling. Wanting a cat is one thing, getting a cat is another. Just like she had wanted the short hair (maybe), and the husband, and the trip to Italy... and those things turned out not to satisfy the real need. I expect the cat will turn out to be a nuisance, complicating their travel plans and their ex-pat lives. A disappointment, just like everything else that was supposed to be good and is not.
The ending feels satisfying and unsatisfying at the same time - I got what I wanted from the story, but now I'm not sure I want it.
Interesting thought that "it has to be the same cat, or it doesn't count." I read her dialogue about how much she wants a cat to sort of reveal that it isn't about this cat at all, but "a cat", any cat; but also, ultimately, not really about any cat or any one thing at all.
Yes — how I saw it was that she wanted to SAVE the cat in the rain and having someone else get her even the same cat won’t do because once again, this is something someone has done for her vs her doing it for herself.
I got the impression that the husband initially thought her vague cat desires were about having a baby, which he was on board for, but as she kept talking he realized it was more about more nebulous desires and dissatisfaction— that’s why he lost interest.
I agree that saving a wet cat (being the savior/doing good works) is very different than being gifted a big fluffy cat. But since the wife seems to be so unheard by the husband and so unhappy with her life, I got satisfaction as a reader, that she was heard and helped by the staff of the hotel and that the big fluffy cat will purr and give her snuggles, albeit it may pee and poop all over the room. All that aside, I didn't get very pulled in to this story. Maybe that's not the point of the expertise. It is really interesting to break it down and look behind the hood, so to speak, and read what everyone else thinks.
Both interesting points! Presumably this kitty was also out in the rain? And how would the maid know which cat was THE cat since she never saw the original.
Clever last line Indigo!
I had the same emotional up and down, one after the other. And I kept seeing other ways for things to turn out. By throwing us this curveball at the end, Hemingway makes me feel like the story of this couple can go a lot of different ways. And my own life can, too.
I do like the way you put that, Indigo -- it is one thing to want a caut, is another thing to get a cat. Precisely.
Sort of in the flavor of, be careful what you wish for young lady, for you will surely get it.
What a weirdly epic ending. As a medical student, I'm skewed towards reading this short story through the lens of service. There are a few primary service relationships at work: padrone-wife, maid-wife, wife-cat (she wants to save the kitty), and wife-husband (she cuts her hair for him, he "offers" to rescue the cat for her). Implied service relationships are also playing out, like commitment of the artists to their paintings and the nationalism symbolized by the war monument. Until the story's end, none of relationships have any pathos for me. As George writes, there are many places where we can read these moments of people doing things for others as artificial and fundamentally selfish. (E.g. The maid and padrone are nice to the wife because of money, husband cares more about wife's looks than her as a person, wife only cares about the cat because it's cute/she's needy.)
There's something about the image of the cat struggling in the maid's arms that activates a feeling that I only get in the hospital, like when a dying patient asked me to steal an Uncrustables for them or when an attending read a poem out loud for a patient recently diagnosed with dementia. Service, going above and beyond to help a vulnerable other, is a beautiful human thing. Sorry for being a kiss-up, but it's why Morse needs to jump in the water at the end of "The Falls."
With the pandemic, people are rethinking their relationship to service industries. As someone who is on leave from medical school to pursue an MFA, I certainly am. This padrone and maid are in a situation where they can by all means do the bare minimum required of their work. Yet, how do they respond when they see a woman run into the rain to save a random cat? Why does the maid's face tighten? Why should we make people feel that they are of "supreme importance," and how is that accomplished?
This is an amazing meditation in the nature of compassion in action. Thank you for all you do.
Richard-I like this "lens of service" very much as it connects to the story. One night, we were in a small town in the south of Spain waiting for our daughter to arrive on a bus. We were standing, bewildered, in the middle of a square as the bus pulled away and she had not emerged. A few minutes later, the desk clerk from our hotel arrived on his motorbike, smiling broadly, saying, "Are you missing something? A daughter perhaps?" She had gotten off at the wrong town and arrived by taxi. After he poured her a glass of wine he hopped on his moto to come find us. He certainly didn't need to-- it was an unexpected act of kindness. We did feel of "supreme importance" -- we were saved from a longer time of worrying about her-- but it wasn't as complicated as money or privilege. As you say, a beautiful, human thing.
"...going above and beyond to help a vulnerable other, is a beautiful human thing." I'm reminded of the passage where Alosha the Pot, in the Tolstoy story, realises that relationships aren't all transactional.
Great response, Richard! I love the examples you gave from your own life. I agree but would go further and say that the service relationships don't matter so much as the kindness. In a way, we're all in service relationships to each other (or can be at any time). I don't really care about the padrone's motives. What hit me was that he did something kind. Finally, someone did something unambiguously kind. End of story (literally).
There is a vast chasm between the cat and the idea of the cat, the fact and the fantasy of it, which the American Wife is now forced to confront. She gets what she wanted, but there is no way it can live up to her expectations. I smile at the ending, but also somehow hurt for her.
Agreed. I felt similary about this ending.
My thoughts exactly! And also, it feels like there's another twist of the knife with her having wanted to go out and get it herself but now simply being brought (what I'm pretty convinced is) a different cat. There's something so moving in the maid and padrone trying to do *something* for her, but also so sad in her still being passive in this last moment, still inevitably unfulfilled.
Mostly I am boggled that so many people can read the same short story and experience it so differently. Who are these characters in this story? What are they thinking? What are they like? What is this story about? What is the author saying? What an illuminating exercise to see how our experience of life (or a story) is so varied. I find this a bit scary -- and also very interesting. The story (or life) means what it means to each of us and it's by communicating to each other about our perspectives that we discover our differences -- and sometimes our similarities. No one is right or wrong. There is not a definitive answer. This experience has helped me see this more clearly than I have before. For me it reinforces how important it is to be curious and to listen to each other. Thank you, George, and everyone.
I keep thinking about a quote from Andrei Tarkovsky: "A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books." Or in our case, a short story (or even paragraph).
LOVE the Tarkovsky reference in all of this! Thanks for adding this to the mix, Manami!
what corner of the globe do you hail from, Manami?
Exactly! Thanks for this.
Yes yes yes.
It feels almost like a punchline, this big swinging tortoiseshell cat that I’d been picturing as small (because “kitty”) and plain black (I don’t know why) and somehow elegant (because of its identification with the woman).
As others have noted, this may be a different cat altogether, but even if it’s the same cat it’s a different cat—no longer out there, helpless, an idea, an object of projection, but real, here, now, needing milk and a litter-box.
And really what she wanted was to save the cat herself, to be a protector and a savior, rather than the saved. But in the end she remains the saved, the protected, as the paternalistic padrone has the cat brought up to her, and she is still a child, not the woman she wanted to be.
Why was it so important that she not get wet? Because rain could lead to a cold, maybe, and she is unalterably in the role of the protected, the sheltered—not one to run through the rain in a cape, the hero.
The most interesting aspect, to me, is that she is complicit—she likes that the padrone fusses over her and serves her. Hemingway could have easily made her dislike all the fuss, but she would have been a more one-dimensional character.
She is trapped, and part of the trap is her own desire.
And since we’re tracking names for the American wife, it seems noteworthy that Hemingway ends on the word Signora. The bitter irony here, I think, is that Signora is the Italian word for a grown married woman, but in this context, it is a word of the politeness and faux-respect that a worker grants a customer—in this case, a customer who couldn’t even retrieve a cat on her own.
"...really what she wanted was to save the cat herself, to be a protector and a savior, rather than the saved. But in the end she remains the saved, the protected, as the paternalistic padrone has the cat brought up to her, and she is still a child, not the woman she wanted to be" -- I like this; thank you.
Yes, that is the impression I'm left with. It makes me think about the novel, The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, of things outside the realm of this story. I loved Hemingway as a teen and he was the number one reason that I wanted to be a writer then. But as an adult woman, though I still love his writing, I wonder what kind of slander this might be to Hadley Hemingway, the real person that the American Wife character is based on. Totally not a fair thing to be wondering, I admit, in an arena of literary criticism. I've left the ring and wandered off...
First, Happy New Year, George! What a lovely way to begin 365 days.
Second, "what else does this [ending] give us?" In the first truncated version, it's unsatisfyingly ambiguous: outside of, as you mention, the symmetry. What happened to the cat? Why did we go through all that for "symmetry"?
At least for me, the final version satisfies with a beat that I'm curious if any of my fellow Story Clubbers also felt: Damn do I want to see the look on the wife's face after the maid delivers the cat! Does she smile and then stick her tongue out at her husband?
Because Hemingway doesn't write it, it's left for each reader to imagine for themselves. It's almost a form of co-creation, and that's a delicious feeling.
I had noticed also that Hemingway does not give us, the reader, any reactions, which I too desperately wanted to know, especially George’s! I found the ending satisfying. But what I didn’t know I had missed was the element of “co-creation” as Michael points out (thanks). It can be any way I want it to be, and other scenarios can keep popping up, and I can keep playing with it.
Great observation, Nancy, thanks!
Agree, Michael. It's so fun to imagine her reaction. Can you imagine her saying, "Oh, never mind."
Love it. That missing beat could go in any direction possible! Genius.
I knew there had to be more. This ending feels exactly right; the wife's expression of her desire is answered not by George but by the Padrone and the maid. It may or may not be the same cat, but at least the Padrone acknowledges her desire. It feels like a different cat because it is large, not a shivering wet kitty. We don't really know. The maid bringing the kitty feels both like gift and a rebuke, somehow, of her earlier whining. Now she has to own the things she wants.
My first impression is that this is 'the' cat, because the first look at the cat is from a second story window, which also has views of the palm trees, which also would make the cat appear small. And the description of the cat is that she is trying to make herself compact enough to avoid the rain, not that she was so tiny that she fit in a spot beneath the table that would not get wet. Thus, when we see the cat at the end, its proximity now reveals the cat's actual size.
Ok, I was 99% convinced that it was a different cat, but now I'm doubting myself haha. Love this take!
"Now she has to own the things she wants." Yes!!
She wants and wants and wants. How many times is that verb deployed? And she gets what she originally wanted. Sort of. And then the cycle of want starts again.
Yes, she gets what she said she wanted (well, one of the things she wanted and the focus of the story), but her life has changed little. She still has the short hair, she still doesn't have the silverware she wants, and her husband has probably already gone back to reading his book and ignoring her. Would the Buddhist answer be: her wanting is the cause of her suffering?
The U2 song comes to mind, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for."
Definitely not a passive character.
I’ve posed the question to Mary Ellis- we just read the story together. She’s 13. She says “yes it does matter.” “The cat that the American wife originally saw was most likely abandoned and in need, whereas the big, tortoise shell cat brought to her most likely has a loving home. If the cat that is brought to her has a home, then the abandoned cat will still be in need. And this leaves the American wife with the same longing she had at the beginning.”
Mary is very smart.
Love Mary -Ellis' observation!
Also - the original stray cat is compact, small identified by H. as 'herself'- a female. The 'big tortoiseshell cat' is likely male. The wife wanted that female companionship in this paternal world. It also felt like the wife is the unloved stray in the story, her husband the satisfied fat cat. The author gives us no idea as to her response because he ends it here- for me she remains unsatisfied because all the men (George, padrone, Hemingway) have decided what she needs (nothing, or any cat: not what she actually wants).
I feel terrible saying this, but the ending feels almost sarcastic to me. "Oh, you wanted a cat? Well, here it is, or "a" cat, anyway. Maybe it's the same one. Maybe it isn't. Oh and by the way, the maid got soaked getting it for you, your husband doesn't want it, and here you are in a hotel room with a soaking wet cat."
I mean, it's sort of "gotcha" to me. Very unsettling.
So those are my first thoughts. Will read over to see if I can get to a more satisfied reading of it.
Editing to add: and maybe that's what life often is. Giving you responses, but not the ones you were expecting (both me and the woman).
Gives you an idea of why Hemingway is often read as a misogynist
Yes, I agree. Total mockery of this woman.
mhm!
Wow, what a great ending! The wife is actually offered the chance to take some responsibility—she’s faced with taking care of a cat. And a big cat, too! And who knows how that will work out? Maybe she will find out whether it was really the cat she wanted or whether it was something else—maybe a different life, a different way of being, a different husband—or maybe something indefinable that will always keep her in a state of yearning and neediness. I’ve softened my attitude toward the woman (even though at the same time I also feel more exasperated by her) because we’ve all experienced that feeling of yearning for something when we have no idea what that something is—and we grasp at all kinds of things we think we want, and none of them turns out to be it—kind of like the general angst and pining of being alive. (And it’s so interesting to see the absence of yearning in the husband—he’s content to be in his own imaginary world, probably reading about other people who are yearning. And he’s annoyed by his wife’s yearning in real life.) So it’s possible she won’t really want the cat at all. Or maybe she’ll discover that what she was yearning for is to have more agency, to be more herself, to become a woman, so that maybe taking on the responsibility of the cat and feeling the joy of being with the cat will help her finally grow into a whole person—not just an image of what her husband wants her to be, and not just a child who needs to be cared for.
The padrone (who went from being called a “hotel owner” to a “hotel-keeper” to a “padrone”—moving more and more toward the paternal) and the maid (who stays a “maid”—women may sometimes have less patience for childlike women like the American wife) seem to be a kind of father-and-mother pair—they’ve taken the young woman under their wing(s) (even though the maid may be a bit more reluctant to do so), and together they actually give the young woman what she says she wants, which turns out to also be what she actually may need—responsibility.
At the end the American wife is now the “Signora”—“a married Italian woman, usually of rank or gentility,” according to Webster’s—so maybe the padrone and maid have decided to view her with more respect, or to see her potential as a mature woman. Or maybe the wife is finally thinking of herself more that way, and, as she says, she wants to no longer look like a boy—meaning she wants to be a woman.
The Signora also now realizes that if she walks around saying she wants something then she should be prepared to actually get it. Sometimes getting what we want is the biggest lesson we have to learn in life, in part because things never turn out the way we imagine them, and in part because we will then have to live up to the responsibility of our dreams—it’s a test of our commitment.
The ending is perfect—it’s so human. It’s funny (we’re thinking “Ha, ha, now what will you do now that you have this big cat?”) and it’s hopeful (maybe the wife will come into her own because maybe she’ll take on the challenge and be happier).
The ending also surprises us by giving us (as readers) what we wanted, even though we weren’t sure what that was. In reading the story, we imagine all the things we want from it (just as the wife imagines all the things she wants), and then there’s the ending. As soon as I read the ending, I knew that was the ending I wanted. So the story embodies what a reader does in the act of reading.
And the ending is so accepting of life and all its yearning. It’s an affirmation—or at least an acceptance—of yearning, at the same time it’s an affirmation or acceptance of its opposite—peace and contentment. So it’s an affirmation of opposites. It’s an acceptance of all of life.
Thanks for giving us this story to read, George. That was great. I totally see now why this is a masterpiece.
Thanks for unpacking “Signora”. That’s some good stuff.
Yes, nice work on "Signora"!
So the agency here, at the end, is given to the males. George stops reading and gives the order to whoever has knocked, to come in. The wife says nothing. The padrone has ordered the maid to bring a cat to the signora. One woman is doing what she is told, the other is silent - having just poured out her thoughts (and yes, I found myself warming to her a little - about one degree above freezing). The maid speaks, at least. The only silent one in the scene is 'the wife.'
And that hulking awkward cat - insistent of my attention in both its shape, weight and colour - hanging as it is down the maid. Isn't it wonderful! Wonderful in that THIS cat is almost comic, certainly bathetic - a complete contrast to the sheltering, shivering little mite that we envisage stuck under that table? What on earth will she do with it? I am reminded of the allegedly 'Chinese' curse (or one of them) - 'May you find what you are looking for." or 'Be careful what you wish for - you may get it...'
Wow. There's so much to unpack here. It is extraordinary.
And fwiw: tortoise-shell cats are almost always female...
Lovely! I had no idea. So the third female in the scene is being lugged about like a piece of baggage…
And there we go! This is why the cat had to be a tortoise-shell. Amazing.
Like calicos, then! Great catch!
We got escalation, all right.
Why is this better than truncating the story at the light coming on in the square? The light is really nice but it’s also a static thing. It’s not going to do anything but hang out there being a pleasant contrast to the dark and the rain.
The arrival of the cat in the hands of the maid delivers many possibilities and questions in one living, unpredictable parcel. Things are about to pop off, and that’s all we know. And we get to feel and wonder about a lot of things on our own without being spoon fed.
(Like: “Is the wife happy? How long will she be happy? What will George do? Why did the maid find and deliver that cat instead of giving up and going back in when the wife did? Was it of her own volition, in some kind of act of recognition and kindness? If so, will our girl recognize this on any level and be warmed by it? Is this a good thing, this cat showing up?” And probably more things, too, but none of that in so many words while reading it. This is all blended together in one quick dose of a complicated feeling. Wonder and satisfaction are there but more, too.
I liked the light a lot but the light was a pleasing note. This is not only a chord with a lot of harmonizing (and pleasingly dissonant) notes in it, it’s a chord progression, making a feeling.
I remember learning from Leonid (that wonderful Russian acting teacher I had once) the difference between emotion and feeling. Emotion, he said, is like one simple note, and you can stir it up pretty easily. Feeling is more complex, like a symphony, and all you can do is make the conditions for it to arrive and hope not to scare it away.
Oh: and I think, instinctively, that a preponderance of one-note things and cheaply stirred-up emotion in the world makes us a little dumber and more reactive, whereas the complexity of feeling refines us, opens us and makes us wiser and better in ways we might not even understand, that might be beyond human understanding, even.