The Politics of Representation in Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain"

Abstract

This paper looks at Ernest Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain" using an interdisciplinary lens that incorporates feminist criticism, psychoanalytical theory and cultural studies. The study investigates Hemingway's minimalist narrative technique and how it builds and limits the female subject in a maledominated hierarchical society. The study concentrates on the unnamed American wife, who is emotionally "discontented," seeking affection and wanting to find her identity symbolized through the recurring motif of the cat, the rain, the hotel room and its spatial context. While previous research focused on symbolism, minimalism and marital alienation, this study reveals that there is a missing dimension in the politics of representation, in relation to the narratization of female agency. The paper examines the gendered layers within the text, in light of the ideas from Stuart Hall to Carl Jung. The wife's need is not just to be comforted by the husband, but one of a psychological and higher maternal nature. The needs of the woman cannot be limited to the comfort of a husband only; there is a higher psychological and existential need that is met. Furthermore, this apparent neutrality of the interdisciplinary paradigm is unmasked as a complex hermeneutic of negotiation between power, desire and identity in the context of the "Lost Generation" after WWI. Lastly, the study provides an understanding of the politics of the text and the critical ideological interpretation of modernist society which emerged after World War I in Hemingway's work, and can be utilised in other classroom discussions regarding gender, narrative technique, and ideology in intellectual works of the early twentieth century.