Cat in the Rain

The protagonist in this story is the wife because the story focuses on her desires and the drive to fulfill them. The story is told in a limited third person, and while readers don’t get much direct insight to the wife’s thoughts, the wife’s words and actions reveal her character. Unlike George, “the American wife” is unnamed; she is called “the American wife,” “the wife,” “his wife,” and “the American girl.” She is never called a “woman,” and after she encounters the maid, the narrator refers to her only as “the American girl” or “his wife.” The American wife feels most comfortable with Traditional Gender Norms; she wishes for long hair (“I get so tired of looking like a boy” [123]), to be a caretaker of the cat, and for her husband to provide for her emotionally and materially.

Her transformation over the course of the story is subtly woven beneath the surface of the story, in what Hemingway called the “iceberg effect.” That is, although she hasn’t explicitly communicated her discontent to George, her quest for the cat prompts her to use her voice to express a deep, unarticulated desire that she doesn’t understand herself (“I don’t know why I wanted it so much” [122]). Her change is beneath the surface because rather than saying, “I’m unhappy,” she expresses her yearning and dissatisfaction indirectly. For example, she empathizes with the cat’s predicament of being lonely and uncomfortable (“It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain” [122]) and conveys her discontent in terms of her desire for long hair, eating by candlelight with her own silver, springtime, and new clothes. Even after George tells her to “shut up,” instead of complying, she repeats her desire for the cat. When she receives the tortoiseshell cat, readers don’t know if it’s the same cat, so whether it will meet the wife’s needs is open to debate.