Thursday, November 18, 2010

"Cat in the Rain" and "The Sea Change"

“Cat in the Rain” slightly frustrated me at first because I had no idea what Hemingway’s point was.  All I could pick out as important was the unequal relationship between the man and woman.  He treated her as an inferior.  Knowing that he was using the iceberg technique, I read this story several more times, picking out the characters and seeing how they all related to each other. 

The cat was the most puzzling.  Then I began making connections between it and the wife.  Helpless, trapped, and huddled under the table, the cat reminded me a lot of herr.  From the beginning, when she tells her husband about wanting to rescue the cat, he first insists on doing it himself.  Throughout the story, he is short with her and pays her little attention.  “Oh, shut up and get something to read,” he tells her when she reveals her true feelings.  Like the cat, she feels helpless and trapped by a husband who does not give her any credit.

            “The Sea Change” was equally as mysterious.  All the dialogue was presented, as well as a clear look at their relationship and the ending of it.  What was missing was the problem.  There is no indication of what exactly went wrong.  Perhaps Hemingway meant this story to be symbolic of all break-up stories—the problems are more or less the same, so let’s focus on the actual breaking up instead.    

2 comments:

  1. I struggled with figuring out the significance of the cat of well. It was easy to see that the young girl was oppressed and controlled by the husband, but I didn’t make the connection that she was represented by the cat. Since she wanted the cat so badly, I just thought it symbolized happiness. I actually didn’t see the relationship until we discussed it in class.
    Your last sentence about The Sea Change is interesting. Although we identified the problem as being the girls affair, I agree that Hemingway might have tried to focus on the actual breakup. He spent more time developing the couples thoughts, feelings, and opinions about the breakup rather than explaining the problem.

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  2. I have to agree with you on the connection between the cat and the wife. The part where the husband offers to go save the cat was especially interesting to me though. He shuts her down all the time and seems to not understand why she acts the way she does but the fact that he (half-heartedly) tries to go save the cat for her may show that he knows exactly how she is feeling and if she just gets loud enough about it he will do something to appease her. This effort though may just be the husband acting as a loving husband would but as you said he later shows his real feelings by telling her to “shut up and get something to read”.
    The Sea Change may well have been to focus on simply the breaking up of the relationship through the dialogue but I think at the same time he also exposed the problem. The way they talked about another “she” and about having a “vice” can communicate to us what had actually caused them to be having this discussion. The fact that Hemingway focused on the breaking up part set the scenery of a disturbance in their relations but once again the problem is hidden just under the tip of the iceberg.

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