Tortoise-Shell Cat: Hemingway & Freud [The Cat In The Rain & The Interpretation Of Dreams]

"The American Wife stood at the window looking out. Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables"

Dream theory uncovers notions about Hemingway’s surface content and the desires which are metaphorically repressed within his text. Freud’s ‘Analysis of Specimen Dream’ and Hemingway’s messages in his contemporary expressions of gender, conflict, desires and repressions within the ‘Cat in the Rain’ correlates the Freudian psychological ideas on wish fulfilment, displacement and condensation. Through characterisation and metaphor, the text explores aspects of Freud’s dream decoding study. As a short story drama, there are potential instances where the dream content and dream thoughts convey the repressed self of the characters. What Hemingway closely captures of the human psyche is the condensation – the dismissal of a fixed meaning from a totemic message which instead favours multiplicity. In terms of the text’s desires and the authors relation to this, the wish fulfilment is unconsciously revealed; Freud believes this gives meaning within the psychological mind and its dreams. 

Psychoanalysis/dream decoding is alike to the analysis into the intricacies of literature. Both finding a significant meaning through the discourse, closely regarding the mind. The Cat in the Rain’s surface content and it’s evident plot functions similar to Freud’s dream content and the discussion of manifest and latent content within dreams. As a short story, the text garners attention with its seemingly direct, simple statements alluding its deeper significance. Typically, Hemingway’s stylistic approach to prose resonates the authors experience with trauma due to its consistent, tight images. In particular the totemic use of the cat and the war monument as the major emblems of the text. The straightforward approach to the plot devices and portrayal of character, regard the manifest content of a dream – the literal. Every action in its most basic understanding without hidden messages or values; dismissed of context. The exposition infers a restless, dreary atmosphere and evolves into the call of action which sees the desire for the cat and its disappearance. The denouement holds the dialogue between the American Wife and George going into the new equilibrium where a tortoise-shell cat is given to the female protagonist. ‘The American Wife stood at the window looking out. Outside right under the window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables’. This is before any metaphorical standpoint; the woman desires the cat and eventually receives a cat. In relation to the manifest content, discussed by Freud here, ‘During this work I had trouble in keeping at bay all the many ideas which were bound to be set going by the comparison between the dream-content and dream-thoughts concealed by it […] The dream represents a certain state of affairs as being as I would wish it to be: its content is thus a wish fulfilment, its motive a wish’, the wish is activated by the literal aspect although concealing the meaning and values. Interpreting the intricacies of the story should be analysed in a similar way to Freud’s decoding method. For the involuntary, supressed wish fulfilment or trauma experiences there is the latent content. The concealed affair which can be interpreted if decoded.

If we concern The Cat in the Rain with a latent content approach, Hemingway’s text relates to an array of wish fulfilment – whether or not it is fulfilled is debatable. Significantly, the cat takes on the biggest role in terms of meaning. Mark Cirino, in his criticism ‘Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory’ he comments on the author’s consistent imagery. ‘In Carl Eby’s study of fetishism in Hemingway’s works, he notes that cats, including lions, “were fetishistically-invested objects, totem animals”. He connects Hemingway’s cats with “the mother” through an inversion of the Oedipus complex […] his analysis of Cat in the Rain, The Garden of Eden, and biographical materials makes a strong case for cats of all kinds as totemic in Hemingway’s work. Eby concludes his study by arguing that cats serve as “a replacement for some unnamed lost object”. That object, he argues, is “the mother”’ . Eby’s idea of the ‘unnamed lost object’, in this short piece, resembles intimacy or at the very least connection which is inherently absent within her marriage. The symbolism of the cat reflects the Wife’s loneliness, frustration and unfulfilled. ‘And I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in from of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes’. With this immense desire, there is no satisfaction for the character of the wife and her need for certain amenities and an altered hairstyle to abandon her contemporary culture and become feminine, suggest the alienation and lack of connection – crucial to a relationship. There’s deep suppression on both sides of the relationship. On the female protagonist’s side, its concerned with sexual frustration and the character of George has raised theories of closeted homosexuality due to a short dialogue between the couple. 
‘” Don’t you think it would be a good idea if I let my hair grow out?” she asked, looking at her profile again. George looked up and saw the back of her neck clipped close like a boy’s.
“I like it the way it is.”
“I get so tired of it,” she said. “I get so tired of looking like a boy.”’
Hemingway shows an awareness of the cultural trends that started in Europe and America, evoking the emancipated woman – a movement which saw women with short hair, smoking, highly independent and casually having sex. Perhaps the loss of traditional ideals issues confusion in the wife’s gender identity, she yearns to become feminine when insecurely complaining about her boyish haircut. George, at a time of immense suppression for homosexuality, admires the masculine appearance of his wife. Inferring his interest in men, further his lack of interest with close contact in the marriage. In regard to the voice of the wife, Miriam B. Mandel’s study in a literary criticism collection of Hemingway’s female voices - ‘Letting the Silenced Voice Speak’ states ‘These repeated narrations of exclusion and silence, which obviously focus on absence, necessarily make us aware of presence and thus raise an interesting question: if we are made aware of the voice that has been silenced, are we not in fact invited to hear it?’ . Mandel makes a point about exclusions in Hemingway’s texts as a repeated theme. The author consistently provides the manifested content, ensuring that the latent content maintains this metaphorical issue of abandonment and diminished belonging. Freud, also aware of the oppression of desires, seeks to uncover the minds expression of a wish whilst in the dream state. I took Freud’s approach to repression to correlate ideas of frustration and sexual desire in Hemingway’s piece. The value of the cat, or desired object, becomes vulnerable to the female characters wish fulfilment and upon satisfaction at the new equilibrium, the deeper context still remains with the Hotel Keeper as a provider of her desires, branching off into ideas on adultery which Hemingway was familiar with in such a modernist era where the boundaries of sexual desire were consistently broken. 

In terms of Hemingway’s experience with trauma, the war monument presents itself strongly in the text. ‘Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument. It was made of bronze and glistened in the rain. It was raining. The rain dripped from the palm trees. Water stood in pools on the gravel path. […] The motor cars were gone from the square by the war monument’. Against the backdrop of the past extremities of the first world war, the mundane, surface content of the cat disappearing, and the wife’s overdramatic upset suggests a lack of sensitivity on the wife’s behalf. Hemingway portrays this desolate landscape, a daunting atmosphere he is vividly retelling yet the American privilege of the wife chooses to idolise a cat. Using Freud’s approach, the factor of displacement within dreams is significant here. Latent meaning in the text, just like the latency of wish fulfilment in dreams, has been shifted into from its repressed state to a new-hidden version of it. An allusion to what it really is. This deep social unrest conjured in Hemingway’s setting is distracted by the crucially important symbol of the cat instead. This act of displacement covers the wife’s isolation and George’s repression from the imagery and drama maintained by the cat’s symbolism. Freud’s anecdotal evidence offers insight – ‘True, I made a substitution. I dreamed ‘propyl’ after having smelled ‘amyl’’.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund, ‘Analysis of Specimen Dream’ in Interpretations of Dreams, ed. by Joyce Creek (Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 78-97

Hemingway, Ernest, ‘The First Forty-Nine Stories’ (Cape, 1979), pp. 136-139

Mandel, B. Miriam, ‘A Lifetime of Flower Narratives’ in Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice, ed. by Lawrence R. Broer (University of Alabama Press, 2002), pp. 220-265

Cirino, Mark, ‘Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory’ (The Kent State University Press, 2013), pp. 50 - 61