Cat in the Rain:
Analysis of a Short Story with Sources:
Analysis of a Short Story with Documented Sources:
This writing assignment is a interpretive and analytical essay with documented sources either on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” or Ernest Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain.” In this assignment you will write an interpretation of a short story, but your essay must include information from at least two online sources. All sources, including the story itself, must be properly cited and documented according to MLA standards, and a separate “Works Cited” page must be included with your essay.
(Important: There are several different documentation styles–we are using the MLA style.)
Your essay needs to be written in a formal voice and needs at least five paragraphs, including an introduction with a clear thesis statement and a conclusion with a restatement of that thesis. The minimum required length for the revised draft is approximately 700 words.
You can assume that your audience has read the short story that is the subject of your essay but has not studied or analyzed it. Your job is not to summarize the story but to help readers appreciate it and to understand its meaning. To help you go beyond a simple summary of the story, you should ask yourself what point the writer is trying to make. What is the author trying to tell us through the story?
You might start by thinking of a possible theme conveyed in the story. “Theme” can be defined as the “main point” or, more specifically, the “comment about life” that an author conveys in a story (or other work of literature). With a possible theme in mind, you should then reread the story carefully, making notes on anything that seems to relate to the theme.
As you consider a possible thesis for your essay, it might be helpful if you come up with three or four important and related claims that you think you can support with specific evidence from the story. These claims could then be the bases for the different body paragraphs of your essay. From the claims, you could then formulate a one-sentence thesis statement.
Be an active reader. Read the story you are writing about several times. When you reread the story, you should have a pen or pencil in hand, making marginal notes to help you remember things you notice and to write down any questions that come to mind.
Referring to the Narrator:
Typically, essays are written in the voice of the author, whereas short stories are written in the voice of a narrator, a persona created by the author to tell the story. As you are writing about a short story and are referring to what the storyteller says, you should not refer to what the “author” says but to what the narrator says. Do not confuse the author and the narrator: even though both Hemingway and Gilman had experiences similar to those presented in their stories, the stories are fictional, with fictional characters.
Using Secondary Sources:
For this essay, you must use material from at least two online secondary sources to help you develop and support your position. (The story–your subject–is referred to as your primary source; works that comment on your subject are referred to as secondary sources.) Sources must be cited and documented according to MLA standards, and you need to include a separate “Works Cited” page that properly lists the sources cited in the essay. The minimum required length for the essay includes the “Works Cited” page.
The secondary sources that you use for your essay should be chosen from the sources listed below. You can look for your own online sources to use in your essay, but you must use scholarly and credible sources in your essay, and the great majority of online material concerning “Cat in the Rain” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” is not scholarly. (It has taken me several hours to locate just the few sources listed below.) Do not use as sources student essays that you find posted at one of the many “free essay” web sites designed to help students plagiarize: you can find hundreds of these types of essays on the two stories, but they are not appropriate sources for a college-level essay.
Selected Critical Essays on Assigned Stories
Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain”
• Beuka, Robert. “Tales from ‘The Big Outside World’: Ann Beattie’s Hemingway.”
• Felty, Darren. “Spatial Confinement in Hemingway’s ‘Cat in the Rain.'”
• Griffin, Peter. “A Foul Mood, a Dirty Joke: Hemingway’s ‘Cat in the Rain.'”
• Lindsay, Clarence. “Risking Nothing: American Romantics in ‘Cat in the Rain.'”
• Monteiro, George. “Expatriate Life Away from Paris.”
Available on the Web:
• Bernardo, Karen. “Ernest Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain.'”
• Takahashi, Hiroshi. “Creatures in Hemingway’s Short Stories: Les Hommagesto Human Grief.” (Adobe Acrobat file) Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”
• Bak, John S. “Escaping the Jaundiced Eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.'”
• Hume, Beverly A. “Managing Madness in Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-paper.'”
• Smith, Evans Lansing. “Myths of Poesis, Hermeneusis, and Psychogenesis: Hoffmann, Tagore, and Gilman.”
Available on the Web:
• Bernardo, Karen. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.'”
• Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.”
• Mahin, Michael James. “The Awakening and The Yellow Wallpaper: An Intertextual Comparison of the ‘Conventional’ Connotations of Marriage and Propriety”
• Murton, Michelle Mock. “Behind the “barred windows”: The Imprisonment of Women’s Bodies and Minds in Nineteenth-Century America.”
• Snyder, Beth. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Poetics of the Inside.Using, Citing, and Documenting Sources
A major difference between this essay assignment and the earlier essay assignments in the course is the requirement that you use sources to help you develop your essay. You will present your interpretation of one of the stories, and the majority of supporting material should be from the story itself, but the sources will help you better understand the story and will also help you more effectively persuade readers to accept your interpretation. The material you use from sources should offer good insights into the story that are relevant to your interpretation. Do not use material from the sources if that material only summarizes facts from the story.
Whenever you use sources in your writing, you need to give proper credit to the sources and you need to be very careful to distinguish your own words and ideas from those you use from the sources. There is a specific way to do this, and there is an organization that has established one of the two most widely accepted standards for citing and documenting sources. This organization is the Modern Language Association, abbreviated MLA, and you need to make sure that you follow MLA conventions as you cite and document your sources in your essay.
The following course web pages provide information about using, citing, and documenting sources according to MLA standards:
• Using Sources Effectively
• Citing and Documenting Online Sources
• Documenting Sources from an Online Subscription Database
• Citing Sources (This page focuses on print sources but presents some information that might be useful.)
• Paragraph with Sources on Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain”
• MLA Documentation and the “Works Cited” Page (This page uses examples of print sources, but the general format for the “Works Cited” page is the same regardless of the kinds of sources used.)
• Plagiarism
• For information about citing and documenting online sources, see https://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/cite5.html#1
• For information about quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing, see
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_quotprsum.html
Sample Works Cited Page:
A “Works Cited” page is required for this essay, and the information listed on that page must follow the correct MLA format. The page linked below presents an example of a “Works Cited” page listing both stories assigned for this essay and a few of the sources listed above. Please use this page to help you prepare your “Works Cited” page properly.
• Works Cited Page with Essay, Stories, and Sources
Sample Essays:
• The sample research paper “Cry, Wolf” by Ella Berven, of Roane State Community College, is not an essay on a short story but is a good example of how material from sources should be used, cited, and documented in an essay.
• The Paragraph with Sources on Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain” presents a paragraph on Hemingway’s story that uses and cites material from the story and from two secondary sources according to MLA standards. The paragraph includes a Works Cited page. The page also presents a lot of important information concerning the use, citation, and documentation of sources.
• A Guide for Writing Research Papers Based on Modern Language Association (MLA) Documentation also provides a lot of information about using, citing, and documenting sources.