“The Cat in the Rain” is set in an unnamed town in Italy in the 1920s, the years following World War I. Though Hemingway does not reference the war directly, he describes a war monument that the American couple at the center of the story can see from outside their hotel room window and notes that “Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument.” The fact that a large number of people come to regularly view the memorial implies that the wounds of war are still fresh in Europe at the time the story is set.
That said, George and his wife don’t seem to care much about the monument or about getting to know the locals generally; as Hemingway writes, “They did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on their way to and from their room.” This suggests that the couple is a stand-in for the American government's response to the war—the United States maintained an isolationist policy for the first two-and-a-half years of the war and only sent troops to Europe near the end of the conflict. European resentment toward Americans for viewing their continent as a tourist destination in the aftermath of such a tragedy comes across in the way the maid’s “face tighten[s]” whenever the wife character speaks to her in English.
Also notable to the setting of the story is the fact that, in the 1920s, the women’s movement was starting to gain traction. American women had only just been granted the right to vote in 1920 and were starting to experiment with other ways of pushing back against the status quo. The fact that the wife in the story has short hair “like a boy’s” suggests that she is allying herself with this type of feminist politics. That said, she also bemoans the fact that she cut her hair short (longing to feel the weight of a bun on her head again), suggesting that she experiences some ambivalence about challenging the gender norms of the day.
