|
She\'s an English volunteer nurse\'s aide. As with Henry, Hemingway gives you little of her background. She, too, is young, but how young we aren\'t told. She seems to be from a good family, although she seldom mentions it. Prior to coming to Italy she had been engaged to a British soldier, but he was killed. When you first see her, she is, in her own words, \"a little crazy\" from the shock.
If she\'s a developing character--and many readers don\'t see her this way--she\'s a different sort of one than Henry. Her development has taken place before you see her. Back when she was engaged to her Englishman, she was still holding onto a staid, Victorian morality. She decided to wait to marry her fiance until after the war. She did not sleep with him. Then he\'s killed. And it is this shock that unnerves her. It makes her dismiss conventional morality. \"He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known,\" she says of her fiance now. And it makes her resigned about the war. \"We\'ll crack,\" she says matter-of-factly, assessing the chances of the Allies, and perhaps of herself and Frederic Henry as well. So, although Catherine has undergone change, it has taken place before the book begins; she develops little in the course of the novel. At her death in Chapter 41 she is the same woman we met in the garden in Chapter 4.
Those readers who see her as an incomplete character point out that she\'s too beautiful, too submissive, to be true. \"You see, I do whatever you want,\" she tells Henry, playing the part of the perfect adolescent sex object, the dream girl with few notions in her head except how to please her lover.
But there is genuine disagreement. You have to make up your own mind, using the text to support your interpretation.
One thing about Catherine is certain: she dies bravely, with the proper Hemingway stoicism. \"I\'m going to die,\" she says. \"I\'m not afraid. It\'s just a dirty trick.\"
|
