Fallen Woman Redeemed: Eliot, Victorianism, and Opera in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats
In their hit musical Cats, Trevor Nunn and Andrew Lloyd Webber juxtapose the poetry of T.S. Eliot with musical elements from a wide range of sources, including various genres of popular music and opera. Cats can be read in the context both of social and political efforts in the early 1980s to revivify an idealized Victorian past, and of scholarly attempts to understand the continuing impact of Victorian discourses around femaleness and sexuality. The figure of Grizabella, the fallen cat/woman, reveals the persistence of this powerful sexual and theatrical archetype, never directly acknowledged by her creators.