THE CRAZY CAT LADY TROPE

One of my most frequently shared gifs is a clip of the Crazy Cat Lady from The Simpsons. In the clip she emerges from the twilight covered in cats, shouting gibberish and hurling cats in a wild fury. This Crazy Cat Lady is by far the most definitive portrayal of the crazy cat lady trope: mentally ill, angry, an alcoholic hoarder who lives alone. She has no husband or children, and is socially isolated with no friends or support.

The crazy cat lady trope is always weaponised as a cautionary tale for girls and women. Better settle down or you’ll become a crazy cat lady! If you focus too much on work and your career, you’ll wake up all alone one day and find you’re a crazy old cat lady! (People said this to my face all through my 20s and 30s.) Women say it all the time too, and proclaim their innocence: ‘I’m not a crazy cat lady!’ haha, nervous laugh, wild eyes, ‘I like dogs! haha!’ When you add this to all the other stuff of being a woman, the sexist outrages all run into each other, like cat spews on the lino. No wonder we can’t be bothered getting out of our dressing gowns.

The real name of the Crazy Cat Lady in The Simpsons is Eleanor Abernathy, and her backstory says so much. As a young girl, Eleanor was academically brilliant, ambitious and idealistic. She started law school at 16, and by 24 she had earned a medical degree from Harvard and a law degree from Yale. She went to not one but TWO ivy league universities, achieving her childhood dream of becoming both a doctor and a lawyer. In the flashbacks, we see Eleanor in court as a beautiful and smartly dressed woman living her dream.

By the age of 32, however, after many years of study and gruelling hard work, sacrificing her personal life and self-care for her ambitions, Eleanor inevitably suffers from burnout. We see Eleanor in her fancy apartment sitting on her couch, drinking a nice glass of wine with her first cat, Buster. She turns to alcohol to cope with her burnout and depression. Just eight years later, Eleanor has at 40 become a complete maniac. No longer Dr Eleanor Abernathy serving the public as both a doctor and a lawyer, her brilliance and achievements are completely erased from history (a familiar story). She has become the Crazy Cat Lady, a misunderstood, underestimated, raving lunatic spinster. Girls, beware!

Eleanor’s backstory includes another cautionary tale for women: the perils of female ambition. The downfall of the ambitious woman is an even more ubiquitous ye olde trope than that of the crazy cat lady. Cue Lady Macbeth. Eleanor’s story arc thankfully includes brief moments of lucidity and brilliance. In one episode, we discover she is a great opera singer. In another, she runs for mayor and we see her ambition, compassion and intellect.

On a side note, it is interesting also to compare Eleanor and Marge Simpson, perhaps the most well-known housewife in popular culture. Marge was also an ambitious young woman with a talent for the arts, photography and painting, but she sacrificed her ambitions for family and married life. Marge occasionally attempts to rekindle her passions but is always thwarted by the chaos created by her husband and children. her life is the very definition of a wife and mother’s sacrifice: always full of love despite being over-burderned, her virtuous sacrifices going under-appreciated.

Eleanor makes no such sacrifices and it is she who suffers most in the end. (And dare I say, is even punished for it!)

Side note – there’s an episode where Marge and Lisa help Eleanor clean up her hoarder house; Eleanor becomes renewed and lucid, but in the process, Marge catches the hoarding illness, as if a woman without her husband is at dire risk of catching the cat lady disease! If it was catching, everyone I know would have it by now.

Eleanor’s story has all the qualities of a Shakespearean character or a Greek tragedy. The brilliant, beautiful young woman bestowed great gifts by the Gods, whose ambitions are so great she unwittingly commits (through her fervent passion and ambition) a kind of patriarchal hubris, is tragically struck down by the cruel fates and is ultimately driven to insanity. Fark, this resonates! I’m gunna need to lie down for a minute.

But don’t be afraid, ladies! These cautionary tales (beware your ambition and your independence, lest ye be punished and driven to insanity and condemned to live on the fringes) are just traps designed to lure us away from living our own lives. Lucky for you, I’ve got everything you need to know to avoid getting ensnared. If you’re already caught up in them (aren’t we all?), you’ll understand what they’re up to and learn from the cat ladies how you can use your considerable powers to get out.