Mrs. Nellie Lovett

Mrs. Lovett is a middle-aged woman who dreams of retiring to a house ``by the sea''. In Todd, she sees an opportunity to fulfill that dream. I think that this is one of the two main reasons that she tries helping Todd achieve his goal.

An important feature of her linguistic repertory is the fact that she speaks Cockney. There are a few Cockney references in By the Sea. For instance when Mrs. Lovett sings: "Bring along your chopper", chopper means apart from an axe, also ''penis''. And there are more sexual double entendres in this song.

There is yet another aspect of Mrs. Lovett's linguistic repertory. To understand this I will first take a look at the following description of écriture feminine:

The texts are characterized by play, disruption, excess, gaps, grammatical and syntactic subversion, ambiguities; by endlessly shifting register generic transgression; by fluid figurative language and myths. They are anti-authoritarian, questioning, unsettling^5.14.

If for example we take a look at The Worst Pies in London we, can find many of these aspects in the lyrics as well as the music. The most prominent aspects are play (the song on its own would be a virtuoso-comedy song) and the use of figurative language and myths:

Take for instance Mrs. Mooney and her pie-shop
Business never better using only pussy-cats and toast
And a pussy's good for maybe six or seven at the most

Furthermore, the use of gaps is apparent in the music. Could this whole song be an example of écriture vocale feminine?

There is one aspect which appears only in the music: the use of the seduction motive. Mrs. Lovett is the first character to introduce this motive, and therefore, it can be said that this motive is associated with her. It is true that the motive is sung by others but in most cases this is just in response to Mrs. Lovett. The seduction motive could be seen as derivative of the Dies Iræ-motive, which gives sheds some light on her relationship with Todd.