A Need for Narrative in "Mary Poppins"

Bring on the Dancing Penguins:   

Mary Poppins’ Original Vignettes versus Disney’s Movie Narrative 

Evelyn Smith

MS in Library Science, University of North Texas (2012)

Ph. D. in English, Texas Christian University (1995)

A re-reading of Pamela Lyndon Travers’ Mary Poppins (1934) occasioned by the recent Disney film, Saving Mr. Banks, has prompted this review of literary and newspaper articles that critique that novel as well as the 1964  feature film Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins.  Saving Mr. Banks focuses on P. L. Travers acerbic and guarded personality that flashbacks relate back to the death of her beloved father  as well as the creative process that pitted Travers against the Disney studios song and screen writers. 

During the writing of the Mary Poppins script, Travers (1899-1996) worried that Disney would rob her of a reputation as a serious poet and writer who specialized in the study of myth and folklore.  However, this should have been the least of her concerns since 52 years later a retrospective Saving Mr. Banks’ provides  a Freudian analysis of her angst.   This film as well as the only book length biography of P.L. Travers, Valerie Lawson’s Mary Poppins, She Wrote (1999), provide a catalog of neurotic defense mechanisms that Travers displays to cover up her anxiety, including isolation, withdrawal, intellectualism, or perhaps pedantry in her criticism of Americanisms like “let’s go fly a kite”, and disassociation—she presents herself as an upper-middle-class English woman, denying her once downwardly mobile Australian background as Helen Lyndon Goff. Travers’ creation, Mary Poppins, also displays a superiority complex and passive-aggressive traits while the Banks children idealize a servant with antisocial tendencies.

Travers fought to exert complete artistic control over the Disney adaptation of Mary Poppins, but her opponents  just as intensely tried to create a coherent narrative out of a collection of episodic stories.  These vignettes worked well when read at bedtime as self-contained chapters; however, they lacked all the parts that make up a dramatic narrative that would link the short stories together. 

Hence while Travers’ traumatic childhood helped her to develop  a memorable archetypal character as well as to create a stereotypical Edwardian English setting, her collection of loosely linked tales when treated as a whole didn’t provide any obvious conflict—let alone an easily recognizable resolution.  Instead, she preferred an indirect approach, using satire to suggest that middle-class English parents didn’t want to be bothered with their children. 

By way of contrast, Disney needed to present a sentimentalized moral along with songs that reinforced the theme of the movie. Thus, the reformation of George Banks became the plot device that drove what was a rather slender narrative.  Meanwhile dancing penguin cartoons, Dick Van Dyke, and Julie Andrews would transform a rather vain and self-serving nursemaid into a nanny that any family would love to hire.

A Mary Poppins/Savings Mr. Banks

Annotated Bibliography 

Avery, Tori. (2013,  December 16).  Who was P.L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins?  The History Kitchen.  Food. PBS.  Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/pl-travers-mary-poppins/

 Travers bended her life story to make it sound more attractive, a trait she inherited from her alcoholic father, Travers Robert Goff,  who fashioned his own personal myths into his version of the truth (Avery, 2013, December 16, para. 2).  Travers habitually stated that Mary Poppins was family, and this was symbolically true since Travers drew from her own childhood experiences when writing the Mary Poppins novels.  For example, many of Mary Poppins’ aphorisms came directly from Travers’ mother, Margaret Agnes Morehead, while Travers borrowed her mannerisms from her Great Aunt Ellie, Helen Morehead (Avery, 2013, December 16, para. 4).  Thus, Avery concludes that Travers was “a woman with a colorful imagination who was the product of a strange, stern, and sometimes lonely upbringing” (Avery, 2013, December 16, para. 5).

Burness, Edwina and Griswold, Jerry.  (1982, winter).  P. L. Travers, the art of fiction. The Paris Review.  63.  Retrieved from http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3099/the-art-of-fiction-no-63-p-l-travers

Burgess and Griswold (1982) upon paying a visit to P. L. Travers describe her as “a master of pith and anecdote” (para. 1).  They also make her out to be “a Mother Goddess”—a comparison that the myth-loving Travers would have attempted to project.  These  critics  accepted without question the fiction that Mary Poppins, according to Travers, “was entirely spontaneous and not invented not thought out,  I never said,  ‘Well, I’ll write a story about Mother Goddess and call it Mary Poppins.’ It didn’t happen like that.  I cannot summon up inspiration; I myself am summoned (Burgess, 1982, para. 9).

Commins, Kathleen M. (1966, Michaelmas Term).  Children’s books: A hundred years since “Alice”.  Arts: The Proceedings of the Sydney University Arts Association, 3(1), 5-17.  Retrieved from http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/ART/article/viewFile/5449/6129

P. L. Travers disliked classifying books as fantasy, according to a New York Times Book Review, because  it has come to mean “far from the truth and untrusty”.  As for nurturing imagination in children in a technological  age, she counseled, “I would just say feed and warm them and let imagination be—though wonder, I think is a better word" (Commins, 1966, p. 13-14).

Cuomo, Chris. (2009).  Spinsters in sensible shoes. From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender and Culture.   Ed. Elizabeth Bell, Lydia Haas, Aura Sills.  Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 212-222. Google Books.  Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books/about/From_Mouse_to_Mermaid.html?id=pdCrF4JxKDIC

Cuomo (2009) classifies Disney's Mary Poppins both as a witch and as an autonomous female who cares for others’ children while resisting becoming a mother herself  (p. 213).   Juxtaposed against this independent woman, George Banks is a failed patriarch, an absentee father, whose children are out of control and whose wife is a gallivanting suffragette (Cuomo, 2009, p. 214).  Thus, Mary Poppins is a feminist hero who lives out the ideas of women’s equality by being a “full moral agent”.  What she is not, however, is a stereotypical nurturing caregiver (Cuomo, 2009, p. 214-215).  Accordingly, the film focuses on how Mary Poppins shows by trickery that the father is neglecting his children since it emphasizes that men have the opportunity to regain control of the disintegrating family (Cuomo, 2009, p. 215).

Didicher, Nicole E. (1977).  The children in the story: Metafiction in Mary Poppins in the Park.  Children’s Literature in Education, 23(3), 137.  [Excerpt only].  Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1022437019041#page-1

Inserting the supernatural into the ordinary appeals to readers of children’s fantasy books, for only the everyday routine can preserve the supernatural.  Thus,  at the end of each adventure with their nanny, Jane and Michael Banks have to come to terms with the extraordinarily events that have happened, even though she always insists that everything is normal.  Curiously however, the self-aware Mary Poppins series increasingly obscure  references myths and legends as Travers move beyond her first novels (Didicher, 1977, p. 137).

Ellick, Catherine L.  (2001, fall),  Animal carnivals: A Bakklinian reading of C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew and P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins.  Style, 35(3), 453-471.  Retrieved from http://people.bridgewater.edu/~kelick/Article_carnivals.pdf

Ellick sees the character of Mary Poppins as queen of the carnival even if her appearance and speech brand her as an English working class woman.  Her role as nanny, however, provides a reason for her adventures, upon which she welds “great even cosmic authority” (Ellick, 2001, p. 461). After embarking on an adventure, contrived “dialogical interactions” kindle the children’s understanding of the carnival surrounding them (Ellick, 2001, p. 462).  For example, the “Full Moon” chapter in the first Mary Poppins novel  inverts the hierarchy of the animal kingdom when a visit to the zoo places visitors behind bars instead of the animals they come to see, thus dissolving the boundaries of structure and order in a cyclical, rather than linear,  alternative world (Ellick, 2001, p. 463).

However, the morning after this escapade ends, Mary Poppins denies that it ever happened (Ellick, 2001, p. 464). Similarly, the nanny turns the social structure upside down as she intimidates her employers, and most middle class adult characters come across as “ineffectual, even silly” while Travers bequeaths working class characters with magical powers (Ellick, 2001, p. 465). Thus, in undermining existing hierarchies, Mary Poppins offers a time out from conventional society before circumstances force a return to the status quo (Ellick, 2001, p. 466-467).

Flanagan, Caitlin. (2005, December 19).  Life and letters.  Becoming Mary Poppins: P. L. Travers, Walt Disney, and the making of a myth.  New Yorker.  Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/19/051219fa_fact1

Although P. L. Travers received five percent of the gross of the Mary Poppins movie, her tears at its opening came from her conviction that Disney “had done a strange kind of violence to her work” (Flanagan, 2005, December 19, p. 1).   Thereafter, Travers spent the rest of her life linked with the film, although her persona as a spinsterish children’s author belied a complicated identity she nurtured  (Flanagan, 2005, December 19, p. 1).  Similarly, the sugar-coated image of the movie Mary Poppins didn’t reflect the title character in Travers’ novels (Flanagan, 2005, December 19, p. 1).  

Travers never married, had several emotionally-charged relationships with older men, and also had at least one live-in, long-term romantic relationship with another woman, so Flanagan concludes that her ideas about family life were “more nuanced” than those of the Disney corporation, owning much to a childhood “almost archetypal in its sadness and privations” (2005, p. 2).   George Russell, a.k.a. “A.E.” (1867-1935), an Irish nationalist poet and a devotee of mysticism whom Travers idolized, suggested that she write a story about a witch and a shape-shifter, hence this was the origin of Mary Poppins.  Travers wrote her first novel about the nanny in 1933 when she was recuperating from pleurisy (Flanagan, 2005, December 19, p. 3).  George Banks became a reformed Travers Robert Goff, and Great Aunt Ellie, Travers’ archetypal model for an “enchantress”, morphed into Mary Poppins (Flanagan, 2005, December 19, p. 3). Forever stern, the nanny didn’t really like children, but they liked her since they depended upon her for their care (Flanagan, 2005, December 19, p. 3).

Travers was also obsessively involved in all aspects of the publishing process of her novels while she feared that their publication might undermine her reputation as a serious writer who specialized in esoteric myths and the occult.  Flanagan believes that a strong undercurrent of spiritualism influenced Travers’ vignettes, but the domestic scenes derived from her childhood memories remain her strength (2005, December 19, p. 4).   Disney, however, realized that marketing Mary Poppins to a 1960s American audience would require a plot along with a storyline that would explain the role of a nanny (Flanagan, 2005, December 19, p. 5).

Travers arrived in California, expecting deference from an organization that she looked down on as sentimental and cynical.  During the story conferences, the Sherman Brothers tried to sell their Disney version of Mary Poppins while the “self-righteous” Travers interrupted, corrected, bullied and shamed her collaborators while attempting “to salvage every detail from her original” work (Flanagan, 2005, December 19, p. 5).  Even so, she spent her 80s pushing a movie sequel that never materialized (Flanagan, 2005, December 19, p. 6).

Harris, Aisha. (2013, December 23). Does Saving Mr. Banks Portray Walt Disney and P.L. Travers Accurately?  Browbeat.  Slate.  Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/12/23/saving_mr_banks_true_story_fact_and_fiction_in_walt_disney_p_l_travers_movie.html

Critics of Saving Mr. Banks have been quick to note that the film has sanitized the character of P. L. Travers while others have criticized the film for portraying her as “crazier, more oblivious, less self-aware” than she actually was" (Harris, 2013, December 23, para. 1).   Most noticeably, the film leaves out Travers’ estranged relationship with her adopted son, focusing on the biographical origins of Mary Poppins (Harris, 2013, December 23, para. 2).

To determine if the movie does justice to Travers and Disney’s relationship, the reader should compare Saving Mr. Banks with the primary source it relied upon --Valerie Lawson’s biography, Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers (Harris, 2013, December 23, para. 3-4).  As the film shows, Travers did travel to Los Angeles in April 1961 whereupon she stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel and spent ten days conferring with Disney screen and songwriters.  But Disney didn’t have any trouble trying to get Travers to sign over her rights to him since Disney and Travers’ publisher, John Lyndon, Ltd., had already signed a preliminary agreement in April 1960 and a six-year service agreement in June 1960.  The latter contract guaranteed that she was to receive a $100,000 down payment against the percentage of the film’s receipts, which ended up five percent of the producer’s gross. 

Travers also insisted that the film not be animated and required full script approval (Harris, 2013, December 23, para. 5), but no evidence exists that Walt Disney either flew to London to coax Travers into giving up her rights or that he escorted her around Disneyland.  At some point, he did secure a final contract, but their conversation was private (Harris, 2013, December 23, para. 6-8). 

Tape recordings of Travers’ meetings with Disney staff, however, show that the film did convey a realistic version of their collaboration.  Travers did, for example, demand that the movie not include the color red in any of the backdrops or costumes and also strenuously objected to Americanisms, such as “go fly a kite”.  Moreover, she objected to the film’s treatment of Mr. Banks (Harris, 2013, December 23, para. 9-10).

Travers invited herself to the American premiere at Grumman’s Chinese Theater.  She was visiting the United States at the time and sent a telegram announcing that she would attend.  True to the film’s character, Travers noted that “the real Mary Poppins remained within the covers of the books” (Harris, 2013, December, 23, para. 11-12).

Hughes, Kathryn.  (2013, December 6).  What Saving Mr Banks tells us about the original Mary Poppins.  Culture/ Books/ Children and Teenagers.  The Guardian.   Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/07/pl-travers-saving-mr-banks-original-mary-poppins

After Kathryn Hughes received a copy of P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins  (1934) on her eighth birthday, upon reading Travers’ “really rather dark text”, the fan of the Walt Disney’s 1964 movie knew “something had gone horribly wrong”, for “this was the kind of nanny, magical or not, from which any sensible child would shrink” ( 2013, December 6,  para. 1-3).   Unlike Julie Andrews, Travers’ Mary Poppins is no beauty; moreover, her Cockney vocabulary is “overlaid with a strangled gentility” and punctuated with “a superior sniff” (Hughes, 2013, December 6, para. 4).

Thus, as Hughes read Travers’ novel, she suspected that she “had been palmed off with inferior goods” that didn’t conform to the movie’s plot and above all else was so “oddly dull . . . or dully odd, filled with passages about the Grand Chain of Being and adventurers without a proper resolution that always ended with Jane and Michael never sure what happened (Hughes, 2013, December 6, para. 5-6).

Of course, one of the primary reasons Travers quarreled with Disney was that she didn’t specifically cater to children, but instead she saw Mary Poppins as a way to popularize esoteric archetypes taken from eastern mysticism with an adult audience, having become a follower of a Russian mystic, a George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, during the 1920s whereas creating films for children was what Disney did (Hughes, 2013, December 6, para. 7-8).  

However, upon reading Travers’ Mary Poppins today, Hughes is not so struck with its arcane philosophy, but with its economic and political slant that places the books not in the Edwardian Age at the height of British Empire, but during the Depression (2013, December 6, para. 9).  The novel accordingly address “the servant problem” of the Interwar Period that forced the English middle class to make do with a dwindling staff of socialist-minded servants. Travers nevertheless was reluctant to divulge her socialist leanings, even though “she had made the lefty intellectual’s obligatory trip to Soviet Russia” in 1932.  Thus, economically and socially dispossessed characters taught life lessons while Mary Poppins rule of the nursery was a reign of terror during which she habitually withdrew her love and threatened to leave (Hughes, 2013, December 6, para. 10-12).

Hughes also notes that instead of giving the novel “an overarching narrative” structure, Mary Poppins was a collection of “self-contained fairy tales” in which the children accompanied by Mark Poppins  embarked upon adventures “as terrifying as anything from the Brothers Grimm” (Hughes, 2013, December 6, para. 13).   Thus, Mary Poppins’ young readers didn’t learn how to be socialized adults, but rather they came to understand that they would survive always being disappointed by adults who would betray and harm them (Hughes, 2013, December 6, para. 14).  Knowing Travers’ adult scheme for Mary Poppins, however, doesn’t win Hughes over since she thinks that Travers’ estoreric philosophy unbalances the book, “There are chapters . . . which sound as if they could have been written by the theosophist Madame Blavatsky on a particularly dotty day” (Hughes, 2013, December  6, para. 15).   Hughes therefore credits Disney with e re-imaging a “small, difficult book” into a classic children’s film (Hughes, 2013, December 6, para. 16).

Lawson, Valerie.  (1999). Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers. New York: Simon & Schuster Publishers.

Ever an advocate of myth and folklore, Travers divided her life into the lives lived by a nymph (1899-1934), mother (1934-1965),  and crone (1965-1966), a division that Lawson respects, filling in details along the way that Saving Mr. Banks as well as most reviewers leave out of any biographical references in a book that includes copious notes, a bibliography, and a list of illustrations.  Thus, Lawson chronicles Travers introduction to mysticism and the occult, her life long search for a father figure,  her adoption of an Irish orphan at age 40, the years during World War II that she spent in safety in the United States, and finally Travers' two attempts to turn herself into a writer in residence at two U.S. universities:  She continuously protested against being classified as a children author and irritated professors and students alike with her standoffish, superior attitude.

Lyons, Margaret. (2013, December 26. Saving Mr. Banks left out an awful lot about P.L. Travers.  Vulture.  Retrieved from http://www.vulture.com/2013/12/saving-mr-banks-pl-travers-fact-check-mary-poppins.html  

Lyons (2013, December 26). smugly notes that “Saving Mr. Banks is based on a true story . . . the way the movie Mary Poppins is based on the book Mary Poppins . . . loosely, and without some of the really unusual and intense juicy parts”, for the movie omits some of the more interesting details in Travers’ life that might make the Disney corporation’s point-of-view less sympathetic (Lyons, 2013, December 26, para. 1).

First of all, although Travers’ character comes across as “odd and unloving”,  she was the middle aged, single mother of an estranged adopted son—albeit, she failed to mention to him that he was adopted–a secret he learned when he bumped into his twin in a pub at age 17.  Travers was also bisexual: She spent her life looking for father figures like the Irish poet and spiritualist George Russell; he, in turn, introduced her to Madge Burnard, Travers’ flat mate and long-term romantic interest at the time she was writing the first Mary Poppins’ novel.  All of which is far from the uptight old maid that Saving Mr. Banks presents (Lyons, 2013, December 26, para. 2-5).

Lyons acknowledges that Saving Mr. Banks is structured to make sure that the audience roots for Disney,  but she also notes that Travers didn’t receive closure for the long ago death of an alcoholic father at the Mary Poppins’ premiere, even though Walt’s reaction to her request to take out the animation—“Pamela, the ship has sailed” is a verbatim quotation  (Lyons, 2013, December 26, para. 6-12).   Even so, as Travers would later tell a New Yorker columnist, “Every elderly man has a bit of my father in him for me” (Lyons, 2013, December 26, para. 13). 

Nevertheless, Lyons concludes that even if Saving Mr. Banks equates Travers’ relinquishing her artistic integrity with a therapeutic process, the critic is left with a discomforting feeling that the film is propaganda (2013, December 26, para. 14-15).

MacCann, M. Donnarae and Woodward, Gloria. (1977). Cultural Conformity in Books for Children:  Further readings in racism. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, pp. 1-10.

P. L. Travers removes the “plantation dialect” of the “Bad Tuesday” chapter from the revised edition of Mary Poppins, but MacCann and Woodward believe that she leaves the image of cultural inferiority intact, although she represents the points of the compass with a polar bear, macaw, panda, and dolphin rather than an Eskimo, an African American, a Chinese character, and a Native American. Since much later Travers protests in an interview with Albert Schwartz that “if even one Black child were troubled, . . . I would have altered it”, McCann and Woodward theorize that while motivation wasn’t a problem, the failure to recognize prejudice was (1977, p. 2).

McDonald, Shae. (2013, December 18).  P. L. Travers biographer Valerie Lawson says the real Mary Poppins lived in Woollahra.  City East.  The Telegraph.com.au.  Retrieved from http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/city-east/pl-travers-biographer-valerie-lawson-says-the-real-mary-poppins-lived-in-woollahra/story-fngr8h22-1226785728393

Valerie Lawson spent two-and-a-half years putting together a biography of P. L. Travers, concluding that the novelist based Mary Poppins on her great aunt Helen Morehead, “Aunt Ellie”, who lived on Albert Street, Woollahra, New South Wales, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, in the early 1900s, possessed a parrot-head umbrella, a carpet bag, and was known to say “spit spot, into bed” (McDonald, 2013, December 18, para. 4-6). 

Minow, Nell. (2013, December 19).  The real story: P. L. Travers, Walt Disney, and the inside story of “Mary Poppins”.  Movie Mom. Beliefnet.com. Retrieved from http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/moviemom/2013/12/the-real-story-p-l-travers-walt-disney-and-the-inside-story-of-mary-poppins.html

Since Travers insisted on documenting her negotiations with Disney’s script and song writers, many scenes in Saving Mr. Banks come directly from tape recordings  (Minow, 2013, December 19, para. 1).  Even so, Travers lived a more complex life than the movie shows.  Drawn to father figures, like an aging Irish poet, George “A.E.” Russell (1867-1935), and a theosophical guru, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866-1849), this Australian-born newspaper reporter turned children’s author would subsequently live among the Navaho, Hopi, and Pueblo cultures during World War II after she travelled to the United States to escape the Blitz (Minow, 2913, December 19, para. 2),  Minow’s review also provides some helpful links to documentaries about Mary Poppins.

Mitchell, Victoria Coren. (2013, November 23).  Mary, Mary, quite contrary: P. L. Travers and Mary Poppins.  The Guardian/The Observer.  Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/24/pl-travers-mary-poppins-documentary

Paradoxically, flashbacks in Saving Mr. Banks reveal P. L. Travers painful childhood with “tear-jerking sentimentality”, even though she at first refused to sell the movie rights to her first Mary Poppins novel because she believed that Disney would cheapen and sentimentalize the darker side of Edwardian childhood (Mitchell, 2013, November 23, para. 1-2).  If P. L. Travers was alive today, however, she might be consoled by what Saving Mr. Banks leaves out of the film, not alluding to her complicated romantic relationships  and her failure as an adopted mother (Mitchell, 2013, November 23, para. 8).

Travers also didn’t understand the film medium nor why a more condensed and structured narrative needed to replace her “shady, jagged stories” (Mitchell, 2013, November 23, para. 11).  Mitchell nevertheless admires Travers for defending the principle of ejecting darkness into children’s fiction (2013, November 23, para. 12). She also wanted to control everything about the film’s production, designing the sets and costumes and tweaking the songs that she really didn’t want at all (2013, November 23, para. 14).

As Saving Mr. Banks illustrates, Travers didn’t work well with others or accept their ideas.  However, what this autobiographical film doesn’t show is that astrological forecasts controlled many of her actions (2013, November 23, para. 18).  For instance, when she decided to adopt a baby boy in 1939, she chose one of two twins offered her upon the advice of an astrologer . When her 17-year-old son found out that he had a twin and Travers was not his natural mother, he became an alcoholic, she felt no guilt, for “it was all written in the stars” (2013, November 23, para. 16).

Nance, Kevin. (2013, December 19).  ‘Mary Poppins, She Wrote’ author discusses P. L. Travers, ‘Saving Mr. Banks’.  Lifestyles. Printers Row Preview.  Chicago Tribune.  Retrieved from 
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-12-19/features/chi-saving-mr-banks-valerie-lawson-20131219_1_saving-mr-p-l-travers-p-l-travers

The Saving Mr. Banks version of Mrs. Travers had more life issues to explain than those addressed in that film’s flashbacks (Nance, 2013, December 19, para. 9). An Australian, Travers  took on the identity of a domineering upper-middle class English woman, who didn’t explain herself  even if her fears were realized since Disney would make Mary Poppins “very pretty and sweet” (Nance, 2013, December 19, para. 10-11).

Picardie, Justine. (2008, October 28).  Was P. L. Travers the real Mary Poppins?  The Telegraph. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3562643/Was-P-L-Travers-the-real-Mary-Poppins.html

The book Mary Poppins is “far darker and more mysterious” than the Julie Andrews version—a trait that Picardie believes captivates young readers.  Although the nanny is part of a routine existence, Travers also takes her audience to a darker, scarier place (Picardie, 2008, October 28, para. 3-4).

Picardie also emphasizes Travers unlikely background as an author of a series of children’s books:  Travers came to England as a newspaper reporter, then submitted articles to the Irish Statesman, became enamored of its editor, George Russell. Russell, or A.E., introduced Travers to William Butler Yeats and spiritualism as well as to Madge Burnard.  Picardie speculates that their decade-long liaison as well as a subsequent emotional attachment to an American, Jessie Orage, were Lesbian relationships (2008, October 28, para. 7-8).  Although anyone who is familiar with the Bloomsbury group can testify that bisexuality wasn’t that unusual in 1920s and 1930s London, Travers’ life style was certainly atypical for writers of children’s fiction in the first part of the 20th century. 

Additionally, the Banks family’s situation hints at psychological traumas that date back to Travers’ childhood (Picardie, 2008, October 28, para. 9).  Travers unlike her alter ego also didn’t know how to deal with children, for when the single mother adopted a baby boy in 1939, when he cried at night, she openly talked of sending him to a children’s home (Picardie, 2008, October 28, para. 12).

Like Travers who revised her persona to fit her situation, Mary Poppins arrived at the Banks house as a shape shifter, and once inside immediately revealed her magical powers—sliding up banisters and pulling everything she needs out of a seemingly empty carpet bag.  Always refusing to explain her actions, the vain and authoritarian nanny exposed the children to dangers from which she rescued them (Picardie , 2008, October 28, para. 10). 

Perhaps because Travers and Mary Poppins shared similar personality traits, Travers once suggested, “If you are looking for autobiographical facts, Mary Poppins is the story of my life” (Picardie, 2008, October 28, para. 13).  Then again, Peter Davies, the adopted son of the author of Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie, was Mary Poppins’ original publisher, and the troubled American poet Sylvia Plath referred to Mary Poppins as “the fairy godmother of her childhood” (Picardie, 2013, November 23, para.13).

Rochlin, Margy.  (2013, December 6).  A spoonful of sugar for a sourpuss; songwriter recalls P. L. Travers, ‘Mary Poppins’ author.  Movies. New York Times.   Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/movies/songwriter-recalls-p-l-travers-mary-poppins-author.html?_r=0

Part of the song-writing team of Richard and Robert Sherman, Richard Sherman remembers that not only was P. L. Travers “sharp-tongued”, but she also misunderstood the meaning of the film’s original score (Rochlin, 2013, December 6, para. 6).   Nevertheless, the Sherman brothers were most eager to finish the score for Mary Poppins, having already spent two-and-a-half-years “writing songs and teasing out a narrative” from a series of  disjointed scenes (Rochlin, 2013, December 6, para. 7).

Szomsky, Brain E. (2000, January).  “All that is solid melts into the air”: The winds of change and other analogues of colonialism in Disney’s Mary Poppins.  The Lion and the Unicorn, 24(11), 97-109.  doi: 1o.1354luni.2000.0012.  [Excerpt only]. Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/uni/summary/v024/24.1szumsky.html

Disney’s Mary Poppins functions primarily as entertainment, but ideology also creeps through  since Travers imbued these tales with her love of fairy tales and made the central character  a strong working-class woman (Szomsky, 2000, p. 1).

Through most critics would classify Travers as a social conservative , she subverts society’s standards by questioning accepted ideas.  Even so, Travers  is not a traditional story teller  because she doesn’t attempt to integrate explicit moral lessons within her works.  Instead, she prefers to teach by indirect hint and suggestion in the form of illustrations and examples (Szomsky, para. 2).

Travers, P. L. (1975).  On not writing for children.  Children’s Literature, 4, 15-22.  doi: 10.1353/chi.00697.  Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/chl/summary/v004/4.travers.html

Travers (1975) asserts that she doesn’t write for children, but rather for adults, “Nothing I had written before Mary Poppins had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that ‘she had come out of the same well of nothingness (and by nothingness, I mean nothing-ness) as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my life (para. 15).

As for Mary Poppins herself, Travers believes that she teaches lessons, but she doesn’t set her up as a governess.   Additionally, Travers insists that if Mary Poppins comes from anywhere, she comes from myth (para. 17 & 23).  To reinforce this theory, Travers quotes both from her Zen master, who claims that Mary Poppins is a Zen story, as well as from an unnamed acquaintance who equates the end of each adventure with the release of sexual passion.  At this point, however, Travers acknowledges that her audience can read into her novels that they wish (para. 26-27).

Travers protests [too much] that she didn’t set out to write for children, nor did she know they would read her novels.  She also presumes that “children’s literature”  is a label that publishers and booksellers have created and acknowledges that she reads myths and fairy tales, but modern novels bore her (para. 33 & 46) whereupon she concludes her lecture by reminding her audience that neither she nor Mary Poppins ever explains (para. 56).

Warren, Mia. (2013, December 20).  In praise of the real Mary Poppins.  Character Studies.  The Hairpin.  Retrieved from http://thehairpin.com/2013/12/mary-poppins

Warren first encountered “the real Mary Poppins” in the children’s section of her hometown public library and discovered she was far removed from the Julie Andrews portrayal that she knew from the 1964 film.  Instead Warren discovered that she was a strong willed “fearsome creation” (2013, December 20, para. 1-2).  Although Warren loved this strong-minded woman, Travers’ inability to collaborate with others resulted in an ideological battle between Walt Disney, who wanted “a spoonful of sugar”, and an author who knew that her character  “would happily switch that spoonful out with salt (2013, December 20, para. 3). Warren thus sets out to prove that the original  Mary Poppins wasn’t the nurturing type of surrogate mother, but a nanny who bullied, withheld affection, and intimidated children (2013, December 20, para. 4).

In Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943), this “paragon of feminine grace and a near-perfect physical specimen” shuns romance  as well as close relationships with family members (Warren, 2013, December 20, para. 5).  Furthermore, she isn’t kind, gentle, humble, or empathetic, making her bereft of the personality traits traditionally associated with the ideal Western world. Yet  this efficient domestic goddess brings order and structure to a disordered nursery (Warren, 2013, December 20, para. 6).

In Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935),  the title character steps in when Mrs. Banks as a “self-absorbed hypochondriac” fails as a mother whereupon the family defers to the nanny’s expertise. Paradoxically, this spinster claims authority in an era that championed marriage and motherhood since she made the parents’ life easier. Additionally, her vanity becomes an integral part of her personality (Warren, 2013, December 20, para. 7).

Indeed, in “Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins”, Giorgia Grill compares the 1934 Mary Poppins  character  to a Victorian dandy, whose antisocial behavior erects a barrier against the rest of society,  thereby subverting social conventions (Warren, 2013, December 20, para. 9). Childless and unmarried, she differs greatly from the rest of the women in the Banks’ household, deriving her worth from twisting traditional feminine norms (Warren, 2013, December 20, para. 10).  

Similarly, Travers stood apart as a bisexual, single parent adoptive mother and folklorist, even as Warren finds an ironic twist in Travers’ negotiations with Disney:  While Mary Poppins stayed relentlessly true to her values, her creator was forced to compromise to survive” (Warren, 2013, December 20, para. 11 &13).  

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The Shape of Dramatic Structure 
in Mary Poppins

Critics have adapted Gustav Freytag’s Pyramid,  a 19th-century scheme that originally organized Greek and Roman dramas into parts, to analyze contemporary dramas and novels.  However, P. L. Travers' 1934 novel, Mary Poppins, doesn't really have many of the elements that traditionally move a narrative.  The 1964 screen play, therefore, inserts George Banks' reaction to the nanny as a plot device that gives structure to the movie.  Even so, Walt Disney's Mary Poppins requires a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious musical score to hold all the different scenes together.  Thus, many adults on seeing the movie again find that it drags along at too slow a pace unlike many traditional children's movies, like The Wizard of Oz, that definitely have a linear plot.

• Exposition sets the scene; for example, in the first Mary Poppins novel, a policeman directs the reading audience to Cherry Tree Lane.  Dick Van Dyke’s character, Bert, however, sets the scene in the movie.

• An inciting incident begins the action; for instance, Katie Nanna quits her post as nanny.

• Rising Action helps to make the story more exciting:  Although each of the chapters has such a moment, it’s hard to identify any rising action in the novel. However, in the film, Michael and Jane’s tales about their adventures continue to irritate their no-nonsense father.

• The climax of a plot is the moment of its greatest tension:  Again, the novel doesn’t have a climax, although chapters in the novel may have such a unique moment of suspense. In the movie, the climax occurs when the owner of the bank where George Banks works fires him.

• Falling Action signals to the audience that the story is ending.  In both the novel and the movie this happens when Mary Poppins leaves.

• Resolution occurs when the main character (also known as the protagonist) solves the problem that sets the plot in motion.  In the movie, this happens when the newly sacked George Banks has reassessed his priorities as shown in the scene that shows both parents heading out the door of No. 17 Cherry Tree Lane with their children and a newly mended kite.

•  A denouement (dā-ˌnü-ˈmäⁿ), or ending, addresses any remaining questions that the audience might have.  In the movie, the son of the now deceased owner of the bank rehires Mr. Banks.

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Literary Terms Online

Abrams, M. H. (1999).  A Glossary of Literary Terms.  7th ed. Boston: Heinle & Heinle.  Retrieved from http://mthoyibi.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/a-glossary-of-literary-terms-7th-ed_m-h-abrams-1999.pdf

Baldick, Chris. (2012).  The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.  3rd ed.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.  Retrieved from

http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199208272.001.0001/acref-9780199208272?hide=true&page=102&pageSize=10&sort=titlesort&source=%2F10.1093%2Facref%2F9780199208272.001.0001%2Facref-9780199208272

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