Previous installments of Jaya Catches Up can be found here.
Did you read Mary Poppins as a kid? I (duh) didn’t, but I’m also not sure a lot of people in my generation have. To me, Mary Poppins was Julie Andrews slyly bringing fun and whimsy into the lives of a confused family until it’s clear they know how to have fun without her, “saving Mr. Banks” from becoming a grouchy old bonds broker or whatever he is. She’s stern, yes, but there’s always a glint in her eye that lets you know she loves you. She smiles sometimes, and she cries when she leaves.
This is not P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins. Travers’ Mary Poppins is a malevolent trickster god and no one will convince me otherwise.
Mary Poppins is a collection of myths about England’s Coyote, beginning with Poppins arriving at the Banks house (which includes twin babies as well as Jane and Michael) and ending with her leaving when the winds changed, but with nothing linking them in between except her general mischief and confusion. Some stories are familiar from the movie–she pours medicine for the kids and it tastes like lime cordial, she jumps into a chalk painting with the “matchstick man,” she and the kids visit her uncle who laughs so much he rises to the ceiling–but there is no joy in the way she acts. Travers writes that the children were obsessed with Poppins and were heartbroken at the idea of her ever leaving, but I began to think it was just an extreme form of negging on Poppins’ part.
Poppins is a weak god, or perhaps an unambitious one. The only hints we get of her past is that she is cousins with a Snake King, she never lost the power to talk to animals (like most humans do when they turn one year old), and her mother was friends with a red cow who couldn’t stop dancing. We’re unsure as to where she inherited her powers, or why she has chosen to pursue childcare. My theory is it’s a punishment for some past discretion, though she’s too proud to attempt to win her previous position back. She’s like Hagrid with no soul, complete with magical umbrella.
Her powers are just strong enough to amuse her, and confuse the children by constantly telling them the craziness they’ve just witnessed is all in their heads. In one story, when Michael is being particularly annoying, she produces a compass and quickly takes the children to the “four corners” of the world to introduce them to increasingly racist stereotypes–North to meet an Inuit-type tribe, West to meet Native Americans, East to China, and South to an astoundingly confusing depiction of Black people. When they return, she convinces them that no such thing happened, but gives Michael the compass. Were this Julie Andrews I’d imagine the compass would be given with a wink and a nod that the magic truly exists, but this Poppins probably just lobbed it at his head and snapped at him for being dumb enough to think it was possible.
Her power is most apparent when she takes the kids shopping for gingerbread. They enter a run-down bakery manned by two giant sisters and a cranky old woman, who breaks off her fingers, which turn to marzipan, as a snack for the twins. She has been alive for at least a thousand years, and she and Poppins act like old friends. When she gives them their gingerbreads, she asks the kids what they usually do with the gold foil stars that are pressed to the top. Both respond that they save them in secret spots in their room, but stupidly reveal their hiding places to Poppins. Late that night, she sneaks in and steals their stars, and the kids wake up and watch her out the window with the woman from the bakery, climbing ladders and gluing the stars to the sky. This follows the traditional pattern of the trickster: though it’s unclear whether her intentions were positive or negative, often the trickster’s pranks end in good for humanity. Here she has given the world more stars in the sky, though she had to steal them from children in the middle of the night.
The only time she seems to enjoy herself is around animals, only bolstering my theory that she is at least a shape-shifter. She talks to the birds for gossip and heartily defends the neighbor’s dog for becoming best friends with a stray. In the final story, the children find themselves in the zoo late at night, where they discover that if Poppins’ birthday falls on a full moon the zoo is reversed and the animals ride and feed humans all night. Poppins is the guest of honor, and the Snake King (who we discover is her cousin) sheds his skin as a gift for her. The animals then spend the evening singing and swaying in a circle around her, as the kids watch on.
Clearly, the animals are her people, so perhaps she was cursed with a human-level of self-awareness that keeps her just separated enough. She can talk to them, and once in a birthday full moon she can party with them, but she can never live like them. This makes her mean and bitter, and she lives her life by pranking children and gathering strength from their confusion.
I do want to mention Mr. Banks, now that everyone supposedly knows the story behind him. According to Saving Mr. Banks, which I did not see but read a lot about, Mr. Banks is supposed to be based on Travers’ father, a loving and playful man who kept the children happy even as they lost money, and battled alcoholism. Travers’ spends the whole time defending the character, who is turned into a mean man with no time for childhood, making the major emotional payoff come from seeing him loosen up and enjoy time with his family. However, in the book he a hapless man who shuffles to the bank each day, neither gruff nor charming, and ultimately not even present. It’s hard to imagine an author being protective of a character when there’s nothing to be protective of. Maybe he shows up in the later books.
According to a synopsis of Saving Mr. Banks, there is a moment where Travers asks Walt Disney “You think Mary Poppins is saving the children?” before shaking her head. She also apparently took issue with the way the film edited out some of the harsher aspects of Poppins’ personality. She knew she wasn’t creating a loveable character, but a sacred ideology of unpredictability. Through her, like through all trickster myths, children learn about the fickle nature of life, understanding that confusion and chaos are ever present, even when everything seems safe. You can be terrorizing your nanny one moment and sucking on marzipan witch fingers the next, and you may even grow to miss the chaos if it’s gone. But rest assured, children, the only constant is chaos. Poppins taught you well.
Tags: books, disney movies, jaya catches up, malevolent trickster gods, mary poppins
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I loved the Mary Poppins books and mid-century children’s books were my jam growing up. Fun fact: by the time I read it, they had edited the racist scene where they travel and instead of meeting people, they meet animals. This was shocking to me when I discovered an earlier edition in my fourth-grade classroom that kept the racism intact.
I remember that too! I haven’t yet gone back to sadly discover that they were racist animals. 🙁
Yesssss. Book Mary Poppins is eerie as fuck.
Jaya. This is grade-A. Thank you.
I loved all the Mary Poppins books. I read them all many times and have watched the film approx. 1,000 times. Remembering them now, I find one of the weirdest scenes to be the one where Jane and Michael follow her to the circus in the sky, where the constellations are the acrobats. Mary is there on, I am sure it is implied, a date with the sun. Michael at one point literally destroys/murders the moon. The children go off to bed earlier than Mary (I think the Great Bear takes them back to the nursery?) and the next morning MARY POPPINS HAS SUNBURN. Yes, she banged the sun.
HE KISSES HER ON THE NECK AND LEAVES A TINY SUNPRINT. AAAAAAAH.
Yes, I may have exaggerated. It’s not like her whole body is red or anything, but I’m sure her nose is all rosy and her cheeks are brown or something like that. Some major pashing, if not banging.
Oh, I wasn’t trying to be a dick! Just yes, you’re right, and it’s so lovely the sun leaves love bites in the shape of suns and it’s one of those images that has really stuck.
I didn’t think you were!
WOW I do not remember this and now want to read 1000 fics about it.
I didn’t read it until I was an adult, I remember being enormously weirded out.
GOD THE MARY POPPINS BOOKS. I was O-B-S-E-S-S-E-D with them as a kid. They also helped me come to terms with the idea that you can like both a book and a cinematic adaptation that is very different from the book. Which helped as an adult in our world of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter adaptations (though nothing can forgive what they did to The Golden Compass).
Weirdly, the scene that stuck with me the most was when the twins are in their cribs in the nursery and the wind blows in and asks them if they want straight hair or curly hair and the boy twin requested straight and the girl twin requested curly. I cannot say how many hours I spent thinking about this (I was old enough to realize the wind does not determine your hair type).
YES. The twins are so good. Also, Annabelle and her conversation with the starling.
I love, love, love the Mary Poppins books, and wrote a paper last year about Mary Poppins as modern myth. It made me enormously happy, spending legitimate work hours on the cultural significance of tuppences and birds and Hamadryads. Incidentally, it was only in that paper that I discovered what a Hamadryad is. I had always imagined it as a sort of waterproof fairy.
ALSO, P L Travers’ prose is beautiful. Also, P L Travers had a completely fascinating, maybe-lesbian, super-astrological very strange life which is mainly skimmed over in Saving Mr Banks, but there is a great New Yorker article on it and a good BBC documentary. Both of which I recommend to fellow Poppins nerds.
LINKS LINKS LINKS FIND ME THESE LINKS OMFG
WAIT SAY MORE ABOUT THE PAPER PLEASE
Also, the one about Midsummer’s Eve is one of the odder stories, with coltsfoot and Mrs Corry again. Also the part with Maia, the middle One of the Seven Sisters..
YES. CHRISTMAS SHOPPING FOR THE PLEIADES.
YES. I owned at least 4 or 5 of the original Mary Poppins books and read them a lot, but the chapter with the Pleiades is one of the few that sticks in my memory to this day.
Mary Poppins, also has a star turn in the League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen books as the only thing that can stop Harry Potter from causing the end of the world.
bTW anyone who tries to tell you those books aren’t straight up fanfic is LYING.
(I did enjoy watching oily, 50s era James Bond get hit with a brick at the Ministry Of Love.)
Also, could we please talk about how heartbreaking it is when the twins can’t talk to the starling any more?
The starling is so sad about it. But! Doesn’t the new baby come, and the starling gets to talk to the new baby? Or am I imagining friends for the starling.
YES. Annabelle! But then she talks a lot about how she is earth and fire and water and from the darkness, and then SHE FORGETS TOO. (Also, BE MY FRIEND, we are COMMANDING this thread.)
I will definitely be your friend. I didn’t realise that what I was waiting for was to reminisce about Mary Poppins books. Yes! Annabell’s birth journey! She is all mystical and stuff, but forgets it soon enough and becomes a babbling baby and the starling is like, oh man, another one bites the dust.
I tried to read the books as a child, and was bewildered because they were so different from the movie. But that one scene, where the baby has forgotten where she came from, and someone notes that Mary never forgot, is the ONE SCENE that has stuck with me all these years later.
Yes, and, belatedly, I am convinced the Shel Silverstein poem “Forgotten Language” is referencing this: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/shel_silvers…
I re-read them last summer when I was staying at my mother’s house. That bit is so sad but so lovely!
And what about the part where the children go off into the blue and white patterned plate? I don’t remember this one clearly but I remember being incredibly freaked out by it. Do the children who live in the china world try to make Jane and Michael stay there forever?
MY FAVOURITE CHAPTER. It’s only Jane, and the grandfather of the little boys in the plate tries to keep her there IN THE PAST to replace his dead granddaughter.
HI BEST FRIEND. Yes, that is what happens. That is effing terrifying. “Stay in this china world with me, a strange old man, to replace my dead granddaughter”. Argh!
Yes! It somehow terrified and delighted me at the same time. I was a weird kid.
If you loved the Mary Poppins movie DO NOT SEE THE MUSICAL. I will repeat – DO.NOT.SEE.THE.MUSICAL. There are many forms of wrong that probably have to do with the book, but most specifically a terrifying scene with giant toys.
Mary Poppins taught me to trust no one and also to eat witches’ fingers, and by gum was she right on both counts.
I loved the Mary Poppins books as a kid. They were definitely a lot harsher and eerier than the movie, but I found them pretty joyful too. I just remember loving the sort of magical, mythic world that clearly existed behind the scenes, and how Mary Poppins knew everybody and everything in it.
She is a trickster goddess, and she doesn’t necessarily care about the children much at first, which in a weird way I think is good for children to hear, especially now?
but she’s not malevolent. Just… amoral.
I like your theory that she’s an extra-self-conscious shapeshifter animal!!
YES YES YES YES YES She is an amoral trickster. PERFECT.
I have read another theory that Mary Poppins is a Time Lord, but amoral trickster seems a more accurate fit!
I’m a combination of glad and disappointed that I stuck with The Boxcar Children now. What the fuuuuuck.
CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE BOXCAR CHILDREN THOUGH
The first book was definitely the best; I think I reread it twenty times. Then I discovered one of my parents’ friends had an entire bookshelf full of The Boxcar Children books. I worked my way through them rapidly one summer and longed, LONGED to have my own boxcar in the backyard and to run about solving mysteries and having gentle fun adventures alongside genial siblings, with only occasional appearances by benevolent adults. I read several of the Mary Poppins books and while I enjoyed the setting, she was an almost terrifying figure. Given the choice at that age, I would rather have lived in the Aldens’ world than the Banks’.
They made homelessness and food insecurity seem so appealing!
OF COURSE the best possible option for four homeless children is to live in an abandoned train car and live off of lawn-mowing money!
I’ve been wondering lately how those books would hold up if I read them now. Weren’t they pretty heavy on the gender-roles, too?
THEY WERE SUCH A BIG DEAL TO MY FAMILY. We read them on roadtrips! We had the cookbook! I made the clam chowder from it! We had new neighbor casserole! Caboose special is still a thing we drink! (It’s orange juice and coke/Diet coke, it looks AWFUL it is tasty.)
Reading (and re-reading and re-reading and re-reading) the Mary Poppins books contributed greatly to my love of horror literature. She is so delightfully fucked up. Thank you to everyone for reminiscing about their favorite scenes, and thanks to hellebore_ for pointing out what I’ve always said: She’s a trickster, through and through. A STEALTH trickster, yes, but a trickster nonetheless. Much like Jeeves (for any Wodehouse fans reading this thread).
It’s the Toast. There are always Wodehouse fans reading the thread. 🙂
I read a number of the Mary Poppins books and enjoyed them, but can remember very little about them except for (a) the act of rigging a sort of faux-windowseat with a toybox under a window, and reading the books and eating graham crackers on the seat and feeling very posh and English (??), and (b) a scene where Michael somehow gets spirited up into cat heaven. A heavenly kingdom ruled by cats, who are also amoral and sort of mean. +1 for trickster god theory.
I was also a big reader of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, another trickster goddess but disguised as a crone.
Yesssssss Mrs Piggle-Wiggle. Remember the one girl who knit the super long scarf because she knit it while listening to a radio program and got so into it she lost track of how long the scarf was? For some reason, as a kid, I assumed Doctor Who had gotten ahold of that scarf somehow.
I LOVE this theory of the Whovian scarf.
MRS. PIGGLE-WIGGLE!!! I think my favorite instance of a kid getting taught a lesson is the one with growing radishes out of one’s personal dirt due to lack of bathing. But I’m pretty sure I was 100% hooked as soon as I read the description of the house being upside down. I spent so much time as a kid imagining all the rooms were upside down and thinking about how high I’d have to step to get through the doors.
Jaya. I have not read the book, only seen the movie. But I got so excited about Poppins as malevolent trickster god that I had to actually take a break from reading for a second, because that concept is just so The Best. Post-break reading has borne fruit. Marzipan witch fingers? Snake cousins? I… I love this.
I think I know the King of the Snakes. He lives in Woodlawn Plantation Rose Garden
I was never a huge fan of the movie as a kid, I don’t know why, but a friend of mine suuuuuuper loved it and the Mary Poppin books. I’ve read a bunch of the books and don’t really remember anything about them. I feel weird about that, since apparently they were massively fucked up? Huh. How could I not remember that?
I read the book before I saw the movie and was SUPER CONFUSED about why this Mary Poppins was so nice. I believe that was when my mother explained the concept of “Disneyfication” to me.