This paper began as a seminar paper for a course on gender and film theory. For years I had been arguing to anyone who would listen (which no one did for long) that the movie “Mary Poppins” was about tensions in gender and family structures. I couldn’t resist an opportunity to develop my ideas -- even though everyone else in the seminar was writing about more “serious” film-makers, such as Hitchcock. If we want to understand how ideas about gender are transmitted through film, I asked, isn’t it vital to look at children’s culture as well as adults’ culture?

I happened to mention the paper to Bev Clark, who suggested I submit it to a book she was beginning to co-edit, which was then titled Nobody’s Baby: Feminist Theory and Children’s Culture. Under the presumably more commercially appealing title of Girls, Boys, Books, Toys, it was published by Johns Hopkins in 1999.

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Just a Spoonful of Sugar?:
Anxieties of Gender and Class in “Mary Poppins”

If you are looking for Number Seventeen-and it is more than likely that you will be, for this book is all about that particular house-you will very soon find it. To begin with, it is the smallest house in the Lane. And besides that, it is the only one that is rather dilapidated and needs a coat of paint. But Mr. Banks, who owns it, said to Mrs. Banks that she could have either a nice, clean, comfortable house or four children. But not both, for he couldn’t afford it. (Travers 1)

Both the book Mary Poppins (1934) and the movie “Mary Poppins” (1964) begin by inviting the reader/viewer for a walk down Cherry-Tree Lane to the Banks house. What we find at the end of our walk, however, differs greatly in the two stories. The book’s Mrs. Banks has chosen to have four children-Jane, Michael, and the infant Twins-and therefore is settled into a smallish, somewhat dilapidated home. The movie’s Mrs. Banks has apparently made the opposite choice, for her two offspring live in a grand house furnished in an opulent style.

This change is one of a multitude made by the Disney studios as it transformed a collection of episodic stories about Mary Poppins and the Banks family into a more-or-less coherent narrative fit for a movie screen. In part, these changes reflect the different formal requirements of a film and a collection of short stories. Mrs. Banks’ transformation from a middle-class mother into a well-off suffragette is not, however, simply a matter of adapting to the cinematic medium. Rather, it suggests a wide range of concerns around gender and class that were of crucial interest to the Disney team and their (imagined) audience.

“Mary Poppins” was spectacularly successful. Although the movie was heavily promoted as a box-office splash, it exceeded all expectations by grossing $40 million, $25 million in the first year. Even more significantly, while all previous movies that had grossed over $30 million were “hard ticket” attractions with reserved seating, “Mary Poppins” was released through the normal channels (Maltin 22; Bart 14). Obviously, many factors contributed to this enthusiastic reception. The movie’s special effects, dance sequences, and mixed animation/live action attracted much attention, and Julie Andrews charmed viewers. But these formal characteristics do not seem adequate to explain the movie’s unexpected level of popularity.

Frederic Jameson suggests that the drawing power of a work of mass culture comes from its ability to successfully manage social and political anxieties. This “transformational work,” he explains, is both utopian and ideological: it provides a form of wish-fulfillment by evoking a vision of the world as it should be, but also legitimates the existing order by distorting and repressing those wishes. Successful mass culture, then, both arouses common anxieties and fantasies and creates a symbolic structure to contain and tame those anxieties and fantasies. The audience’s utopian impulses are partially gratified but more deflected in the service of the status quo (Jameson 25). Similarly, Richard Dyer argues that entertainment responds to people’s real needs by promoting interpretations of those needs that fit capitalist ideology: the real problems of exhaustion and alienated labor, for example, give rise to images of unbounded energy and a fusion of work and play, which are promised as the fruits of consumerism (25). Thus, Dyer concludes, entertainment attracts not by presenting models of utopia, but rather by evoking a sense of “what utopia would feel like” (18). If these theorists are correct, then the popularity of “Mary Poppins” may reflect its ability to tap into and in some way defuse or soothe anxieties that were widespread in American society in 1964.

The opening sequence of “Mary Poppins” announces that the movie is about gender and family. Film critics typically analyze musicals by contrasting a “realist” narrative that points to the way the world is, with all its problems, and the “unreal,” “utopian,” or “spectacle/fantasy” numbers, which promise an escape from that world (Sutton 191; Dyer 26). The first two numbers in “Mary Poppins,” however, each articulate the problems that the movie associates with the Banks parents.

“Sister Suffragette” is a satirical spoof on Mrs. Banks and the suffrage movement. While the song’s lyrics seem to celebrate the suffragists, the words are visually undermined by the movie’s choreography. The domestics are scandalized when Mrs. Banks sings, “political equality, and equal rights with men,” and pulls her skirts up, step by step, well above her knees-we can guess, the Disney team intimates, what sorts of “equal rights” she really wants. Although proclaiming her solidarity with all women, Mrs. Banks is blind to the flesh-and-blood women who work for her. Flighty and over-dramatic, she is so wrapped up in the drama of suffragette protests that she doesn’t see what is going on in her own household and repeatedly cuts off Katie Nanna, the exasperated nanny. Her actions speak louder than her words: despite her elevated rhetoric, she is shown to be silly, self-absorbed, and oblivious to the world around her. The superficiality of her feminism is confirmed when Mr. Banks is due home and Mrs. Banks orders the maid Ellen to put away the “Votes for Women” sashes. “You know how the Corps infuriates Mr. Banks,” she explains as she falls into the role of dutiful and subservient wife.

Contemporary reviewers loved the movie’s rendition of Mrs. Banks. Said Ann Guerin: “The film has even improved in Mrs. Banks by making her a raging suffragette” (28). Arthur Knight called her “delightfully flibbertigibbet as the suffragette materfamilias who urgently needs Mary Poppins’ ministrations” (30). These reviews are significant not just because they allow us a glimpse of how a few viewers (professionals) interpreted the movie at the time of its release, but also-and more importantly-because they suggest the sorts of interests and concerns that collected and guided the audience. Apparently this “nutty suffragette mother” (Variety 6) appealed to reviewers’ images of suffrage activists-and, by extension, other feminists-as mentally unbalanced.

Mr. Banks articulates the complementary role: “I’m the lord of my castle, the sovereign, the liege. / I treat my subjects-servants, children, wife-with a firm but gentle hand. Noblesse oblige.” He describes a home run by schedule, where order prevails and the sum total of his interactions with his children (“the heirs to my dominion”) is to “pat them on the head and send them off to bed; / Ah, lordly is the life I lead.” This order is illusory, of course, but Mr. Banks doesn’t notice when his wife tells him that their children are missing (“Splendid, splendid”). Both parents thus fail to perceive the people around them, but for decidedly different reasons. Mr. Banks believes that the home should be his sovereign property, in which both things and people are arranged for his comfort, while Mrs. Banks seeks drama and excitement outside the home. Both are made to look ridiculous, Mr. Banks by taking his so-called “traditional” gender role to an extreme, Mrs. Banks by resisting hers.

The movie’s narrative line might well be titled, “The Education of Mr. Banks.” Indeed, one could argue that Mr. Banks is the protagonist of the film: he is the only character who experiences significant external resistance, self-questioning, and personal change. Once he learns that his obligations to his children require his active engagement with them, the film comes to its utopic conclusion in a kite-flying scene. Mrs. Banks falls into line as she turns a “Votes for Women” banner into a tail for the children’s kite: it seems that she too has been educated in the importance of family and childhood, though the movie does not show how this education has occurred. Mrs. Banks simply follows the lead of her husband as she subordinates her public interests to her children. In the crowning touch, Mr. Banks even gets his job back: the price of his education is refunded as the bank managers join the community frolicking in the park.

In the closing scene of the movie, only Mary Poppins’ bird-headed umbrella is left to voice impermissible thoughts and feelings:

Bird: That’s gratitude for you. Didn’t even say good-bye.
Mary: No, they didn’t.
Bird: They think more of their father than they do of you.
Mary: That’s as it should be.
Bird: Well, don’t you care?
Mary: Practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking.
Bird: Is that so? Well, I’ll tell you one thing Mary Poppins, you don’t fool me a bit.
Mary: Oh really!
Bird: Yes, really. I know exactly how you feel about these children, and if you think I’m going to keep my mouth shut any longer, I’m. . .

But Mary firmly closes the bird’s beak, and in the last shot we see her flying off into the clouds. Nothing can be allowed to disturb the sanctity of the restored nuclear family. “That’s as it should be.”

The movie’s narrative-parental preoccupation redeemed by the combined work of Mary Poppins and Bert-is a creation of the Disney studios. It is not even suggested by the book Mary Poppins, in which both parents are somewhat absent-minded but genially affectionate, and do not undergo any kind of moral reformation. According to a New York Times preview published in 1963, this theme of parental neglect was added in order “to introduce a little harmless dramatic conflict” (Glenn B7). One must wonder, however, just how “harmless” such a symbolically and psychologically laden theme can be.

Gender conventions have long been an important marker of class status. The middle class, in particular, defined itself in the nineteenth century as the class with the financial sufficiency, but not excess, to have sharply polarized gender roles: men were to be active in the financial world outside the home, while women were to be active in the caretaking world within the home. “Mary Poppins” questions this division of labor. Mr. Banks, it suggests, cannot be a good father or a perceptive human being unless he takes on caretaking as well as breadwinning responsibilies. It is Bert who finally brings this lesson home to Mr. Banks, but there is no hint that Mr. Banks is declassed by his changing priorities. Rather, there is an implication that working-class people may have a secret of enjoying life that their social betters need to learn. Middle-class manhood is the focus of the movie’s critique: there is no complementary suggestion that Mrs. Banks should become a breadwinner. Indeed, the movie suggests, she too must become more focused on the home as the center of human fulfillment.

“Mary Poppins” can even be seen as an outgrowth of the 1950s “literature of conformity.” Sociologists of the time often warned that the condititions of American society were depriving individuals of inner direction, will power, and freedom. While they used a pseudo-generic male language, their focus on the effects of life in the corporate world made it clear that they were talking predominantly about men. (Betty Friedan made the complementary critique for women.) When Bert explains to Jane and Michael that their father is caged in the bank, he is echoing a broader societal fear that American men are being deprived of their vitality, and even their virility, by their jobs. “There he is in that cold, heartless bank day after day, penned in by mounds of cold, heartless money. . . . They make cages in all sizes and shapes, you know. Bank shapes, some of them, carpets and all.”

What little critical attention “Mary Poppins” has received has tended to argue that the movie’s conclusion reconciles its characters, and by extension its spectators, to patriarchal and capitalist power structures. Sally Hibbin explains: “Not only is [Mary Poppins] able to restore a tempting combination of order and love to the household, she reconciles husband to wife, children to parents and Michael to the dreaded bank, transforming that institution in the process. Ms. Poppins can only be a force for the status quo” (35). Leslie Donaldson analyzes the movie in terms of a polarity between order/cleanliness and disorder/dirt (a recurrent theme in Disney movies). Mary Poppins, she believes, is a “paragon of ‘reverse psychology’” who brings manners and propriety to the Banks family: “she is a bulwark of reassuring conformity to conventional behavior. . . . Mary Poppins gives Jane and Michael a reassuring avenue to a fantasy life which does not endanger the security of their family, but instead restores it” (1552). Caroline Champetier uses a similar polarity between the horizontal (the narrative realm of the family) and the vertical (the “hors-la-loi” of Mary Poppins’ control over gravity), in which the children are finally restored to the realm of the horizontal (53-54). Thus all three critics see the ideological function of the movie as predominant: “Mary Poppins” reinforces the order of the powers-that-be. Ariel Dorfman assumes this interpretation when he quotes the line, “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” to illuminate the enticements offered by imperial powers to their obedient colonial subjects (19).

This interpretation is certainly easy to defend, and in more ways than the critics mention. “When stands the banks of England, England stands,” says Mr. Dawes senior, and the interlocking strands of imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy pervade the movie. The bank is clearly a patriarchal institution: Mr. Dawes senior rules the bank by virtue of being a father to Mr. Dawes junior, while Mr. Banks, named after the bank, has his position because his father had it before him. The board tries to persuade Michael to follow his father into the bank by invoking “railways through Africa” and “magestic, self-advertising canals” -the mechanisms of empire. The connections are explicit even in Mr. Banks’ opening advertisement for a nanny: “A British bank is run with precision; a British home requires nothing less. . . . A British nanny must be a general. The future empire lies within her hands.” The climax of the movie occurs when the children are threatened with assimilation into the tribe of “Hottentots” -dancing with the sooty chimney-sweeps, they are in danger of renouncing their racial and national as well as class inheritance. Michael even tries to slip out the front door with the chimney-sweeps, adopting their Cockney accent as he addresses his father just as they do: “Good night, Guv’nor!” Mr. Banks, of course, grabs Michael’s coat and hauls him back into the house. He cannot afford to lose his son and heir, his link to the future empire.

The whole movie is displaced into an Edwardian world that suggests unlimited wealth and comfort. The book Mary Poppins, published in 1934 by an Englishwoman, is set in 1930s England: Mary Poppins and her magic enter into an ordinary family leading an ordinary life. The American movie, however, distances itself in both space and time by choosing to place the Banks family in London in 1910. As Larry Glenn explained, “The period was chosen because of its photogenic qualities and because the nineteen-thirties connote a degree of grimness.” This “photogenic” London is itself a fantasyland, but only once (in 1973) has a reviewer commented on the disturbing distortions in the movie’s highly stylized “real” world: Edwardian London, Vincent Canby notes, “was a city of terrible extremes of poverty and wealth. Yet for whom does the film shed its tears? For the bloody pigeons!” (B1). Michael’s disappearance up the chimney takes on a more sinister note when one remembers that children really were used to clean chimneys, and sometimes got stuck and died in the process.

This prettying-up of “jolly old London” (Time 114) is particularly evident in the movie’s treatment of its working-class characters. Bert has the wisdom to instruct Mr. Banks in what it really means to be a father, but he would hardly be able to support children of his own. Every time we see him he is doing something different to earn money; when the rain washes away his carefully-drawn chalk pavement pictures, he does not mourn his loss of income, but smiles and remarks that this is perfect weather for selling hot chestnuts. His Cockney accent persistently reminds auditors that Bert is a lower-class “other” not really fit to consort with the Banks family-and Dick Van Dyke’s erratic delivery of the accent, repeatedly noted in the contemporary reviews, only underlines the fact that the movie was determined to portray Bert as lower-class even if the actor could not consistently support that characterization.

The movie systematically erases, however, the consequences of lower-class status. Ladies in silk dresses and gentlemen in top hats are delighted to shake hands with Bert even at his sootiest. In the book, Mary Poppins joins Bert on her day off for their customary raspberry-jam-cakes and tea, but Bert has only tuppence for his day’s work and cannot afford to pay for tea. Nor, of course, can Mary Poppins (who in the movie ends up dropping the subject of wages altogether), so they both put on a cheery face and determine to make do without-until Bert pulls Mary into one of his chalk pictures, where they get their raspberry-jam-cakes after all (Travers, 19-24). No such hints of financial need are allowed to disturb the movie. Instead, the much-anthologized “Chim Chim Cher-ee” insists that money and status have nothing to do with happiness: “Now as the ladder of life ‘as been strung, / You might think a sweep’s on the bottom-most rung,” explains Bert. “Though I spend me time in the ashes and smoke, / In this ‘ole wide world there’s no ‘appier bloke.”

The movie’s portrayal of working-class women is equally romanticized. The Banks’ domestics are friendly, noisy, busty, and ever-present, fulfilling their master’s and mistress’ wishes amidst good-natured grumbling. Hibbin notes that Hermione Baddeley’s “Ellen” has “provided the blueprint for many domestic characters” (35). With her middle-aged rosy cheeks and full figure, she is the image of what the middle class wants a servant to be: contentedly devoting her life to “the family” and “the master.”

Mary Poppins herself is, of course, always a lady, which is part of why she is such a good nanny. Two reviewers even suggested that the movie “might well revive the whole fashion for English nannies” (Knight 30; Alpert 22). In the United States, historically, non-family caretakers of children have been women marginalized either by race (Southern “mammies”) or by their lack of secure attachment to wage-earning men (Northern nurses and governesses-and the ugly women dressed in black blown away from the Banks’ gate). Mary Poppins revivifies the nineteenth century ideal that a woman proves her character as a lady by her actions, not by her financial or occupational status. She thus soothes the residual fear that children left to the care of social inferiors will not learn the behaviors expected of their class, at the same time that she validates the perception that such women do not need external aids (wages, job security) as much as internal resources (strength of character, proper manners) to perform their task well.

The displacement into Edwardian England invites middle-class spectators to indulge in the nostalgia of thinking that this is what master-servant relationships really were like back then. Similarly, it allows the movie to subvert challenges to middle-class women’s roles. Three years in production, “Mary Poppins” appeared about a year after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a book that was later credited with launching the second wave of the feminist movement. In the fall of 1964, however, this wave was only beginning to swell and few people predicted the cultural turmoil that was to occur by the end of the decade-not just because of feminism, but also because of the Black nationalist, anti-war, and student movements. In retrospect, 1964 seems more like 1957 than 1967. But tensions were building, and “Mary Poppins” allowed anxieties around gender to be projected onto another time. We can all chuckle when Mr. Banks pompously declaims, “It’s grand to be an Englishman in 1910. / King Edward’s on the throne; it’s the age of men”-because men (presumably more enlightened) don’t act like that any more. Mrs. Banks’ suffragette enthusiasms seem similarly overblown. In an age that congratulates itself on its rationality, and wouldn’t dream of depriving women of the vote, women’s suffrage seems simply a mark of the historical march of progress and modernity’s broad-minded liberalism. Certainly Mrs. Banks’ rotten eggs were unnecessary, along with all the rest of her emotional demonstrativeness. In our advanced age, we can be doubly sure that all that is needed, if any change is called for, is some fine-tuning of women’s roles.

The order restored at the end of “Mary Poppins” is thus not just an order of family and gender, but also of class and empire. The United States in 1964 was at the height of its own imperialist power. While the Soviets were seen as a threat, the United States intervened in small countries such as those in Indochina with every expectation of success. In “Mary Poppins,” set in Britain when it was still a great power, we see a reflected image that reconciles us to these operations of power. The interlocking structural and symbolic orders that unify the realms of nation, family, and commerce are revealed and ratified.

Or, at least, this is one way to look at it.

If we are interested in the movie’s impact on viewers and the roots of its popularity, the careful readings typical of literary criticism are not sufficient. A detailed analysis of narrative, language, image, and symbolism may well reveal meanings and connotations that are present to a typical viewer in a vague, inarticulate, or even subliminal form. But such reconstruction is not an adequate representation of an audience’s experience of a one-time (or even two-time) theater viewing of the movie. Certain meanings may not even be possible to discern unless one is viewing the movie synchronically-reading the beginning in the context of the end. While people often do reflect back over a movie after seeing it in a theater, many details will be missed, and even multiple viewings may not result in a totalizing narrative-perhaps especially in the case of child viewers. An interpretation that relies on seeing the movie as a whole may not, then, be the best way of understanding what most audience members see.

“Mary Poppins” was explicitly billed as a children’s movie that adults would also enjoy. The reviewers’ most common complaint, however, was that the movie was too long. At 2 hours and 20 minutes, it could give even adult viewers a case of the fidgets. Children were unlikely to sit still and silent for even a fraction of that time. When the movie was revived in the Radio City Movie Hall, Canby estimated that at any given time approximately 2000 children were on their way to or from the bathroom: “The aisles were aswarm, a single file up, a single file back, creating a gentle, constant drone. It was like being inside a huge beehive” (B1). While most theaters would not have provided such large masses of children in movement, we can hardly assume the stereotypical passive movie audience staring quietly at the screen.

Nor would many children have that expectation. While parents typically try to silence their children at movies and plays, children do not automatically assume that they are not supposed to speak just because they are in an audience. (Nor, for that matter, do adults. As Lawrence Levine has documented, genteel patrons in the late nineteenth century struggled to impose silence on mass audiences.) Many parents make book-reading an interactive process, encouraging their children to comment on the characters and story and pictures. That socialization may well transfer to the movie theater, at least for a child’s first few movies. It seems very likely that parents and children, sitting next to each other in a darkened but somewhat noisy theater, would occasionally exchange comments about what is happening on the screen. The engrossment that critics tend to assume for adult spectators, where viewers are drawn into the story and identify strongly with a character, would be unlikely in such an environment.

That kind of engrossment and identification is also directly undercut by “Mary Poppins,” which insistently blurs the boundary between the “real” and the “unreal.” At the very beginning, Bert looks the camera in the eye as he “answers” our question about where to find Seventeen Cherry-Tree Lane. Both then and later, he engages in conversation with an inaudible interlocutor-us. Similar blurrings between levels of reality occur repeatedly within the plane of the movie itself. The live-action actors enter an animated world where flowers turn into butterflies and merry-go-round horses join animated horses on a racetrack. People rise to the ceiling, animated doves join the pigeons around St. Paul’s, and Admiral Boom surveys the neighborhood from his ship-shape (literally) house. Then, of course, there is Mary Poppins’ magic. All of these techniques emphasize that boundaries, including the boundary between screen and audience, are permeable. Time and time again the movie impresses the audience with its technical virtuosity-its ability to make unnatural things look so natural that one can’t help wondering how the movie achieved the effect. We all, child or adult, know that toys don’t just put themselves away. Though some suspension of disbelief is expected, the procedures that make the movie entertaining also remind the viewer that the movie is a movie.

Indeed, Jim Collins suggests that musicals as a genre commonly invite the audience into the movie not through identification, but as active spectators who are “essential for the entertainment to succeed” (139). Spectatorship, in this view, is not necessarily passive. While spectacle may well construct spectators as passive recipients of a pre-packaged product, it may also elicit more active forms of engagement, such as curiosity about how an effect was achieved or interaction with other members of the audience. Rick Altman argues that musicals are characterized by a reflexivity that highlights the film’s status as film: we are expected to marvel at the film’s technological tricks and to accept that the numbers are at least as much motivated by the presence of the audience as by the film’s narrative. This reflexivity repeatedly disrupts narrative movement, but it does not make the film radical, expose its ideological content, or diminish the audience’s pleasure in the film (6-7).

Such disruptive pressures fragment, but do not eradicate, audience identifications. One might think we are expected to identify with the title character, Mary Poppins herself, but the movie does not encourage that identification. Only rarely are we sutured into Mary Poppins’ position by shot/reverse shot sequences, and the only time we get privileged information about her consciousness is at the end of the movie.

More frequently, we are encouraged to identify with Jane and Michael. We are given repeated shots of their faces as they gaze with wonder and delight at some new miracle: they, like us, are often spectators. Clearly gender-coded (Jane wears a pink nightgown and rides a pink horse, Michael wears blue pajamas and rides a blue horse), they together provide every viewer with a same-sex identification. In many ways, however, they are lumped together as “the children.” With the exception of the bank scene, where the boy carries the money even though he is younger, the differences in their portrayals could be as much related to age as to gender. Jane speaks more, representing the two children to the adults in the movie, while the camera more often focuses in on Michael’s face. Thus, while the movie certainly recognizes gender, it provides two relatively undifferentiated sites of identification.

We frequently join Jane and Michael in looking at Mary Poppins. While Mary Poppins is thus “the object of the gaze” -a position that many feminist critics, following Laura Mulvey, have considered indicative of women’s powerlessness and pasivity in a patriarchal cultural system-this gaze hardly makes Mary Poppins passive or powerless. Indeed, it is often her magical potency that attracts the attention. While reviewers frequently mentioned Julie Andrews’ beauty, Mary Poppins does not rely for her appeal on romantic or sexual allure. In fact, Pamela Travers was determined to keep any hint of a romantic alliance between Mary and Bert out of the script (Glenn B7). Disney company memos indicate that the character of Mary Poppins was highly contested: executive Martin Kaplan explained that the movie’s Mary Poppins needed to be “substantially more charming and affectionate than the one in the books, where she’s somewhat too fastidious and vain (like her creator)” (Masters 36). Whether Travers was successful in her campaign is debatable, especially in the context of a movie tradition where any adult, unmarried, heterosexual friendship is likely to be construed as romantic-and waltzes in Victorian garb don’t help. But Bert’s adoration of Mary is matched by that of the children and the animated animals they encounter, and we are expected to join in admiring the new, improved, “charming and affectionate” Mary Poppins. Identifying with the children certainly does not eliminate sexual overtones, but it does relegate them to second place.

This identification with the children is not, however, absolute. If we are adults, and particularly parents, our sympathies are likely to occasionally slip over to the movie’s parents -especially if we feel similarly ineffective in managing a squirming youngster in the seat next to us. Since the parents are not present in large segments of the movie, this identification is unstable, and recurrently shades back into seeing things from the children’s point of view. Parents may also identify with the real-life children who are simultaneously watching the screen. Imagining their children’s reactions (and seeing and hearing them) will certainly affect parents’ experience of the movie.

Such a viewing may produce some rather mixed feelings. On the one hand, simply by coming to the theater parents are doing what the movie tells them to: they are taking their children on a fun outing. They may therefore feel comforted, since the movie seems to be assuring them that they are good parents. On the other hand, their identification with Mr. or Mrs. Banks may be disconcerting. Few parents (and especially mid-century American middle-class parents) never fear that they are neglecting their children. The standard for good parenthood in the early 1960s was very high and rising. “Mary Poppins” might even seem to be saying that fathers as well as mothers have to subordinate all interests outside the home if they are not to fail as parents. For women, such a dictate would condemn them to the fullest form of “the problem that has no name.” For men, it raises the problem, actively erased by the movie, of how to fulfill one’s breadwinner responsibilities while giving one’s children adequate time and attention.

According to Kathy Jackson, children in American films made before World War II tended to be represented as innocent, happy, good, and capable of solving not just their own problems but also those of the adults around them. In the 1950s and early 1960s, however, popular films featuring children “reveal a world in which children are confused, searching, misunderstood, or deviant” and fathers in particular are “frequently absent or ineffectual.” Jackson suggests that the popularity of such troubled film images of children indicates that parents feared that even the domestic world was out of their control (81, 117-18).

Parents, then, may respond quite powerfully to the movie’s images of emotionally starved children constantly running away. While their anxieties may be soothed by the movie’s resolution, in which a simple kite-flying expedition solves all the family’s problems, they may also recognize the inadequacy of this solution; if nothing else, such outings would need to be repeated ad infinitum. Mothers especially may want to identify with Mary Poppins, who has the perfect touch for making children feel happy, cared for, and able to explore the world, while at the same time enforcing discipline. But Mary Poppins has the great advantage of being able to put the nursery to order by a snap of her fingers. A mother who aspires to be Mary Poppins, like a father who defies his employers, is likely to find that the “real world” is more difficult and painful than “Mary Poppins” suggests.

All of which finally brings us to the movie’s presumed primary audience: children. As Jacqueline Rose points out, the whole project of criticizing children’s literature is highly problematic. “Children’s fiction sets up a world in which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver), but where neither of them enter the space in between” (1-2). Rose concludes that a child’s experience of literature is more or less inaccessible to an adult critic. While I believe it is essential to heed her warnings about the distortions probable in an adult’s reading of a child’s reading of a cultural product, and agree entirely with Geoff Moss that it is impossible to predict accurately the responses of “child readers in general” as if all children were the same (50), I am unwilling to give up entirely the attempt to suggest how children may view “Mary Poppins.” Perhaps I am simply walking in where angels fear to tread. As I argued above, however, “Mary Poppins” is not the closed or “readerly” text that both Rose and Moss consider typical of children’s literature. The movie’s disruptions of “reality” means that it does not “count absolutely on the child’s willingness to enter into the book, and live the story” (Rose 2). Instead, it relies on a viewer’s willingness to engage with a text that repeatedly underlines that it is a text.

“Mary Poppins” clearly draws on children’s anxieties about being unloved and abandoned. At its opening, Jane and Michael are inconveniences to their parents, both of whom would prefer to be off doing something else rather than dealing with their children. Mr. Banks’ comments in particular make us sympathetic to Michael’s opinion that his father doesn’t like him (though an older viewer might pause over the connection between loving one’s children and liking them). By the end of the movie, however, the Banks family has become what therapeutic jargon might call “child-centered.” Not only are the children welcome to spend time with their parents, but it is the parents’ response to the children’s interests (kite-flying) that determines what the whole family does together.

I would argue, however, that the over-all narrative may not be particularly significant in children’s experience of the movie, especially among the under-10 set that is likely to be Disney’s primary audience. Children are unlikely to have the patience, or the experience, or the interest, to try to comprehend the movie as a whole, especially when both the movie itself and the viewing environment encourage viewers to see the movie as a series of episodes rather than as a closed and coherent narrative driving inexorably towards a goal. What is more salient, then, is children’s experience of individual scenes-the images and dialogue they walk away with. (Such fragmented viewing is even more significant in an age of VCRs, when children can often control which parts of a movie they see again and again.) We can think of this as a self-constructed set of “narrative images” that represent the film in the child’s mind.

Consider, for example, the bank. Mr. Banks is strongly identified with the bank; he is even named after it. Susan Willis points out, however, that young children find it very difficult to understand what banks do: they “see the bank as a window that dispenses cash to people whenever they run out of it” (25). In a society that carefully separates children from any form of productive labor, it takes quite a while to understand the capitalist system and banking’s role in it. Songs that list “First and second trust deeds / Think of the foreclosures! / Bonds! Chattels! Dividends! Shares! / Bankruptcies! Debtor Sales! / Opportunities! / All manner of private enterprise! / Shipyards! The mercantile! / Collieries! Tanneries! / Incorporations! Amalgamations!” (44-46) don’t illuminate the issue. From a child’s point of view, then, Mr. Banks spends his days doing something incomprehensible. But the two wardens who march Mr. Banks down the hall to the bank’s darkened board room lend credence to Bert’s explanation that Mr. Banks is in a cage. And, while a child may not fully understand what is happening when Mr. Banks is fired, the images of tearing his flower, inverting his umbrella, and punching out his hat are quite clear. Such images of threat and power convey a sense that the world of business is not a safe place.

Mark West suggests that children’s senses of humor frequently turn on the tensions in their relationships with adults. Coming to consciousness and society in the context of an unequal power relationship, children enjoy jokes and stories that poke fun at adults’ authority, suggest that adults are not infallibly good, and/or highlight the dirty and disgusting things about which adults are so squeamish (115-16). This analysis helps us understand why some children find “Mary Poppins” so funny. While the movie is sometimes slapstick, and has its fair share of people bopping themselves or others on the head, it is a mistake to assume that this is all children see. Scenes in which everyone’s clothes and faces are covered with black soot, for example, surely resonate with children’s pleasures and fears around making a mess. The movie’s humor repeatedly undercuts parental authority and reveals parents to be confused, foolish, and needing to listen to and learn from to children. It’s not so clear, then, who is reconciled to whom: the same story that can be called “The Education of Mr. Banks” can also be called “The Triumph of the Child.”

In conclusion, I would suggest that “Mary Poppins” does indeed raise a wide range of anxieties in its spectators-anxieties around gender, class, family, work, race, and nationhood. These anxieties are soothed by the narrative conclusion, which posits the middle-class nuclear family (appropriately but not excessively supported by lower-class assistants) as the site of true personal satisfaction and authentic group loyalty. The utopian vision ultimately ratified by the movie centers on this idea of family: we are all expected to feel that the movie ends well when the Banks family consolidates its ranks, Mrs. Banks symbolically gives up her suffrage activism, Mr. Banks recognizes that his most important calling is as a father, and Mary Poppins and Bert safely return to their marginal position in the family/society. Along the way, however, we see glimpses of other utopian visions: one, for example, in which the workplace recognizes the value of sociability and play and people mingle on the basis of shared interests and pleasures, not shared age and class. The line between utopianism and romanticism is a thin one, if indeed it exists at all, and a utopian vision always runs the risk of resigning people to the status quo by over-accentuating the seeds of hope. Things aren’t so bad, mass culture so often seems to say, and the problems that remain can easily be solved by embracing more of the existing system.

Nevertheless, this ideological closure is rarely complete. In “Mary Poppins,” the fact that both movie and audience encourage viewers to experience the movie in an episodic fashion increases the possibility that the movie’s implicit critiques of class, capitalism, and middle-class gender relations may stick. There is no one way to read “Mary Poppins.” When I first saw the movie, as a child, my mother leaned over after the “Sister Suffragette” line, “Our daughters’ daughters will adore us,” to whisper what a shame it was that the mother was thinking so much about her daughter’s daughters that she didn’t even take the time to care for her own daughter. My mother felt that the movie supported her choice to interrupt her graduate work for six years to be a full-time mother. In contrast, another professional woman I know felt that the movie’s portrayal of Mary Poppins’ and Bert’s beneficial relationships with Jane and Michael supported her choice to pay another person to nurture her children during the workweek while she continued to pursue her career.

Such contrary conclusions make it clear that what viewers bring to “Mary Poppins” greatly affects what they take away, a principle that also holds for other movies-and for other cultural products. Susan Willis concludes in her discussion of dinosaurs (this volume) that a child’s images of these widespread cultural artifacts can easily reinforce dominant ideologies and just as easily convey utopian content. Similarly, there is no way to firmly determine whether a particular movie is “subversive” or “recuperative,” whether it will provoke utopian aspirations or socialize viewers into a normative order. While Jameson’s ideological function is probably predominant in most works of mass culture, the very process of raising anxieties in order to soothe them runs the risk of promoting awareness of those anxieties and provoking other answers to the questions they pose. One cannot rely on a cultural product to be, in itself, subversive or liberatory. Too much occurs during the process of interpretation for a cultural product alone, outside a tradition of critical conversation, to carry such weight. That critical tradition-be it located in a classroom, a newspaper column, a circle of friends, or whispered by a parent in a child’s ear-crucially affects what people see and hear in any cultural product.

Note: To facilitate distinguishing between the book and movie, I have placed the title of the book in italics and the title of the movie in quotation marks. All film lyrics are quoted as they appear in Sherman and Sherman. All other quotations from the movie have been transcribed from the video.

Works Cited:

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Altman, Rick. “Introduction.” Genre: The Musical. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

Bart, Peter. “Hollywood Ponders a Paradox of Great Riches Among Flops.” New York Times (July 16, 1965): 14.

Canby, Vincent. “Mary’s Poppin’ Up Again.” New York Times (June 10, 1973): B1, B16.

Champetier, Caroline. “Mary Poppins.” Cahiers du Cinema 283 (Dec. 1977): 53-54.

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Masters, Kim. “Hell’s-a-Poppins.” Premiere 3 (April 1990): 36-37.

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Willis, Susan. “Imagining Dinosaurs.” Girls, Boys, Books, Toys. Ed. Beverly Lyons Clark and Margaret Higonnet. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1999 (forthcoming).