A Spoonful of Sugar Helps The Gender Issues Go Down?


That Little Round-Headed Boy wonders whether or not Mary Poppins is our great lost Feminist fable:

"...the movie could be retitled THE FEMINIST RE-EDUCATION OF GEORGE BANKS. [...]Seeing it now, it's clear that George Banks is her primary reclamation project. He still believes in old school male supremacy, and Poppins is his Cassandra, offering up a dire warning of coming change that he doesn't want to hear. This also dovetails with a subtle message that England's days of world supremacy are soon to wane as well..."

I'm not sure the messages of Mary Poppins are all that subtle, but they're certainly discomfitingly mixed. It's a film that spends roughly 118 minutes presenting case studies to support a cache of radical theories: that women are smarter and althogether more capable than men; that hired parents are far more functional than biological mothers and fathers; that panhandlers and vagabonds are inherently more noble than men who handle other people's wealth for a living (and don't even get the movie started on the spoiled, fashionably political wives of said corporate moguls).

But then, like so many 50s-era stabs at the dominant culture, the movie pulls back from its insurrectionary impulses. Mary Poppins ends with the nuclear family (however improbably) reunited, and George Banks (though in some ways enlightened in a manner he was not at the beginning of the film) firmly re-ensconsed in corporate culture, and Mary Poppins herself, floating off alone, without saying goodbye. Not only does she abandon the Banks family (who she has ostensibly "fixed", and who apparently barely notice that she's gone), but if I remember correctly, she essentially leaves Dick Van Dyke's Burt (who we are to read is her on-again, off-again lover) in the middle of the night, without a clue as to where or when they might meet again.

If anything, I think we're suppossed to walk away with the idea that the feminist woman is a lone warrior; that it's her duty to go where she's needed to re-educate the masses behind the mask of domestic employment; that she must forgo binding emotional attatchments in order to get the job done; and she must then leave in the night with nary a goodbye, allowing the wind to carry her to her next engagement with no baggage holding her down (although, on that score, the fact that she can squeeze large items of furniture in her magic carpet bag surely helps). As a feminist fable, it's not so much about the feminist herself -- it's about the men she leaves behind.