Although she led a fairly free-style life for her day, the grandkids were the kids of her adopted son. And therein lies an interesting tale:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
At the age of 40, two years after moving out on her own, Travers adopted a baby boy from Ireland whom she named Camillus Travers Hone. He was the grandchild of Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats’ first biographer, who was raising his seven grandchildren with his wife. Camillus had a twin brother named Anthony, but Travers chose only Camillus, based on advice from her astrologer. Camillus was unaware of his true parentage or the existence of any siblings until the age of 17, when Anthony came to London and knocked on the door of Travers’ house.
So is that a disguised Bert at the bank, in position and patiently waiting for the drugged kid that Mary’s been coaching to create one heck of a diversion?
She Pops-in, she Pops-out. That’s what she is, exactly what her name says. She’s like the magic social worker, who solves problems rather than just identifying them-- from a time when the social working profession didn’t even really exist (charitable aid societies that would eventually become CPS, and DCFS, etc. existed, but they weren’t part of the government yet). What if these people were really powerful and helpful, instead of well-intentioned, but largely ineffectual?
I think there’s a lot of social commentary that goes unnoticed-- and even probably did when the books were first published, because the audience was children who had not lived through the time represented. Believe me, though, if you read stuff from around WWI that happens not to be about the war, or watch movies from the time, there’s lots of commentary about social workers. Cf, “The Mother and the Law” segment of DW Griffith’s Intolerance.
Mary Pops in to the Banks family a lot throughout the book series, whenever there is trouble, even just a morale crisis.
She has no backstory, because the fact that a problem needs a solution is self-evident.
Not in the books. There’s no crisis in the family, ever; she just pops in. There are mentions of minor situations such as the male servant Robertson Ay – not in the movie – being very lazy, but it’s nowhere near “crisis.”
The movie adds that dimension of Mary P as psychologist/social worker, the mysterious stranger who resolves problems. (Like Joseph Cotten in Hitchcock’s SHADOW OF A DOUBt )
There was an SDMB post I read years ago (at least four, probably more) that was brilliantly written. It had her as a witch and the head of a coven of chimney sweeps that performed rituals on the rooftops of London. Repeated attempts at the search function find nothing.
I haven’t read the books since I was a child, so we’re talking about 38 years ago, and I don’t remember many details, and I never read all of them, but to the best of my recollection, things were happening that were crises to children. Think about the Beverly Cleary books. If you read those for the first time as an adult, you might think they were kind of silly, but as far as tapping into real worries of children, she nailed them.
Mary Poppins, to the best of my recollection, was an adult who took the problems of childhood seriously.
I saw Saving Mr. Banks, and I remember thinking that if there was any truth in it, PL Travers probably wished her childhood problems had been typical. Kinda like Allan Sherman, who wrote “A Letter from Camp” (Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah), and had grown up in a children’s home, where he probably wished his worst problem was that it didn’t stop raining when he was at camp.
It doesn’t seem ironic at all to me that she was a bad mother, because in my experience, sometimes people with real, genuine empathy for children don’t make good parents or teachers, because they can’t step back and be the adult in the situation. But they do make great writers of children’s books. Some of the best writers for children didn’t have children. I know Meg Cabot personally (we were friends in high school), and I’m not surprised that she writes popular books for children, nor that she doesn’t have kids.
Anyway, so from an adult perspective, “crisis” is probably to strong a word, but the kids’ needs are not being met. Or, I just don’t remember them well enough, having seem the Disney movie five or six times since the last time I read one of the books.
I seem vaguely to remember liking the books better, though.
Anyway, a lot of the things that people are proposing Mary Poppins is, didn’t exist when the book was written, including the Samantha Stevens-type witch.
I think what she was, was a person with a child’s sensibilities, but an adult’s power and control over the world. You know, that fantasy you have of being able to go back and fix some of the bad things that happened to you as a child with the sense and ability you have now as an adult? I think she’s the fulfillment of that wish, if you must have an answer.
On reflection, she belongs to a specific genre: the mysterious itinerant stranger with access to powers who arrives, solves the problem of those rooted to a location,and then departs. She has to depart to fulfill the rules of the Wandering Helper genre: neither Shane nor the Doctor can ever stay. She may be a Time Lord, she can’t be Tom Bombadil, whose powers are tied to his own location: he’s the opposite of itinerant. Tom may help you if you stray into his domain, but he will never arrive to assist in yours.
eta: That’s why the last Matt Smith episode of Doctor Who was so deeply unsatisfying: it broke the rules by having the Doctor stay in Trenzalore. He’s been marooned before, but he’s always striven to escape.
Hmm. There are lots of examples of those from TV, aren’t there? The Fugitive, Touched by an Angel– even Scooby-doo.
Those are usually from the strangers’ perspective, but you know, if you were a child before about 1914, the world was full of problem-solving itinerant strangers, albeit, not so good as the fictional ones. Doctors made house calls, there were door-to-door salesmen, with miracle products, and door-to-door repairmen, who fixed pots and pans, carriage upholstery, and all sorts of things.
Maybe what Mary is, is a “Poppins,” someone who pops in, and fixes things, and then pops out. Just because we only see Mary, we don’t know there aren’t other “Poppins.” She is like the people who went door to door fixing things, except she could fix anything, even psychic wounds, fixed them completely, and they stayed fixed.
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