The Features of Fairy Tales in the Stories of Mary Poppins
Renáta Marosiová
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to analyse several fairy tale features in the stories of
Mary Poppins. Fantasy literature has adopted and altered the fairy tale formulae.
Thus for example supernatural beings (fairies, goblins, dragons), magic (flying,
magic spell) and magic tools (invisibility cloak or ring, wand) which are part of
fantasy literature are all derived from the world of fairy tales. The Mary Poppins
books, as examples of this mode, reflect the fairy tale pattern in many ways, and P.
L. Travers’s, the creator of the series, as an aficionado of this genre also claimed that
her governess originated in the realm of the fairy tale. I suggest that in respect to
Poppins’s role in the Banks family, she can be decoded as the fairy tale archetype of
the Fairy Godmother, who regarding her function is actually a magic helper. Since
fantasy literature has changed the fairy tale pattern, the character of the magic helper
has been altered as well. Therefore Mary Poppins is neither an old dwarf in the
woods nor an enchanted princess. She is a subversive helper in respect of her
outward appearance, speech, manner, magic aid and attitude toward the Banks
children. The Fairy Godmother acquaints her protégés with the fairy world: she
introduces characters like the crones (Mrs Corry, the Balloon Woman, Ms Calico)
and other fairy tale beings like princes, the features of magic (act of flying, talking
animals, living statue) and so forth. Journeys with Mary Poppins carry moral
messages and maxims that finally have fascinated and influenced the Banks children:
reward, punishment, discovery of the unknown self and their physical world. Finally
a happy ending that is so common in fairy tale formulae is also present but modified
in Mary Poppins stories in interesting ways.
Key Words: Fairy tale, magic helpers, magic aid, fairy godmother, Mary Poppins,
crones, mental journeys, prohibition, happy end.
*****
Fairy tales have always fascinated and affected mankind; they are in children’s
mind and imagination, in adults’ memory and their peculiarities have remained in
fantasy literature as well. Fantasy literature adopts and transforms aspects from
fairytale convention: either it ‘borrows’ the fairyland’s characters, magic tools
(Warner, 2014, p. xix) or recalls the themes once told sincerely by the folk, like
sexuality or morality. To mention some of them: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s travel,
among others, points out the theme of sexuality, Frank Baum’s Dorothy’s silver
shoes are similar to the fairy tales’ seven league boots, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan’s
ageless realm mirrors the continuous present in the fairy tales’ world, and the battle
between good and evil in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia resembles the battle between the
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opposites in fairy tales. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins stories, was very
fond of these tales and approved of their values, consequently her Mary Poppins
books reflect some features of fairy tales (journey, magic, characters, etc.).
Mary Poppins’s mysterious, contradictory personality and magic power have
been well-known globally. If the reader looks at Mary Poppins’s ‘human’
personality (s)he can observe her as a modern, independent, offensive but also
always polite and good-looking woman. Furthermore if we observe Euripides’s
Dionysus in The Bacchae the similarity between the Greek God and Mary Poppins
is obvious. Since as Grilli (2014) suggested it aptly both of them are identified as
being the cause of disorder and subversion.1 However if we study Mary Poppins’s
role in the Banks family we can identify her as one of the fairy tale archetypes, and
that is the Fairy Godmother. As the function of the Godmother is to aid heroes on
their journey, Mary Poppins’s role is to help and protect the Banks family during
their every-day adventures. Campbell (2004) wrote about magic helper as ‘a
protective figure (often a little old crone or old man)’2, making the Fairy Godmother
a wise helper, usually an older one. Furthermore in Propp’s opinion, the magic
helper’s function is, among other things, the rescue. 3
Therefore, according to Joseph Campbell’s and Vladimir Propp’s study on the
archetypes of the magic helpers, I suggest that Mary Poppins is a Fairy Godmother,
however, a subversive one, since she is everything but a traditional cheerful, old
fairy with a magic wand or an old woman, a speaking animal or a dwarf in the woods
who guarantees the ‘happily ever after’; she is rather a cross ‘Great Exception’ or
‘Dutch Doll’ who denies displaying her magic power and emotions and who shows
the children that nothing lasts forever.
As one of the Banks children states, Mary Poppins is not a fairy but she is the
fairy tale. Since she makes the fairy world out of the stories and figures around her:
without Mary Poppins there are neither magic adventures nor extraordinary
characters. Therefore I would like to look at further connection between fairy tales
and Mary Poppins stories: many Poppins’s relatives, friends or enemies – regarding
their personalities – resemble fairy tale characters; furthermore there are other motifs
or subjects that resemble fairy tale formulae (magic tools, self-discovery, etc.) and
that are all present around Poppins.
Finally, I would like to emphasize two facts. Firstly since Mary Poppins books
are not fairy tales and thus show significant differences from established fairy tale
patterns, the Mary Poppins books use the formulae in various ways. However I think
to deal with these aspects is important in order to follow the way the features of fairy
tales change in fantasy works. Secondly, since Travers liked the brothers Grimm’s
German Popular Stories (1823, 1826) they will form the basis of this study’s fairy
tale corpus. She claimed that these stories show the truth by being realistic and
didactic; furthermore – as the writer said – the Grimm’s (original) tales did not speak
to her childishness and treated her with respect. 4
Renáta Marosiová
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Mary Poppins: the subversive Fairy Godmother
In 1812 and 1815 the Brothers Grimm published their collected tales under the
title of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales). These books,
among other tales, included animal tales and fairy tales (in other words Märchen or
wonder tales). Several years later these volumes were translated into many
languages, so into English as German Popular Stories in 1823 and 1826.
By the time Helen Lyndon Goff (later known as P. L. Travers) was born, the
Grimm brothers’ collected tales were approved and eagerly read all around the
world. Significant adults who introduced little Helen into the realm of literature were
her parents and the family’s Irish washerwoman, who often told the young Helen
fantastic tales, ‘grims’, a word she ‘took to be a generic term for narrative’.5
‘Travers’s young soul was deeply etched with […] the multi-layered realities, and
the magic and heroism of the tales’.6 Tales shaped her imagination since she ‘found
she could conjure up from her own mind the most fearsome monsters as well as a
host of fairy-tale creatures’.7
Moreover P. L. Travers was so impressed and inspired by fairy tales that her
purpose was to learn more and more about their origin and message. Let the reader
allow me to bring here Travers’s thoughts about the origin and spread of fairy tales
and myth which she put in her essays ‘Only Connect’ and ‘I Never Wrote for
Children’.
The true fairy tales [not the invented ones] come straight out of
myth; they are, as it were, miniscule reaffirmations of myths, or
perhaps the myth made accessible to the local folky mind. […]
One might say that fairy tales are the myths fallen into time and
locality […] Not minimized, not to be made digestible for
children.8
In respect of the ‘true’ fairy tales she goes further when she writes that
none of the fundamental fairy stories were ever written at all. They
arose spontaneously from the folk and were transmitted orally
from generation to generation to unlettered listeners of all ages. It
was not until the nineteenth century, when the collectors set them
down in print, that the children purloined them and made them
their own.9
As myths and tales were being created based on the folk’s belief, experience or
imagination10 Mary Poppins as a fantasy work was coined by Travers’s experiences,
imagination and inner self. Travers said that Mary Poppins has come out of myth 11
and so she has ‘come out of the same world as the fairy tales’.12 All in all, Poppins
has come from a tale which Travers told her sisters about a magic white horse who
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moves from house to house, flies without wings and dives into the sea. Isn’t it
resembles Mary Poppins who moves to and from the Banks house, who flies and
visits the sea without possessing any wings or gill? Finally, Mary Poppins has
arrived and brought fairyland with her into an ordinary family, since ‘it is only
through the ordinary that the extraordinary can make itself perceived’.13
‘The helpful crone and fairy godmother is a familiar feature of European fairy
lore’.14 The magic helper, as one of the main fairy tale characters, is often depicted
in a masculine form. It may be some little fellow of the wood, some wizard or
shepherd, who appears, to give the advice that the hero will require. 15 Therefore
Grimm’s helpers are not dummy, flying godmothers with a wand – that is so
common in Disney tales – rather old women or men (so disguised fairies) in the
woods, dwarfs or giants, elves, dead mothers (in the shapes of tree or bird),
enchanted girls and princes (in shapes of frog and fish), servants and shepherds.
Like fairy tales have undergone several changes throughout times, the figure of
magic helpers, so the Fairy Godmother, have been altered. Heroes have been
protected on their journeys with the help of talking animals, old men or women, then
the jolly Fairy Godmother and peculiar magic helpers as Mary Poppins. The
subversive aspects of her are pointed out by Valerie Lawson, Travers’s biographer:
Mary Poppins was not so much a plain old nanny as a good mother
from a fairy tale. Hiding behind the facade of a British nanny
pushing a pram in Kensington, Poppins was more magical than
Cinderella’s godmother, more mysterious than the good fairy of
“The Sleeping Beauty”16
Mary Poppins is truly an unusual helper in her personality, manner of speech, magic
and relationship with her protégé.
Both the Grimm’s and the Banks’s Fairy Godmother help heroes or heroines on
their journeys, either with simple advice or magic. ‘What such a figure represents is
the benign’17 and thus friendliness as well. Nevertheless when one starts to describe
Mary Poppins’s personality (s)he may not think of her as a kind and cheerful helper.
Mary Poppins ‘is always extremely serious, direct and practical, almost amusingly
austere, decisive and certain’.18 Moreover something ‘sinister lay behind the blue
button eyes and flowerpot hat’.19 To me, this aspect in her personality is similar to
Rose-Bud’s evil fairy. Poppins is very petulant and offensive especially when
children attempt to unfold her magic power and talk about their amusing adventures.
Though Mary Poppins does not enchant children, her sharp look, ‘scornful laugh’
and ‘stern voice’20 is enough to stop their curiosity. Her evil fairy side is shown when
the cruel and strict Ms Andrews (called as ‘Holy Terror’), Mr Banks’s former
governess criticizes Mary Poppins’s perfectness. Poppins rescues Caruso Ms
Andrew’s lark from his cage and she puts her enemy into the lark’s cage. She releases
Renáta Marosiová
5
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the Holy Terror when she says sorry to Poppins. One can see that Mary Poppins
protects both animals and people.
Let the reader allow me to study the aspect of this magic aid and compare it with
Grimm’s helpers. A common and obvious feature that magic aid helps the characters.
While Grimm’s helpers are given the choice – to accept the help or not – Mary
Poppins never asks and always takes the characters into the realm of the magic
world.
The unexpected situations she creates are the result neither of
tools, nor of enchanted formulae, nor of magical ingredients. […]
Rather she is an ungraspable presence […] for whom anything and
everything is possible, even without her intervention.21
Thus although Mary Poppins also possesses magic tools like a parrot-headed
umbrella and compass, which take her and the children anywhere, these tools would
be inefficient without her intervention.
‘Breaking the everyday familiar feel [and routine] and being able to see the
fantastic in these things are parts off what fairy-tales offer’.22 The same goes for
what the Banks’s Godmother provides: how to make ordinary things enjoyable (tea
party under the dandelions, party under the water, riding on peppermint horses, etc.).
One has to observe the children’s journeys not only as physical but as internal,
psychological journeys as well: discovery of their unknown self and the world
around them. In respect of this, Travers explained fairy tales in her essay ‘Only
Connect’:
These are old trees, rooted in the folk, full of meaning and ritual;
they retell the myth in terms that can be understood by unlettered
people. […] Every one of these tales, it seems to me, is asking
something about us, telling us something about life. 23
Therefore as a representative of the fairy world, Mary Poppins helps the children
to learn about themselves, animals, nature and the universe. They visit a heavenly
circus in the sky where they meet the constellations, the sun and the moon; they are
dancing together with fairy tale characters in the Crack (between the Old and New
Year) and with animals in the Zoo. Thus children receive answers to their questions
like what makes a shooting star, what is between the first and the last stroke of
twelve, what a Zoo looks like at night. Furthermore the little Banks children John,
Barbara and later Anabel become aware of the transition from childhood to
adulthood: they can no more understand nature’s language when they grow up. On
many journeys other magic helpers and crones also show the truths to the children.
The extremely old and wise Clara Corry, who is sticking gingerbread stars onto the
sky together with Mary Poppins, pays the children’s attention to the value of their
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shadows (their outer self); the wit Balloon Woman and Ms Calico help the Banks
children to enjoy their walk by selling them flying balloons or offering them to ride
on peppermint horses. Crones’ instructions express maxim which may seem to be
clichés nowadays: Enjoy your life! Never lose your childish self! Transcend yourself
and the world and try to observe them from another point of view!
In respect of these ‘actual journeys’ and ‘mental journeys’24 Mary Poppins never
lets the children discover her magic power and the truth about their adventures. To
me the denial of these things are in accord with the prohibition which is so common
in fairy tales and that Tolkien has associated to the ‘taboo once practised long ago’.25
To me, in Grimm’s fairy tales the prohibition manifests in magic helpers’ advice: do
not go to the nice but the shabby place ‘otherwise you will repent it!’26; do not drink
from the twelve princess’ wine; or do shot the bird and you find your luck.
In fairy tales the others’ help and miraculous adventures are not surprising, but
parts of their every-day routines or their deeds that they are to accomplish. That is
why in fairyland ‘nobody wonders at anything that may happen’27, moreover there
‘is never an explanation of why’.28 The youngest prince, the simpleton brother or the
poor soldier never asks his helper why (s)he helps them or who (s)he is. The
Fisherman is not surprised when he catches a talking fish which is even an enchanted
prince, he very rationally lets him swim away since he has ‘nothing to do with a fish
that can talk’.29 Heroes are also take it for grant if they have to steal a giant’s hair,
fight the dragon or rescue an enchanted princess.
Nevertheless Jane and Michael do ask questions, they need it since for them these
adventures are extra-ordinary. Thereupon they wonder when after her first arrival
Mary Poppins slips up the banister or pulls different things out of her empty carpet
bag. I think in Mary Poppins stories the prohibition is the following: Do not try to
find one answer to the question, only let the adventures happen with you and find
your own answer on your own. ‘Travers preferred questions to answers. She once
declared, “Anything I write is all question. I don’t think I have the answers” ’.30 The
author of Mary Poppins ‘could never remember that her father or anyone else
explained anything’.31 However she did not regret it since as she wrote it in her essay
‘A Radical Innocence’: getting no answer is a grace because children’s mind have
the possibility to ‘turn in upon itself […] wondering, pondering, absorbing the world,
re-enacting himself all the myths there are’.32 Therefore Mary Poppins neither
explains herself or her deeds to anyone (as no one knows where she has come from,
where she goes to, what she feels or thinks); and lets the children observe their
adventures and world as they like and lets them find their own answers and truths;
since truth for Poppins ‘is something that reveals itself a side at a time, never
revealing the whole of itself at any one moment. Like truth, reality cannot be
considered a given’.33 Thus later on she ‘lets slip some sign, she reveals some clue
or object’34 which show the children that their adventures were true. To see some
example: Mary Poppins lets the children notice her belt that she has got at night in
the Zoo from her cousin, the Hamadryad; she has left her scarf in the drawing of
Renáta Marosiová
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Royal Daulton Bowl after she has rescued Jane from it; she allows the children to
see her grassy slippers in which she has been dancing with her shadow in the Park
together with children.
Magic helpers appear when characters need them and they leave when their help
is no longer necessary. While Grimm’s heroes are not interested in how long their
helpers stay with them since there is no close relationship between each other, the
Banks are always very happy when Mary Poppins turns back and so her eventual
departure is ‘experienced as a terrible feeling of loss’.35 Mary Poppins subversively
brings happy ending at the beginning of the stories with her arrivals and does not
offer real, joyful end since she goes away (three times!). Travers said that fairy tales
ending with happy ending ‘have told only half the story. In their wisdom […] they
leave the other half to the reader. It is he who must complete it’.36 The same is true
for Mary Poppins who leaves the Banks family for ever in the end but it is the reader
and the Banks who must complete her story. How would you complete it?
Notes
1
Giorgia Grilli , Neil Gaiman and Jennifer Varney, Myth, Symbol and Meaning in
Mary Poppins: The Governess as Provocateur (New York: Routledge, 2007), 71.
2
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Face (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton
University
Press,
2004),
63,
http://www.dabhub.com/datas/media/The%20Hero%20with%20a%20Thousand%2
0Faces.pdf .
3
Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Structure and Form: Reflections on a Work by Vladimir
Propp,’ trans. Monique Layton, in Theory and history of folklore (Vol. 5), ed.
Anatoly Liberman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 173,
http://monoskop.org/images/f/f0/Propp_Vladimir_Theory_and_History_of_Folklor
e.pdf.
4
P. L. Travers, ‘I Never Wrote for Children,’ in A Lively Oracle: A Centennial
Celebration of P. L. Travers Creator of Mary Poppins, ed. Ellen D. Draper and Jenny
Koralek (New York: Larson Publication, 1999), 183.
5
Ben Haggarty, ‘Refining nectar,’ in A Lively Oracle: A Centennial Celebration of
P. L. Travers Creator of Mary Poppins, ed. Ellen D. Draper and Jenny Koralek (New
York: Larson Publication, 1999), 20.
6
Ellen D. Draper, introduction to A Lively Oracle: A Centennial Celebration of P.
L. Travers Creator of Mary Poppins, ed. Ellen D. Draper and Jenny Koralek (New
York: Larson Publication, 1999), 12.
7
Valerie Lawson, Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2013), 37.
8
P. L. Travers, ‘Only Connect,’ in What the Bee Knows, ed. P. L. Travers (England:
The Aquarian Press, 1989), 294, 295-6.
8
The Features of Fairy Tales in the Stories of Mary Poppins
________________________________________________________________
Travers, ‘I Never Wrote,’ 184.
Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales: A New History (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2009), 4,
https://www.academia.edu/5449581/Fairy_Tales_A_NEW_HISTORY_a_A_NEW
_HISTORY_a.
John T. Bunce, Fairy Tales, their Origin and Meaning: With Some Account of
Dwellers in Fairyland (Internet Archive, 2007), 23-4,
https://archive.org/stream/fairytalestheiro00buncuoft#page/24/mode/2up.
Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014), 1.
11
Edwina Burness and Jerry Griswold, ‘P. L. Travers, the Art of Fiction,’ The Paris
Review, no. 86 (1982), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3099/the-art-offiction-no-63-p-l-travers.
12
Grilli , Gaiman, Varney, Myth, Symbol and Meaning, 39.
13
Burness and Griswold: ‘P. L. Travers’
14
Campbell, The Hero, 65.
15
Campbell, The Hero, 66.
16
Lawson, Mary Poppins, 1-2.
17
Campbell, The Hero, 66.
18
Grilli, Gaiman, Varney, Myth, Symbol and Meaning, 16.
19
Lawson, Mary Poppins, 2.
20
P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins: The Complete Mary Poppins. (UK: HarperCollins
Children’s Books, 2010), 16, 83.
21
Grilli, Gaiman, Varney, Myth, Symbol and Meaning, 6.
22
Ditte R. Kronborg, ‘Are Fairy Tales Only Children’s Stories?: A discussion of the
Use of Fairy Tales as a Literary Genre’ (Thesis, University of Iceland, 2009),
Recovery and Escape section, para.1,
http://skemman.is/stream/get/1946/3301/10380/1/Ditte_Kronborg_fixed.pdf.
23
P. L. Travers, ‘Only Connect,’ 297.
24
Kronborg, ‘Are Fairy Tales’, Themes section, para. 1.
25
John R. R. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy Stories,’ accessed November 18, 2015,
http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-2004/fairystories-tolkien.pdf.
26
M. M. Grimm, German Popular Stories, Translated from the Kinder- und
Hausmärchen, trans. Edgar Taylor (London: C. Baldwyn Newgate Street, 1823), 20,
https://books.google.hu/books?id=LWAVAAAAQAAJ&pg=PR1&redir_esc=y#v=
onepage&q&f=false.
27
Bunce, Fairy Tales, 7.
28
Kate Bernheimer, ‘Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy tale,’ accessed November
15,
2015,
http://www.katebernheimer.com/images/Fairy%20Tale%20is%20Form.pdf.
29
Grimm, German Popular Stories, 28.
9
10
Renáta Marosiová
9
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Philip Zaleski, ‘At Home with Pamela Travers,’ in A Lively Oracle: A centennial
celebration of P. L. Travers creator of Mary Poppins, ed. Ellen D. Draper and Jenny
Koralek (New York: Larson Publication, 1999), 173.
31
Lawson, Mary Poppins, 26.
32
P. L. Travers, ‘A Radical Innocence,’ in What the Bee Knows: Reflections on
Myth, Symbol and Story, ed. P. L. Travers (England: The Aquarian Press, 1989),
237.
33
Grilli, Gaiman, Varney, Myth, Symbol and Meaning, 115.
34
Ibid., 37.
35
Ibid., 132.
36
P. L. Travers, ‘The Unsleeping Eye: A Fairy Tale,’ in What the Bee Knows:
Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story, ed. P. L. Travers (England: The Aquarian
Press, 1989), 191.
30
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Renáta Marosiová
11
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Travers, P. L. ‘A Radical Innocence.’ In What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth,
Symbol and Story, edited by P. L. Travers, 235-241. England: The Aquarian Press,
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–––, ‘Only Connect.’ In What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol and
Story, edited by P. L. Travers, 285-303. England: The Aquarian Press, 1989.
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Myth, Symbol and Story, edited by P. L. Travers, 189-194. England: The Aquarian
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and Jenny Koralek, 168-174. New York: Larson Publication, 1999.
Renáta Marosiová is a PhD student at Eötvös Lóránd University. Her main research
field is children’s literature, mainly fantasy literature, however currently her writing
is devoted to unveiling the border between the formulae of fantasy literature and
fairy tale.