Mary Poppins: why we need a spoonful of sugar more than ever

The Emily Blunt reboot reintroduces PL Travers’ nanny for uncertain times but is she a feminist?

It is fairly well known that PL Travers, who wrote the eight original Mary Poppins books, hated the 1964 Disney film adaptation. The animation, the Hollywood version of Edwardian England, the playful verbosity of the songs and above all, the presentation of Mrs Banks as a larky suffragette are understood to have enraged the Australian author, as, surely would this: the co-option of Mary Poppins as a feminist.

It is an irritating reflex to take beloved figures from childhood fiction and bend them to adult political ends, but it is particularly perverse in the case of Poppins, given her creator’s dislike of piety. The original Poppins is not quite the spit-spot version with whom most of us are familiar, but a far darker, more irregular creature, powered in places by what reads as sublimated rage and inclined to embrace something that sails close to atheism.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PMUl3h

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