Caitlin Flanagan's piece on P.L. Travers and Mary Poppins in this week's New Yorker is actually good: an old-fashioned well-written, well-researched profile/analysis with hardly an ax to grind, save the gratuitous paragraph on contemporary nannies. Flanagan is even correct when she notes that the much-beloved Disney Mary Poppins is in fact the ultimate anti-nanny tract. What Mary Poppins accomplishes is the reformation of the Banks family into a child-centered unit in which Mom and Dad abandon all other priorities in favor of caring for and cavorting with their offspring, and the nanny is thus no longer necessary. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
[And here I must plead guilty to once having had a nanny and telling people, like the women Flanagan describes, that she was Mary Poppins. Which in fact she was: she was British, she'd spent two years at nanny school, she called me up and announced that she was going to be my nanny, and she created an unheard of level of order in our lives--she even got recalcitrant young M to fall asleep without hours of singing and back-patting, though of course M only performed this trick for her, never for me. Does it help if I say that she became one of my best friends?! (Please note self-parodic phrasing.)]
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3 comments:
great article, thanks for alerting me!
I also enjoyed the article. Like you, I was reduced to stereotype: I have often referred to people as Mary Poppins, "practically perfect in every way," as Julie Andrews points out in the movie. Too bad about Mr Disney. He had as much regard for a woman's intellect as Mr. Banks did. What a prick.
Lucy
Could you keep doing this New Yorker book report thing? I need to be reminded when to read it. :)
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