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UNIVERSITATEA „ALEXANDRU IOAN CUZA” DIN IAŞI

FACULTATEA DE LITERE

ŞCOALA DOCTORALĂ DE STUDII FILOLOGICE

Fairy-tale and Myth: Male Archetypes in P.L. Travers’s Works.

Saving Mr. Banks

Doctoral Thesis

Summary

Conducǎtor de doctorat:

Prof. univ. dr. Avadanei Stefan

Doctorandǎ:

Filip P. Lacramioara – Petronela cǎs. Olaru

Iași

2018

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Anunț

La data de 17 iulie 2018, ora 10.00, în sala 3.15, drd. FILIP P. Lăcrămioara –

Petronela căs. OLARU susține, în ședință publică, teza de doctorat cu titlul ”Fairy-

tale and Myth: Male Archetypes in P.L. Travers's Works. Saving Mr. Banks,” în

vederea obținerii titlului științific de doctor în domeniul Filologie.

Comisia de doctorat are următoarea componență:

Președinte:

Conf. univ. dr. Ioan Constantin LIHACIU, Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din

Iași

Conducător științific:

Prof. univ. dr. Ștefan AVĂDANEI, Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din Iași

Referenți:

Prof. univ. dr. Michaela PRAISLER, Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos” din Galați

Conf. univ. dr. Ștefan-Mihai STROE, Universitatea București

Conf. dr. Iulia MILICA, Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din Iași

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CONTENTS

1. Introduction ..........................................................................................................4

2. The World Wars and Helen Lyndon Goff – The Life of „Anon:‟ Historical

Contextualization .................................................................................................9

3. From Childhood Innocence to Re-Storying the Adults.......................................28

3.1. „The Authors are in Eternity‟..............................................................38

3.2. Dickensian Tribute: “To Pip”…….………………………...………..46

3.3. The Mythical Method ………..………………………..…………….53

4. The Relationship between Psychoanalysis and P.L. Travers‟s Books ……...…61

4.1. Dreams, Fairy Tales and Myths…………….……………………..68

4.1.1. The Pre-Oedipal Phase …………..……....73

4.1.2. The Three Wishes…………………….......78

4.1.3. The Stories within the Story …………..…93

4.1.4. The World of the Hero …….…………....123

4.2. Ecstatic Dances ……………………………………………..……154

5. The Hero of P.L. Travers‟s World: An Analysis of Male

Archetypes….................................................................................................…162

5.1. Friend Monkey: The Trickster…………………………………....166

5.2. Michael Banks: The Precocious Child ……………………….…..177

5.3. The Park Keeper: The Dreamer……….….…….…………….......182

5.4. Mr. Banks: The King………………………………….…….……188

6. Mary Poppins and Saving Mr Banks…………………….……………...………….205

7. Conclusions.......................................................................................................216

PLATES............................................................................................................220

BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................224

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Fairy-tale and Myth: Male Archetypes in P.L. Travers’s Works.

Saving Mr. Banks

Literature began with people sitting in a circle while retelling stories to one

another not only for sheer entertainment, but also to voice their fears and dreams,

explain the mysteries of the natural world and bring order into their lives by defining

man‟s place in the universe. Therefore, the oral versions of the fairy-tales did not

emerge as a genre preoccupied with instructing children. However, adults gradually lost

their interest in fairy-tales and, ever since the 18th

century, children became the primary

recipients of the teachings conveyed by means of reading bed time stories. An

immediate threat arose from the part of those writers who sought to bowdlerise this type

of literature under the false pretence of trying to protect their young ones from the

danger of wishful thinking. Charles Dickens, P.L. Travers and many other true believers

in the infinite value of the fairy-tales fought in defence of what, for them, holds the

wisdom of our ancestors and the true meaning of our existence. Not only did they seek

to revive this portion of literature but they were also keen on recapturing its original

magical aura which helped people connect with one another and with the entire divine

creation.

Departing from P.L. Travers‟s own claim that she never wrote for children,

specifically and solely that is, we attempted to uncover other layers of meaning reflected

in her works for the purpose of illustrating her intention of addressing the childlike, no

matter their age. Her main purpose was to re-story adults tainted by experience in such a

way as to help them get back in touch with childhood innocence and, in the meantime,

raise strong children who would be armed with the necessary weapons to confront life

as it is: a vast ocean of suffering with small elusive islands of happiness. Consequently,

her works employ a great variety of fairy-tales and mythical motifs which are meant to

heal the broken souls of all those Wastelanders wandering aimlessly in a world without

God.

Bearing these in mind, we began by contextualizing P.L. Travers‟s works

according to her personal experience with the World Wars and the intermediary lapse

which left a heavy imprint over her artistic drive. We took as reference two relevant

biographies, Valerie Lawson‟s Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers and

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Patricia Demers‟s P.L. Travers, and set out to connect certain aspects of the writer‟s

private life with the compost from which sprout the seeds of her creation.

Since Travers mentioned to have knocked on the doors of Romanticism in

search of deeper meanings conveyed by William Blake‟s poetry, a part of the third

chapter was devoted to researching the ties binding her texts to this literary trend.

Another part was concerned with the exploration of the Dickensian fictional world

because the second volume of the series is dedicated to Phillip Phirrip, the hero of Great

Expectations, and P.L. Travers‟s nanny is interested in exercising her children‟s mind

by confronting them with multiple perspectives on reality. In addition, we attempted to

establish a number of intertextual links with various literary works which have also

been ascribed to children‟s literature and, simultaneously, to explain why assigning

these books to a specific targeted audience restricts and evades the true authorial

intentions. Staffan Bergsten‟s Mary Poppins and Myth and P.L. Travers‟s own articles

collected in What the Bee Knows. Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story served as

guides for us during this stage as they reflect the writer‟s reluctance in accepting this

critical approach to her stories. The chapter ends with a section which intended to depict

the series‟ adherence to a Modernist structure by analyzing its repetitive narrative

pattern and the employment of an array of mythological figures.

Miss Travers was not only the writer of the Mary Poppins books. She was also a

mythologist who assiduously worked on reading and interpreting sacred texts, using her

associative habit in order to connect fairy tale characters to mythical figures and them

all to reality. Following her own indications to look for the necessary clues in order to

decipher her meanings in the greatest epics of the world, we strived to build a bridge

between her fictional universe and „worlds beyond worlds.‟ The world of the hero was

for her here and now, not a long time ago. She considered herself the heroine of her own

story and advised those interested in getting to know her to read her books because they

are the only reliable sources to advocate for their creator.

It wasn‟t just the objects around her that she wrote into her stories; she also delved into her

own unconscious, her inner world for her books. And she practiced, I think, this descent into

another world full of the archetypes, full of the wisdom of the unconscious. She was very at

home there. (Kisly, Lorraine – Editor of the Parabola in The Real Mary Poppins)

Thus we felt compelled to trace her interest in psychoanalysis and understand

the way she made use of it in giving life to her characters. Although she was not

acquainted with C.G. Jung‟s hypotheses at the time she began writing about the

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inhabitants of Cherry Tree Lane, she was subjected to other influences which nourished

her mind and soul by taking her on the path of esoteric teachings and spiritual

illumination. W.B. Yeats, one of the two most important men in her life, had developed

his own psychological system which was compared with Jung‟s in the fourth chapter of

the present thesis founding our suppositions on some works, like Gary B. Wack‟s Yeats

and Jung: Mapping the Unconscious, which have already emphasized the striking

similarities between the two structures of the psyche taken into discussion.

Further on, we took a psychoanalytical angle on the works discriminating

between the three main domains which give rise to the characters‟ adventures:

daydreaming, fairy tales and myths. P.L. Travers disagreed with those who sought to

interpret her books in terms of the Freudian theory which maintains that literary works

stem from the writers‟ own unresolved issues with their parents. Her articles clearly

show that she favoured Jungian psychoanalysis and James Hillman‟s views which

concurred with her own. She also mentioned Nietzsche‟s contribution to her syncretic

system of ideas which resulted after a long period of brooding upon all these approaches

to the human psyche. Thus, we intended to expose those aspects of her stories which are

related to the psychoanalytical models proposed and in order to do so we have taken

most of the tales separately because each of them puts forward a different hero in such a

way that, eventually, almost all the characters of the central narrative framework

become the protagonists of at least one embedded story in turn. Bruno Bettelheim‟s The

Uses of Enchantment. The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales and Sheldon

Cashdan‟s The Witch Must Die are the two main sources which provided us with

patterns for understanding the journey of the fairy tale hero who toils to achieve his

happy ending. The last section of this chapter, which focused on identifying mythical

allusions in some specific stories from the books extensively made use of Joseph

Campbell‟s and Mircea Eliade‟s studies in religion and mythology. To these are added

Edward F. Edinger‟s researches, Empedocle‟s papers, Plato‟s myths and the sacred texts

as each of them shaded light upon the revelatory moments experienced by the people of

the fictional reality.

The fifth chapter goes to the core of the subject which is to take a survey on the

psychological evolution of the male characters after their three encounters with Mary

Poppins who acted as a reconciling force by providing them with propitious occasions

for their rediscovery of the self. We looked into the previous studies which have

debated the case of Mary Poppins as an archetype of the Great Mother (Mary

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DeForest‟s “Mary Poppins and the Great Mother,” in Classical and Modern Literature

and Jenny Koralek‟s “Worlds Beyond Worlds” in A Lively Oracle. A Centennial

Celebration of P.L. Travers Creator of Mary Poppins) and into those which have

argued in favour of her being a Trickster figure (Georgia Grilli‟s Myth, Symbol and

Meaning in Mary Poppins. The Governess as Provocateur and Massimo Introvigne‟s

“Mary Poppins Goes to Hell. Pamela Travers, Gurdjieff, and the Rhetoric of

Fundamentalism”), but mostly in P.L. Travers‟s own articles which tackle the subject of

duality of the human beings and implicitly of the immortals. It was essential to grasp

first of all the true nature of the mediator and its fallibility because it was P.L. Travers‟s

belief that it is precisely the imperfections which summon up the perfections. However,

her story was obliquely revealed, step by step, through the lens of the beneficial effects

she has over the life of the other characters. It is the halves in their initial state and their

bringing together which mainly interested us, the fluctuation of inter-relationships and

their final ascension to the peak of tolerance where they rest integrated in the primordial

whole.

The Jungian analysts Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, in their work entitled

King. Warrior. Magician. Lover. Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature

Masculine, have put forward the idea that there are four masculine archetypes

associated with boys which might develop into corresponding mature archetypes if the

child is prevented from migrating between their shadow forms. In order to understand

the way in which Mary Poppins succeeds in reuniting the halves we departed from the

individual broken boys and men who are subjected to a long and sinuous process of

therapy consisting of being re-storied properly and danced on the rhythms of the soul.

Therefore, we went to seek for what is missing and relate it to infantile stages to which

men must return to so they could solve their inner conflicts before maturing and

assuming their roles within society.

The veil of illusion and deceit prevents P.L. Travers‟s characters from

accessing their inner eye and perceiving the greatness which lies within them.

Therefore, Mary Poppins is assigned the role of a re-storier summoned to remind people

what has been long-forgotten: that in order to acquire true meaning one must first allow

himself to be vulnerable and come with his unknowing to stand under the ever-flowing

pitcher of ancient wisdom. This nanny rocks the cradle in which the soul of humanity

rests in oblivion. She challenges the boundaries of a world populated by sleep-walkers

unable to attain their full potential by subverting the normal human order and opening

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doors beyond doors so that people could take a peak over what Nicolaus Cusanus called

“the Wall of Paradise.” (The Vision of God, London, 1646)

Both children and adults are required to stand on their heads, spin around, float

weightlessly on the ceiling or over the Park, and go to worlds below or above the

ordinary, so they could perpetually change their perspective on reality. There are times

when the characters are taken to other worlds where their re-experience the primordial

perfect bliss of the whole creation, the initial sacredness which precludes the actual

fallen state of humanity, so they can remember that the seed of divinity is common to all

beings. At other times, Heaven simply falls upon the inhabitants of Cherry Tree Lane as

the beings from above descend to celebrate a ritual pause which temporarily enables

humans to break up with reason so they could be open for perceiving the unperceivable.

Movement, sound and dance are the additional instruments Pamela makes use

of in order to continually destroy profane worlds and recreate them anew so they could

stand as a symbol of divine perfection. The cosmic dancer, Shiva, dances on the burning

ground in his frenzy to cleanse his devotee‟s soul of its sins. People dance away their

pain to the other end of the realm and thus their souls are mended. Ritualistic ecstatic

dances are performed by humanity to honour its makers and the representatives of the

both worlds take each other by the hand to form the Grand Chain of Beings. Mortals

and immortals spindle together like humming tops on the universal music of the spheres

that stems from the all-encompassing godly energy which is love.

In the world of the hero imagined by P.L. Travers, the duality of the human

beings is recognized and accepted as such. She emphasizes the need for a villain to push

forward the action of the story and believes that the carriers of the opposing forces are

two sides of the same coin. They could switch places at any time if required to do so.

Both the Good and the Wicked Godmother have unlimited powers to bless and curse at

will but it is the action of the story which demands that one of them should bear the

burden of ensuring the other one‟s glory. P.L. Travers did not pity her villains; she

loved them because she understood their love for the other half. It is the dark through

which light came forth; one destined to be loved, the other dreaded. Nevertheless, for

Travers one cannot exist without the other. „Goodly‟ and „Badly‟ should be loved

equally for the sake of taking the whole stick.

Mary Poppins plays the part of the harmonizing force which is needed to

restore order in a chaotic world where one dominates the other. She embodies Tao - that

middle way between the opposites - which has the ability of reuniting the contraries

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within its own self. Her main objective is to point to the right way. She and her high

relatives mend the items broken by the members of the Banks family, a symbolical

gesture for the healing of their souls. Husband and wife, man and woman, the masculine

and the feminine principles, yin and yang are danced on their path towards

reconciliation for the purpose of living their endless story.

A.E. Russell, P.L. Travers‟s friend and mentor, was the first one to notice the

archetype of the goddess Kali reflected in Mary Poppins. He was impressed with her

Ecstatic Virgin-like traits which allow her to handle transpersonal energies without

being in danger of identifying with them. In her Warrior aspect, Kali gets carried away

in destruction and becomes blood-thirsty. Similarly, Mary Poppins cannot contain her

wrath when confronted with evil women who seek to destroy or dominate the masculine

principle. Some of her opponents are simply sent away into seclusion where they can

think things over and make amends on their behaviour, while others are immediately

destroyed never to contaminate the community with their wickedness again. Miss

Andrew, Mary Poppins‟s most acerbic enemy, is forced into dancing until her soul is

purged of sins so she could finally be accepted and integrated amongst the people from

Cherry Tree Lane.

During our analysis concerning the mythical journeys the nanny undertakes

while being assisted by the Banks children we have noticed a pattern of these night-time

adventures which expose them to all kinds of embodiments for God. These encounters

stem from the innate curiosity of the children who wish to know what happens in other

worlds. The result of their discovery is always the same: the unity of all beings as they

are kindred in as much as they are the offspring of the same creator whose archetype

dwells in the underlying sheet of consciousness. The myth is continually reiterated

because otherwise humans lose contact with the divine and contend themselves with

living in the profane desacralized world. It is because Jane and Michael are Precocious

children that Mary Poppins finds the fertile soil where she can safely deposit the seeds

of understanding knowing that they will make a good harvest when the time comes. She

pours her wisdom upon them growing them into strong fruitful trees that will be able to

provide others with shelter when she will no longer be around.

P.L. Travers also employs Jesus-like figures in her works. Humble heroes, like

Luti or Stanley Livingstone-Fan, come to bear the cross of the suffering for those who

are unable to redeem otherwise. They bring blessings and peace to a fictional universe

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where characters are at odds with each other. These Divine Children willingly accept

the cup of vinegar for the sake of humanity which needs to be saved from damnation.

Some have put forward the idea that the Mary Poppins series might be

interpreted as a modern myth. But P.L. Travers did not believe in myth makers. Her

comments upon similar suppositions concerning the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, the

interviews with Laurens van der Post and other articles she wrote speak of her strong

and obstinate views which state there is only one Creator, while writers can be nothing

more than „subcreators.‟ Travers maintained that she, like many others before and after

her, has borrowed or summoned ideas from the ever-stirring Celtic „Cauldron‟ of

ancient wisdom or from its Australian equivalent, the „Dreaming.‟ All she had to do was

to connect these pieces of the puzzle according to her own artistic drive so she could

express out loud what was ticking inside her heart. She has never assumed the merits for

inventing Mary Poppins, rather preferring to see the situation in reversal. Almost all of

her books end with a Latin expression of devotion to God: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam

(For the Greater Glory of God) and Gloria in Excelsis Deo (Glory to God in the

highest).

In 2013 Disney issued a film, Saving Mr. Banks, whose plot accounts for his

persistence in obtaining the rights for the Mary Poppins adaptation from an obstinate

P.L. Travers who would not allow him the privilege of transforming her into a “silly

cartoon.” The last chapter of the thesis was supposed to argue against the false image

weaved around an allegedly wounded woman who would not share her characters with

Disney because they impersonate her father, mother and aunt who bitterly disappointed

her during her childhood in Australia. The parallel drawn between the fictional Mary

Poppins and its screen version focuses on the dissimilarities between the two mainly

because there is nothing else to account for. Although Saving Mr. Banks, hoped to

present the sinuous and discomfiting working relationship between the writer and the

Animated Man, by favouring the paternalistic figure of the latter, all it managed to

accomplish was to reinforce our belief that Pamela had indeed every reason to withhold

the rights for the film from Walt. He did not want to show her nanny to the world, but

only to take her name (that, for Pamela, meant her core) and make it his. All that was

mystic and sacred was neglected and, like many others before him, he focused on Mary

Poppins‟s collateral function to serve as an efficient nanny for the Banks children.

The present doctoral thesis sought to deconstruct a shallow perspective upon a

work of inestimable value capable of addressing our child within through its generous

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offer of nursery rhymes, fairy tales and myths. After the publication of her books, P.L.

Travers was often badgered with questions which avidly required her to reveal the one

true source responsible for the invention of a new myth. Pamela had never pretended to

have done such a thing as to invent her beloved Mary Poppins and always dismissed

these attempts at getting a straight answer from her as annoying and invasive. Since her

talks in public evaded any direct pointing towards a path of understanding, people gave

way to all kinds of assumptions. Pamela would listen to them all, rarely caring to

comment on any, but still encouraging readers to look for their own meaning inside her

books because a true symbol always has this multisidedness which means that it appeals

to each of us differently. She maintained that there are no „right‟ or „wrong‟ answers

when it comes to interpreting her books. P.L. Travers wanted her readers to feel the

endless love lurking in the general atmosphere of the books and to openly take in her

„love-gift‟ for humanity.

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SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

P.L. Travers’s Works

1. TRAVERS, P.L. About the Sleeping Beauty, London: Collins, 1975

2. ______________ Friend Monkey, London: Collins, 1972

3. ______________ I go by Sea, I go by Land, New York and London: Harper &

Brothers, 1941

4. _____________ Mary Poppins. The Complete Collection, London:

HarperCollins Children´s Books, 2013

5. ______________ Mary Poppins from A to Z, New York: Harcourt, Brace &

World, Inc., 1962

6. ______________ The Fox at the Manger, New York: W.W. Norton &

Company, 1962

7. ______________ What the Bee Knows. Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story,

New York: Codhill Press, 2010

Studies on P.L. Travers and her Works

1. BERGSTEN, Staffan. Mary Poppins and Myth. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell

International, 1978

2. DeFOREST, Mary. “Mary Poppins and the Great Mother,” in Classical and

Modern Literature, Vol. 11, 1991

3. DEMERS, Patricia. P. L. Travers, James Gellert (ed.), Boston: Twayne

Publishers, 1991

4. GRILLI, Georgia. Myth, Symbol and Meaning in Mary Poppins. The Governess

as Provocateur, New York: Routledge, 2007

5. INTROVIGNE, Massimo. “Mary Poppins Goes to Hell. Pamela Travers,

Gurdjieff, and the Rhetoric of Fundamentalism,” The International Humanities

Conference, 1996 www.cesnur.org/testi/marypoppins.htm#Anchor-5677

6. KUNZ, Julia. Intertextuality and Psychology in P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins

Books, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang GmbH, 2014

7. LAWSON, Valerie. Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers, New

York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1999

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Studies on fairy tales and mythology

1. BETTELHEIM, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. The Meaning and

Importance of Fairy Tales, New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random

House, Inc., 1975

2. CAMPBELL, Joseph. El Poder del Mito, Trad. César Aira, Barcelona: Emecé

Editores, 1991

3. _________________ The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Princeton and Oxford:

Princeton University Press, 2004

4. CASHDAN, Sheldon. The Witch Must Die. The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales,

New York: Basic Books, A Member of Perseus Books Group, 1999

5. COOMARASWAMY, Ananda K. The Dance of Shiva: Fourteen Indian Essays,

Revised Ed., New York: The Noonday Press, 1957

6. FRANZ, Marie-Luise von. Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales Studies in

Jungian Psychology By Jungian Analysts, Toronto: Inner City Books, 1997

Studies in psychology

1. EDINGER, Edward F. The Christian Archetype: A Jungian Commentary on the

Life of Christ. Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts, Toronto:

Inner City Books, 1987

2. HILLMAN, James. The Soul’s Code. In Search of Character and Calling,

Toronto, New York, London, Sydney, Auckland: Bantam Books, 1996

3. JUNG, Carl Gustav. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part II, Aion.

Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Ed. Sir Herbert Read et al.,

Transl. R.F.C. Hull, Princeton: Bollingen Series XX, 1959

4. ___________ Four Archetypes: Mother. Rebirth. Spirit. Trickster, Trans. R.F.C.

Hull, Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1970

5. WACK, Gary B. Yeats and Jung: Mapping the Unconscious, Centenary College,

2012

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Studies on Religion

1. ELIADE, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion,

Translated from French by Willard R. Trask, New York: Harvest Book, s.a.

2. ____________ Historia de las creencias y las ideas religiosas. De la Edad de

Piedra a los Misterios de Eleusis, Vol I, Barcelona: Paidós, 1999

3. ____________ Shamanism. Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Princeton

University Press, 1972