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