Caitlin Banks

Your kind and thoughtful and wise responses continue to overwhelm me.  Thank you very much.  It's not looking like I'll be responding personally before we leave for Minnesota (I'll blog, but I won't answer e-mail: how rude is that?) but I will respond.  Y'all are fantastic.

Let's take a break from the hard and dirty job of living my life, though, and take a blogger's holiday.  Heck, let's do the blog equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.  Let's tear apart a Caitlin Flanagan article about parenting.

In the 19 Dec 2005 issue of The New Yorker, Flanagan, once again, turns her attention to nannies.  She turns her attention to P.L. Travers, creator (of course) of Mary Poppins.  Now, it so happens that I know Mary Poppins well -- all right, the movie "Mary Poppins," not the book.  We watched "Mary Poppins" at least seven times in two weeks in July, and revisited her twice while on the road in November.  I know "Mary Poppins" so well that I toyed, once or ten times, with writing a short little blog entry in praise of the movie and its charms.

Specifically, I love the way that the movie doesn't care one teeny tiny bit about Mrs. Banks' mothering.  Mrs. Banks goes off to wreak havoc as a suffragette, she comes home to a household in disarray, she makes feeble attempts to set things right, and then off she goes again.  It's completely refreshing, and entirely odd.

Mary Poppins couldn't care less about Mrs. Banks' indifferent household management or her constant absences.  Neither the movie nor the nanny tries to reform Mrs. Banks in the slightest.  Mrs. Banks dances into the movie and she dances out of it, singing about feminist activism the entire time.  Not that her songs do much for the feminist cause: Mrs. Banks is a pretty silly person.  But the movie doesn't care.  Because Mrs. Banks is not the problem.

Mr. Banks is the problem.  It is Mr. Banks that Mary Poppins comes to set right.  Mr. Banks neglects his family by staying away at work all day.  Mr. Banks neglects his children by ignoring their emotional needs.  Mr. Banks needs reforming, because his concern for British efficiency and regulation has turned him into a world-class prig.

Mary Poppins doesn't send the children off to rallies with their mother -- indeed, she never says word one about Mrs. Banks in the first place.  The two women barely interact.  No, Mary Poppins is dead set on sending the children to work with their father.  The entire dramatic climax of the movie involves Mary Poppins' plot to divert Mr. Banks with the woman feeding the birds on the steps of St. Paul's.  She apparently orchestrates his dismissal from his bank job so he can learn the value of time spent with his family.

Mr. Banks is the problem, and the point.  In the world of "Mary Poppins," it's the fathers, not the mothers, who need reforming.  How remarkable.

It made perfect historical sense, by the way.  In 1964, people had well-established critiques of American suburban life.  High on the list was the absent, regimented corporate father figure, the IBM man who left the distant suburban enclave at a ridiculously early hour and endured an endless commute before coming home at dinner-time.  We remember the feminist critique of women's roles in the suburbs, but we've forgotten the men in grey flannel suits.  Rather ironic, when you can read in the New York Times just this week about families in the exurbs:

Chris Gray, 34, moved to Frisco with her husband eight years ago, eager for a bigger house in an affordable, family-oriented community. Ms. Gray quit her job as a financial consultant for Electronic Data Systems in Plano, the previous exurban boomtown just to Frisco's south, and decided to become a stay-at-home mother for her two daughters. But her husband, who works near downtown Dallas, has paid the price.

"I can't count on him being home before 7 o'clock," she said. "Even if he leaves the office at 5:30, he's not here until 7. This morning, he left at 5:30 and it took him 35 minutes. But if it's raining outside, he can count on a two-hour drive."

Ms. Gray has been able to volunteer for her neighborhood association and local PTA, and to become a cheerleading coach at school. But her husband's uncertain schedule keeps him from volunteering in community activities.

But that's neither here nor there.  Or rather: I think I've said enough this week about the ways that stay-at-home mothers and working fathers can damage their marriages and mar their families without intending to.  The Gray family set-up scares the heck out of me.

But for today, let's stick with Caitlin Flanagan, who used a little bit of information about the script-writing process for the "Mary Poppins" movie to very bad interpretive advantage.  Here's what Flanagan writes:

[Mary Poppins'] main objective is to transform Mr. Banks from a prig to a loving mid-century American-style dad, with a hankering for kiddie fun and family time. But she’s got half an eye on the missus. By the movie’s end, Mrs. Banks has abandoned the whole crazy suffrage scheme, and proves it by using her “Votes for Women” sash as a tail for the children’s kite. As Mary Poppins slips away, Mrs. Banks goes to the park with her family, embracing her proper role in the household. The story’s happy ending depends on a signal fact: the Banks children will no longer be brought up by servants. Henceforth, their own mother—corralled homeward through the beneficent intercessions of Mary Poppins—will do the job herself.

Supposedly the movie's writers imagined Mary Poppins as a character who would fix two broken parents.  Unfortunately for Flanagan, we don't just have the writers' intentions to consult: we have the movie itself.  And the movie doesn't provide much support for the anti-mother crusade Flanagan wants to see.

When does the movie assert even once that Mrs. Banks has abandoned suffragism?  Where does it indicate that the children will now "be brought up" by their mother?  Almost the last spoken words of the movie are those of the parrot on Mary Poppins' umbrella: he complains that the children would rather spend time with their father than their nanny.  (Mary Poppins reminds the parrot that that's as it should be.) Mrs. Banks doesn't get mentioned at all -- and the banner on the kite tail seems like a poor signal of the writers' intentions.  I doubt one child in a thousand even notices it, and not one mother in a thousand, either.

Okay, the end of the movie doesn't quite work: Mr. Banks has his job back, the children aren't going to be able to clean their rooms any better (everything was done with magic while Mary Poppins was there), and the family once again has no nanny.  Mr. Banks will, presumably, spend more time with his family, but it takes an enormous leap to assume that Mrs. Banks will now take over the day-to-day management of the children.  There's simply nothing in the plot to suggest such a thing.

It's obvious that Flanagan feels enormously insecure about her mothering choices.  It's equally obvious that I'm in no position to criticize her for that.  But how in the world does she get this stuff published?

Flanagan wants to imagine that Mrs. Banks was attacked in that movie because Flanagan thinks she's under attack herself.  I can see her interviewing the movies' writers, or reading their accounts of the process, and grinning with mad glee: now she can take this movie that's manifestly about bad fathers and force it, lock-step, into her tired template about bad mothers.

From what I've gathered from the too-many stories Flanagan has had published, Flanagan hired a full-time nanny while still at home full-time, and then agonized over (among many other things) whether she was still "the mother" if she passed bath duty off to the nanny.  Her defensiveness simply flies off the pages of everything she's ever written.  In this latest New Yorker piece, she writes:

It is Mary Poppins who earns the deepest love a child has to offer: that which is bound in his trusting dependence on the person who provides his physical care. “Mary Poppins,” Michael cries in anguish the first night she has come to care for them. “You’ll never leave us, will you?” It’s the great question of childhood, the question upon which all the Mary Poppins books turn: is the person on whom a child relies for the foundation of his existence—food and warmth and love at its most elemental—about to disappear?

Uff da.  Flanagan really believes that children love best the person they spend the most time with, the person who "provides his physical care"?  Clearly, it's Flanagan's deepest personal fear, and who am I to fault her.  The fact that there's no evidence to support such a claim (the bonds a child forms with her childcare provider have never been seen by pediatricians or researchers to usurp the bonds she forms, and wants to form, with her parents) seems rather beside the point.  You simply cannot use "Mary Poppins" to spread this fear that children love best the person who gives them their baths, because there's nothing in the movie to support such a wild idea.

The entire message of Mary Poppins, after all, is that that children always love best, and want most, their parents.  Mary Poppins cleaned the nursery with magic, had a talking mirror, sang lullabies like a lark, could make chalk pictures come to life and cause laughing people to dance on the ceiling: but the Banks children still loved their absent, indifferent father best.

How did Flanigan manage to miss that little detail?

George Banks didn't have to become a stay-at-home dad to solve his familial problem: he just had to start paying attention to his kids' lives, and to realize that time spent with them was the best time of all.  The ultimate message of "Mary Poppins" the movie was that nothing has to change about people's day-to-day lives except their attitudes.  After all, George Banks may have lost his job to teach him a lesson, but then he got it back again.  The message might be simplistic, it might be absurd, but it's the message of the movie we've got.

What movie Caitlin Flanigan sees when she pops "Mary Poppins" in her DVD player, I have no idea.

Comments

[momzom]

YOU RULE!! This blog entry was the best Hanukkah present ever.

[Leggy]

You are amazing- that was a really great post. I'm in awe that in the span of the 3 days you can post two intense, heart-felt posts about your family, your marriage, and where you are going with your life, and still have the energy to write about Mary Poppins and parental roles in the family.

[liz]

What Leggy said.

[Jackie]

wow-- the tension between your viewing and Flanagan's (tension rhetorically, not that you two are in a fist-fight) really makes me want to watch the movie again. Would you mind if I copied your blog entry out for my students? I'd love to have them watch the movie next semester and read both analyses and then come to their own conclusions.

[Linda]

Um, I just like the music. A and I can burst into "Sister Suffragette!" at the drop of a hat. We even do the different parts.

And yeah, I've always noticed that the kite tail is Mrs. Banks' sash. I just assumed that Mrs. Banks was still a suffragette, but also realized her family was important, too. I'm so simple.

[Lisa C.]

Quick note to Ms. Flanagan RE: Mary Poppins. It is a movie. That is all.

As to the couple featured in the NYTimes, they are stupid. I live in this area and can guarantee you that anyone who lives in Frisco (which is like 50 miles from downtown Dallas and there is one (1) major highway in and out of there) is not going to get home in time for dinner, I don't care where you're driving from. Move closer to Dallas, you stupid twats.

[Sarah]

What a wonderful post. Thank you. I love Mary Poppins and read the books many year ago. The magic is bigger in the books and Mary Poppins is a bit meaner. She also comes back to nanny for them in each successive book (if I remember correctly). I won't bother with Flanagan, but I may have the kids watch the movie tomorrow.

[Susan]

I'm so happy we downloaded Mary Poppins to listen to in the car as we head back east. I'll be thinking about your post--and you. I hope the holidays are restorative in some way.

[sz]

Granted, maybe Caitlin Flanagan reads too much into the Mrs. Banks character and maybe her interpretation of the movie's moral is a bit off. But I didn't see that as the main focus of the article.

The article was about P.L. Travers and her lifelong battle of wills against Disney for what she (Travers) perceived as the hijacking of her story. I had never heard of Caitlin Flanagan when I read the article, and I honestly didn't even remember what she said in the piece about mothers vs. nannies. What stuck with me was the image of P.L. Travers in Hollywood for the Mary Poppins premiere, crying while everyone else applauded, because her book had been "Disneyfied" to an extent that totally pissed her off.

Not being a mother yet, I didn't pick up on the subtext, perhaps. What I read, primarily, was a piece about how novelists get chewed up and spit out by Hollywood. And I was fascinated to learn that the inventor of the uber-nanny (Travers) was a single bisexual adoptive mom... in the 1950's. I wish she had been able to have a "blogosphere" of support in her day.

[mamacate]

Jody: BRAVO! Exactly. Mary Poppins is a big hit in our house too. SZ's point about the book makes me really want to re-read it; I read the book many times as a child but never saw the movie until adulthood.

Anyway, what you say about caregivers and parents is entirely consistent with my experience. And I just want to say BRAVO for the support from a SAHM (who has made plenty of sacrifices to do so) of working moms who use child care. Bravo. Bravo.

And merry, merry.

[sandra]

Which Atlantic was that article in, if I may ask?

[sz]

Sandra, it was actually in last week's New Yorker.