From Page to Screen / Vom Buch zum Film. Группа авторов
has argued that audiences do not just passively receive, but rather interact with, media products (Gledhill, 2006: 114) and that that interaction necessarily eludes the adoption of pre-established “fixed positions” (Gledhill, 2006: 118). It is true that viewers (even very young ones) bring into the act of watching their own set of references, beliefs, experiences and motivations that may support, thwart, counter or even cancel out filmmakers’ intentions, and that films (even blockbusters) may open up gaps for meaning negotiation. However, in the specific case of young audiences, a combination of semiotic and mimetic approaches must be adopted as children often fail “to acknowledge fictionality as a literary convention, including the fictional status of characters” (Nikolajeva, 2004: 172). This effect might even be increased by the materiality that the screen affords these characters.
In this scenario, intermedial analysis offers the possibility of observing mechanisms to which audiences do not generally have access: these are conscious mechanisms that, through operations of selection, reduction, deletion, addition, adaptation, rewriting and emphasis, are precisely intended to fix meaning. In this way, intermedial analysis reveals the worldviews and intentions behind filmmakers’, screenwriters’ and producers’ decisions when adapting a text. So, even if the experience of the film itself opens up new possibilities for viewers, it certainly, and deliberately, closes others offered in the book. This reduces considerably the possibilities for feminist meaning negotiation.
3 Mary Poppins
Written for the screen by Bill Walsh and Don Da Gradi and directed by Robert Stevenson, Mary Poppins (Disney, Stevenson, 1964) was the most expensive film to that date and remains nowadays one of the most profitable films of the 1960s1. The story behind Walt Disney’s long courting of author P. L. Travers for the rights to adapt her book series is already well known and has been recounted in both Valerie Lawson’s biography of Travers (2013) and Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks (Owen, Collie, Steuer, Hancock, 2013). In spite of the success of the film, Travers was deeply unsatisfied with the end result (Lawson, 2013: 276). To begin with, she disliked the way her beloved nanny had been dulcified and made much kinder and merrier, less conceited and arrogant, than the character in the book. Behind this process of dulcification, one can see the male gaze (Mulvey, 1999) at work, reproducing an unattainable ideal of female perfection. Moreover, in the film, Mary Poppins’s lack of bonds and close relationships with other women prevents her from becoming a catalyst for sorority. As it was said of another all-too-perfect female hero, Catwoman, Mary Poppins “may forge a space for herself within the discourse of the film, but she denies that space to other women” (Walton, 1997: 101). Mary Poppins is, then, the perfect patriarchal construction.
Regarding secondary characters, a key aspect of this analysis is precisely that secondary female characters, which abound in the 1934 book, are conspicuously absent from the film2. While it is true that, from a technical point of view, it would be challenging to fit all the adventures that take place in the book into one single feature film, it seems relevant that the film boasts an overbearing presence of male characters3. Such is the case of the fox-hunting scene and the horse race (freely expanded from the chapter “The Day Out”), the tea party at Uncle Albert’s (based on “Laughing Gas,” from which Miss Persimmon is aptly erased), the scenes at the bank (partially based on “The Bird Woman,” where the title character plays a much more fundamental role), and the chimney adventure (inspired by the chimney sweep book character), all of which are dominated by male characters.
As opposed to these, the book presents several chapters in which female characters are on a par with male ones (“Bad Tuesday” and “John and Barbara’s Story”) or even central to the stories (“Miss Lark’s Andrew,” “The Dancing Cow,” “Mrs Corry” and “Christmas Shopping”). When some of these characters do make it to the film, they are not even given speaking roles: Mrs Corry and her two daughters are only shown to be enchanted by Bert’s rhymes; the Bird Woman is only allowed her famous “Tuppence a bag” line; and Mrs Lark, whom Mary Poppins intends to visit but never does, is only present via her dog, which does make an appearance at several points throughout the film.
Downgrading and, in some cases, doing away altogether with these secondary female characters destroys the rather prominent female presence in the book and the feminine atmosphere that serves as the background to many of Mary Poppins’s adventures. Mr Banks’s words when stating that it is a good idea to take the children out of the “sugary, female thinking they get around here all day long” (Disney, Stevenson, 1964: 1:19:40) may serve as a meta-commentary on the very process underlying the production of the film.
What is more, two main features of these secondary female characters in the book are their creativeness and freedom, two qualities that are historically men’s prerogative (Proudfoot, Kay, Koval, 2015): the Red Cow leaves her comfortable life in search of the happiness that dancing grants her (Travers, 2018: 61); the Bird Woman has a very special connection with birds (Travers, 2018: 86); Mrs Corry, Fannie and Annie go out at night on magical errands (Travers, 2018: 102–103); and Maia is a free-spirited and generous girl who goes around wearing “practically no clothes” (Travers, 2018: 143). Also, these characters are diverse in their appearance and qualities, which counters the patriarchally constructed perfection of Mary Poppins. Their absence from the film deprives viewers of diverse models to identify with and prevents them from enjoying the sisterly relations between Mary Poppins and those other women: the cow was “a great friend of my Mother’s” (Travers, 2018: 51); Mary Poppins is good friends with Mrs Corry and talks to her “with most surprising courtesy” (Travers, 2018: 93), joins her and her daughters in their night-time errands (Travers, 2018: 102–103) and, when they say goodbye, “it seemed as if some secret had passed between them” (Travers, 2018: 98); Maia gets thoughtful Christmas presents for her six sisters (Travers, 2018: 146–147) and, when Jane shows her concern about Maia not getting any, Mary Poppins gives her her own brand new gloves (Travers, 2018: 149).
All these stories contribute to creating a poetics of the female quotidian or, as Travers herself put it, the “miracle” of everyday life (Lawson, 2013: 254), that is deliberately elided in the film, leaving both female characters and women spectators without a net of female references and role models. Something similar occurs, for example, in The Little Mermaid. In Hans Christian Andersen’s tale (1837), the mermaid’s grandmother and sisters hold strong bonds with the protagonist and are key to the story: the grandmother gives her wise advice, and the sisters, portrayed in a rather individualised way with their own peculiar tastes and quirks, use the birthday ritual to pass on knowledge of the human world from one another. This not only creates a sense of family routine and everydayness but also reinforces the complicity among the sisters. In Disney’s 1989 film (Musker, Ashman, Clements, Musker, 1989) though, the sisters’ appearance is made merely anecdotal in favour of Ariel’s friendship with Flounder (a male fish), and the grandmother is purged.
Very similarly, in Disney’s Mary Poppins, Jane holds no meaningful relationship with any other female character (except for Mary Poppins), but is clearly attached to both her brother and her father. In contrast, the book portrays a girl interested in other women’s lives and stories. The end of the “Mrs Corry” chapter is enlightening in this sense: while Michael is visibly upset by Mrs Corry, Fannie, Annie and Mary Poppins taking their paper stars to put them up in the sky (Travers, 2018: 102, 103), Jane finds the whole event quite edifying. In her appreciation that, in order to understand what had happened that night, she would need “somebody very much wiser than Michael” (Travers, 2018: 104), the implications are that that person ought to be a woman. In this very brief comment, the book gives readers a glimpse into an unknown tradition of women astronomers that can explain the origins of the universe to her. In this way, the book bypasses “the problems of the alignment of woman with nature when devoid of feminist agency” (Walton, 1997: 100) and avoids drawing “upon essentialist constructions of femininity – as they have been patriarchally defined” (Walter, 1997: 101). It also draws on the figure of the Triple Goddess (Gimbutas, 2001), which represents and connects the ages of woman in Neopaganism: daughter and mother, maiden and crone (Gimbutas, 2001: 42). In a 1965 interview, Travers herself stated: “we [women] have to become wise old crones, carrying the traditions we’ve learned” (Lawson, 2013: 283). All these insights into Jane’s connections