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shewhomustYou couldn't write Bad Tuesday nowadays: the four racial stereotypes who represent the four compass points to which Mary Poppins takes her young charges in a rapid world tour would no longer be tolerated. Later editions of the book substitute four animals: a polar bear, a macaw*, a panda and a dolphin, in what feels like a more leisurely and limply described tour - though it does require Mary to utter the line "And thank you for the fish," which is some compensation.
Racial stereotypes they may be, and broad caricatures too - as are so many of Travers's characters - but the individuals who represent the four compass points in the original text are not depicted unsympathetically. Indeed, since they are friends of Mary Poppins, they are entitled to respect. The elderly Mandarin who represents China elicits a speech from Mary Poppins as elaborately phrased as his own; but is there a touch of humour in this, a hint that Travers knows her sketches of foreign lands are so simplistic as to be absurd? (Chief Sun-at-Noonday invites the travellers into his wigwam with the words: "We are just frying a reindeer for supper.") The terminology is of its time: 'Eskimo' and 'Red Indian', certainly, though I was surprised to see the southward couple referred to as 'Negro' (and later, 'the Negro Lady'), this being the form preferred among my parents' left-wing friends in the 1950s.
Why are these two, alone of the group, given such a distinctive dialect to speak? All the others express themselves in unmarked English of different forms: that is, the Eskimo woman has a conventionally female, motherly tone, using emphasis and endearments, the Mandarin deploys elaborate vocabulary and syntax, but only the Negroes require variant spellings to convey their pronunciation. Their speech reads like a cliché of the American South; we aren't told where we are, but there are golden sands, a grove of palm trees, and watermelon. It occurs to me that if I wanted a location to represent the South, I might choose that Terra Australis from which P.L. Travers herself came, but she seems to have thought otherwise.
As a child, I was not fond of this chapter, not for these reasons, which made little if any impression on me, but because the plot was of a kind which always made me anxious: it built tension slowly towards a disaster which was obviously going to happen. Re-reading it now, I'm surprised at the brevity of the scene in which Michael seizes the compass and revisits, alone, these hospitable beings who are now grown monstrous and menacing - barely a page from picking up the compass to rescue by Mary Poppins, and those four terrifying figures appear and disappear in a single paragraph.
A much larger part of the chapter is concerned with Michael's bad temper, and the ways in which it manifests itself through the day. His behaviour is unremittingly and pointlessly horrible; in real life a child of his age would be unlikely to keep it up for so long. But it is described with sympathy, almost as something separate from Michael himself, "Michael knew now what was happening to him. He knew he was going to be naughty." There is a "heavy burning thing" inside him, and when it melts away he is back to his usual self.
In the equivalent chapter in Mary Poppins Comes Back, it is Jane who has a Bad Wednesday, and her badness is permitted an external stimulus. She must get up first, she must have porridge when the Puffed Rice runs out, because she is the eldest, and her crossness begins as a reaction to this**. Like Michael's badness, her temper is seen as something external to herself: when it has passed, she reflects that "It couldn't have been I who was cross... It must have been somebody else."
These two chapters are exceptional in showing Jane and Michael alone, each in turn without the other. Otherwise they are inseparable, sometimes accompanied by the twins, sometimes just the two elder children. Jane's enjoyment of her early waking solitude, her chance to think quietly to herself, is a sign that trouble is brewing, and her desire to paint, without her siblings' participation, what she chooses to paint, is a sign that it has arrived. Elsewhere, Jane reads, but she reads to Michael. Good children share; bad children are solitary. This is implicit, but when Travers returns to the 'bad day' motif in Mary Poppins in the Park, Michael's 'Lucky Thursday' gives him everything he wishes for, until he realises that he has been wishing for all the wrong things: "in spite of his luck, the day had been lonely." It is characteristic of the later book to spell out what has been hinted at in the earlier ones, and it is not always for the better.
Finally, in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, The Hounds of God is the chapter in which Bod is angry and therefore sits down by the grave "which looked the way he felt", places himself in danger and has to be rescued by Miss Lupescu, struggling at first because he does not recognise her. There is an unmissable parallel with the Bad Days of the Mary Poppins books, but it is perhaps not as direct as I had remembered it. On the other hand, Miss Lupescu herself, plain, formal, inclined to sniff, definitely reminds me of someone.
*The macaw offers the visitors some bananas, but Mary declines, to the children's disappointment - "they would dearly have liked some tropical fruit" - which makes me wonder when this revised text was produced. My film tie-in edition still has the original version, but would any English child of the 1960s, however fond of bananas, have thought of them as 'tropical fruit'?
**Possibly an overreaction, but as an eldest I have much sympathy for her.
Racial stereotypes they may be, and broad caricatures too - as are so many of Travers's characters - but the individuals who represent the four compass points in the original text are not depicted unsympathetically. Indeed, since they are friends of Mary Poppins, they are entitled to respect. The elderly Mandarin who represents China elicits a speech from Mary Poppins as elaborately phrased as his own; but is there a touch of humour in this, a hint that Travers knows her sketches of foreign lands are so simplistic as to be absurd? (Chief Sun-at-Noonday invites the travellers into his wigwam with the words: "We are just frying a reindeer for supper.") The terminology is of its time: 'Eskimo' and 'Red Indian', certainly, though I was surprised to see the southward couple referred to as 'Negro' (and later, 'the Negro Lady'), this being the form preferred among my parents' left-wing friends in the 1950s.
Why are these two, alone of the group, given such a distinctive dialect to speak? All the others express themselves in unmarked English of different forms: that is, the Eskimo woman has a conventionally female, motherly tone, using emphasis and endearments, the Mandarin deploys elaborate vocabulary and syntax, but only the Negroes require variant spellings to convey their pronunciation. Their speech reads like a cliché of the American South; we aren't told where we are, but there are golden sands, a grove of palm trees, and watermelon. It occurs to me that if I wanted a location to represent the South, I might choose that Terra Australis from which P.L. Travers herself came, but she seems to have thought otherwise.
As a child, I was not fond of this chapter, not for these reasons, which made little if any impression on me, but because the plot was of a kind which always made me anxious: it built tension slowly towards a disaster which was obviously going to happen. Re-reading it now, I'm surprised at the brevity of the scene in which Michael seizes the compass and revisits, alone, these hospitable beings who are now grown monstrous and menacing - barely a page from picking up the compass to rescue by Mary Poppins, and those four terrifying figures appear and disappear in a single paragraph.
A much larger part of the chapter is concerned with Michael's bad temper, and the ways in which it manifests itself through the day. His behaviour is unremittingly and pointlessly horrible; in real life a child of his age would be unlikely to keep it up for so long. But it is described with sympathy, almost as something separate from Michael himself, "Michael knew now what was happening to him. He knew he was going to be naughty." There is a "heavy burning thing" inside him, and when it melts away he is back to his usual self.
In the equivalent chapter in Mary Poppins Comes Back, it is Jane who has a Bad Wednesday, and her badness is permitted an external stimulus. She must get up first, she must have porridge when the Puffed Rice runs out, because she is the eldest, and her crossness begins as a reaction to this**. Like Michael's badness, her temper is seen as something external to herself: when it has passed, she reflects that "It couldn't have been I who was cross... It must have been somebody else."
These two chapters are exceptional in showing Jane and Michael alone, each in turn without the other. Otherwise they are inseparable, sometimes accompanied by the twins, sometimes just the two elder children. Jane's enjoyment of her early waking solitude, her chance to think quietly to herself, is a sign that trouble is brewing, and her desire to paint, without her siblings' participation, what she chooses to paint, is a sign that it has arrived. Elsewhere, Jane reads, but she reads to Michael. Good children share; bad children are solitary. This is implicit, but when Travers returns to the 'bad day' motif in Mary Poppins in the Park, Michael's 'Lucky Thursday' gives him everything he wishes for, until he realises that he has been wishing for all the wrong things: "in spite of his luck, the day had been lonely." It is characteristic of the later book to spell out what has been hinted at in the earlier ones, and it is not always for the better.
Finally, in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, The Hounds of God is the chapter in which Bod is angry and therefore sits down by the grave "which looked the way he felt", places himself in danger and has to be rescued by Miss Lupescu, struggling at first because he does not recognise her. There is an unmissable parallel with the Bad Days of the Mary Poppins books, but it is perhaps not as direct as I had remembered it. On the other hand, Miss Lupescu herself, plain, formal, inclined to sniff, definitely reminds me of someone.
*The macaw offers the visitors some bananas, but Mary declines, to the children's disappointment - "they would dearly have liked some tropical fruit" - which makes me wonder when this revised text was produced. My film tie-in edition still has the original version, but would any English child of the 1960s, however fond of bananas, have thought of them as 'tropical fruit'?
**Possibly an overreaction, but as an eldest I have much sympathy for her.
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Date: 2014-01-14 11:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-15 10:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-15 08:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-15 10:58 am (UTC)You're right, though, to say that the best bananas are not the utilitarian fruit I think of, and may reasonably be seen as tropical exotica!
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Date: 2014-01-15 08:54 am (UTC)didn't think of them as particularly exotic. We used to eat them sliced, in a bowl with jam and cream.
Oh, and they had tiny labels on them which said Fyfes. Or was it Ffyfes? I forget.
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Date: 2014-01-15 10:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-15 12:33 pm (UTC)