Mary Poppins and the dialogic imagination of Christianity

Abstract

This essay uses Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia and dialogism to analyse Mary Poppins as a cultural production that responds to several specific aesthetic crises, each arising from growing and particular cultural tensions within modernism: the passing of the classical Hollywood Studio system and its style, the closing of the post-war Eisenhower era and its strained social stability (and with it, the growing turbulence of the 1960s), and the ongoing struggles of institutional Christianity to adequately respond to the triumph of secular humanism. This analysis shows that located within the margins of the text are liberationist discourses of Christianity which offers an alternative aesthetic of Christianity based on a rejection of social hierarchies, capitalism and imperialism, and advocating instead an egalitarianism based on social transformation.

Keywords:

• Mikhail Bakhtin
• dialogism
• heteroglossia
• aesthetics

Notes

1. See, for example, the argument on p. 276 in Mikhail Bakhtin, The dialogic imagination (1982), in which Bakhtin argues, ‘The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile.’

2. In his discussion of the English comic novel in particular (The dialogic imagination, 301), Bakhtin does favour a concept of authorial intent, delineating how the author carefully aligns then distances their own voice from character's voice. The value of Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia, however, is that it brings back a concept of intent – which film studies, after years of auteur theory, have particular disdain for. Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia, however, makes intention a far more complex process than merely the conscious decision of the author.

3. And indeed, a more detailed analysis than I can provide here can clearly delineate that the film offers pointed criticism of gender roles, (keenly anticipating the Women's Rights movement that follows in a few short years), the marginalisation of children and the ethical deficiencies of modern empire and industrial capitalism.

4. Bakhtin's concept of dialogism is a complex concept that several literary essays do not exhaust. At its core, however, the term is meant to describe how language use – the spoken word – is always in relationship with a web of meanings and intentions for the same ‘word’ or concept. Here, I am emphasising that the particular word a speaker uses inscribes an agenda – a way of structuring the world through meaning. By pointing to the different logics within meaning, we point to the different agendas.

5. See, for example, Frohlich's argument that Therese's ‘little way’…is not the saccharine piety of affecting the multiplication of good deeds (as it has often been portrayed). Nor is it a search for extraordinary positive or negative experiences. Rather, it is the most demanding ascesis of simply living neighburly charity in the very ordinary here and now. In the end, Therese no longer expects to encounter God in ‘essence’; she simply trusts in the ‘event of apophasis’ as it occurs in the midst of her daily acts of love (Frohlich 2000, 274).