Writing from the Unconscious: P.L. Travers and her Mary Poppins Novels

• Main Authors: Sheng-Yu Lin, 林聖又
• Other Authors: Chen-Wei Yu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/37394468234112008685

碩士 === 佛光大學 === 外國語文學系 === 104 === This thesis argues that the unconscious is the main source of Travers’s creative writing, the Mary Poppins books. Some clues can be found in the biography and interview of P.L. Travers. In order to explore the literary manifestation of something repressed in her unconscious, I study symbols expressed in stories as the early mother-infant relationship, birth trauma, and ideologies with reference to psychoanalytic theories (Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein) and Marxist thoughts (Louis Althusser). By the way of analogy, association, and comparison, the hidden meanings concerning Travers’s unconscious ideas are interwoven with characters, things, place, time, and objects. Therefore, this thesis makes an investigation from three aspects (characters, adventures, and ideologies) to analyze Travers’s unconscious behind stories in the Mary Poppins books. According to my findings, Travers does four things: rebuilding the earlier mother-infant relationship, repairing the birth trauma and the separation from the womb, making up to her parents for her lost role and duty, and rebelling against ideologies on the aspect of the middle-class family, racism, and etiquette. In addition, the fragmental experiences in the unconscious are important sources of inspiration for Travers’s writing. They are transformed, decorated, condensed, and displaced in the readable and coherent stories by the system Preconscious and Conscious. They can be found in the relationship between Travers’s real life, her inner mind, and her stories in the Mary Poppins books. Therefore, it is found in the Mary Poppins books that there is a conflict between Travers’s instincts and social conventions. Because of Travers’s self-defense mechanism, everything in her writing looks magical without following the law of physics. In addition, most people know Mary Poppins Travers created because Mary Poppins is not only adapted into the movie and musical, but also is translated into different languages. Mary Poppins has been the representative of a nanny. She is a good role model for caretakers. However, after Mary Poppins’s magic, thinking, and action are analyzed, it is found that Travers can explore the depth of her heart through writing and portraying Mary Poppins.