Mary Poppins and the dialogic imagination of Christianity

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.