The Balancing Acts of Mary Poppins and Mulan

In her chapter on sexuation, Karen Coats explains that  “a person has a masculine or a feminine structure according to how he or she is situated with respect to the Name of the Father” (99). Lacanian theory suggests that we are sexed by society not through biological determinants, but rather through a third term, the Name of the Father. This third term, according to Lacan, separates the Symbolic and the Imaginary worlds of a child in their psychological development, which “effectively bars the mother’s desire, inaugurating a chain of substitutions that come to signify and replace the mother’s desire” (20). Essentially, the Name of the Father, which is Law, separates the child from the imagined, but non-existent relationship with the mother, which lies within the Imaginary, and propels them into the Symbolic order, or society.

This perceived separation creates a hole of desire within the child that they wish to fill. According to Lacan, both sexes experience this separation, however men, because the Symbolic is a masculine structure (100), men cannot escape from the loss and subsequent hole created by the separation of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. A woman, on the other hand, can see this lack and “can fill the hole if she wants to, that is, she can act as if the problem of incompleteness can be solved. But-and this is the important distinction – she doesn’t have to” (100). Because of this, women are more capable of balancing between the Imaginary and the Symbolic.

To demonstrate this balancing act, Coats uses the example of Mary Poppins, the loveable, extraordinary, word-jumbling nanny of the Banks children. Poppins acts as foil for George Banks, the father of the children she nannies, challenging his role within the Symbolic, as a man who adheres and subscribes to the Law of the Father. As she rejects masculine structure, she must also, to an extent, reject the feminine role within that masculine structure. Mr. Bank’s wife and his children, act as his symptom, as do past nannies of the Banks children, but Poppins, because she is aware of the fact that the Symbolic “performs what it purports to describe,” she can choose to obey or not to obey the Law of the Father (107). By both challenging and using the Symbolic to her advantage, she is able to change the lives of the Banks family.

Disney has the propensity to support the image of women like Mary Poppins, who transcend gender roles, but also tends to support the Symbolic order. Ariel, from The Little Mermaid, for instance, must change herself for Prince Eric and ascribe to the role of lover, wife and symptom. However, Disney’s interpretation of the legend of Mulan, a story of a woman, set in the 6^th century, who joins the all-male Chinese army, supports the Lacanian theory that “the feminine position…has closer affinities with the Real than with the Symbolic” (101). Although the Mulan does support and strengthen the Law of the Father in some cases, it rejects it in others. In the beginning of the film, Mulan’s father is called to war and, although he is old and disabled, he dutifully accepts his masculine responsibility.

However, Mulan speaks up and disagrees with this law, disgracing her father in the eyes of society, but rejecting that society all the same. In secret, Mulan steals her father’s armor and his summon to war, cuts off her hair and dresses like a man, and joins the army. In doing so, she walks the line between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, not only emotionally, but physically. Much like Poppins, Mulan also uses the Symbolic to her advantage. Knowing that she would not be accepted as a woman, she dresses and attempts to act like a man, convincing her comrades that she is equal to them. She is successful at this, however, because she uses, unbeknownst to them, her knowledge of the feminine structure within the male structure. Eventually, she is able to save her father, her fellow soldiers and even China by rejecting her role as the symptom and creating a new role for herself within, but separate from the Symbolic.

 

The Master Signifier in “I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This”

In chapter six “Blinded by the White” from Karen Coats’ book Looking Glasses and Neverlands, one main idea presented from Lacan that she further examines is that of “master signifiers.” This concept discusses how one moves in the direction of the impossible concept of perfectibility. The idea of the master signifier is to work toward covering over our status of split subjects, and if we identify with the master signifier and can get others to provide support for this actually being our identity, then, conceivably, we can convince ourselves as well as others into believing its possibility: “This is precisely the way a master signifier works—by offering itself as a whole, a complete and ideal Thing, without qualities, it supports a field of signifiers in which it does not participate but that define themselves in terms of their failure to attain its ideal wholeness…Whiteness has attained this status of a master signifier” (page 124).

One example of Whiteness as a master signifier that Coats mentions is within Holes, the young adult novel written by Louis Sachar. Coats points out one particular instance within the novel in which Whiteness takes on the status of a master signifier, in relation to the main character Stanley. Stanley is a young, white male who ends up befriending a more under-privileged African American boy named Zero. Stanley starts out by denying his white privilege, but comes to assume this position when he starts to teach Zero how to read and expects some sort of payment in return. Zero realizes his lack of Whiteness and readily accepts the task of digging Stanley’s holes for him, i.e., adopting the African American role of doing manual labor for the white boy.  Zero is willing to do the extra labor to attain the secondary signifier of Whiteness, which is literacy, something Stanley seems to naturally have because of his white privilege.

Another instance of master signifier, not necessarily Whiteness, however, that could be examined using knowledge of this concept is within a reading of the young adult book I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This. This book, written by Jacqueline Woodson, seems to be the opposite of what one would expect with the societal “norm” or expectation of racism. The main character is a twelve-year-old African American girl named Marie, who goes to a school where the majority of the students are African American. The Caucasian students that do attend there are normally referred to as “white trash” and are usually poor. Both races of students stick to themselves until a new girl Lena comes to school one day. Marie is drawn to her and doesn’t know why. She is white, very poor, dirty, lives in a bad part of town and eventually reveals that her father touches her inappropriately. So in this instance we have the clear opposite of how race plays out in Holes, because the African American girl is more privileged and better educated, while the white girl is poor and abused. The African American girl has the traits, or secondary signifiers, that Coats states as typically being associated with the master signifier of Whiteness, like “achievement,” “innocence,” and “freedom” (126).

Whiteness Can Be Blue

Karen Coats discusses in her chapter, Blinded by the White, about the rules of race and how it is portrayed to children. Coats explains, “But as a master signifier, Whiteness acts as a nodal point of desire—not that we desire, as Seshadri-Crooks points out, to be Caucasian, but that we desire the ideal of Whiteness in its place as master signifier, its place of wholeness, the absence of difference and qualities” (124). Coats explain how the children see the definition of whiteness as the ideal person; the perfect height, weight, traits, hair color, eye color, etc. Whiteness is considered to be the master signifier because it is the idealist look of what a person should be outside of the outwards physical appearance. Whiteness as the master signifier is desired because it is seen as being privileged and people, including children, try to live up to the ideal prospect of whiteness.

One of the main examples Coats uses to express her idea is the story, Tangerine, by Edward Bloor. Coats uses this example to show how whiteness is portrayed in a children’s book. The upper middle class all live in a housing development made up of white upper middle class suburban families while the other classes are made up of different races. Of course, the white class is seen as better off and idealistic. Children reading this story can see the prospects of this whiteness as being ideal and the conscience of the child reading the story may want to strive for the same achievements of the perfect suburban family-life. While this is a positive look on the whiteness appeal of the book, the other races are seen as secondary signifiers. These are the races that seem to follow or surround the master signifier. For instance, all the other races described within the book, both African American and Hispanic cultures, are actually surrounding the housing development of the white culture. The other races are given strong stereotypes like how the Hispanic characters are considered to be emotionally violent, who were always suspended from school, did manual labor, and drove a pickup truck, while the African American character was poor and great at sports. Compared to the whiteness, these stereotypes, or secondary signifiers, are not really something to idealize.

The movie Avatar it seems as though the whiteness is considered to the Na’vi people not the white people who have gone to Pandora uninvited. It is interesting to see whiteness not pertaining to a white culture but those of blue humanoids. In the movie, Jake Sully, the main character, is able to walk in the shoes of both the white culture and as an avatar in the Na’vi culture. For the purpose of Coats, Sully is seen to be the child. He is able to see both the master signifier and the secondary signifier (master signifier is represented as the Na’vi and the secondary signifier is represented as the United States army). As the movie continues, Sully strives to live the idealistic life of the Na’vi people. He goes so far as to turn his back to the secondary signifier and considers himself as one of the master signifiers. Sully is so apt to becoming the ideal whiteness he manages to change completely by switching his race.

Lacan, Objet A, and a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

In our previous class discussion, we touched upon the Lacanian term, objet petit autre (objects with a little otherness, 81). Lacan and Coats describe the objet petit autre as representing “that part of himself that the individual loses at birth, and which may serve to symbolize the most profound lost object” (81). We also discussed the Shel Silverstein story, The Missing Piece, which gives a literal picture of what the objet petit autre is: A small piece of ourselves that we perceive to be missing, but even after we gain a piece to fill the whole we feel needs filling, we still desire. What we did not discuss in class was how the concept of objet petit autre works in the classic children’s book, Alice through the Looking Glass.

Coats explains that Carroll (or Charles Dodgson) looks at the character of Alice as his objet petit autre. “She, like his ideal reflection,” writes Coats, “exists as a rem(a)inder of self-alienation, as as reminder of lack, but also, in the matter of objet a, as a suggestion of the possibility of amelioration. In her, lack transcends the physical and is poignantly etched in his psyche as a great aching to preserve an impossible dyadic relationship with the Other” (83). In other words, Alice represents Dodgson’s desire to take hold of childhood, either his own or a non-fictional Alice’s, and uses the story of Alice through the Looking Glass to attempt to prevent Alice from growing up. Coats explains, “Having recognized the implications of his [Dodgson/Carroll] own Symbolic castration, he seeks to save her from hers” (84). This, of course, cannot happen, and, as Coats points out, the story is filled with a desire–either to “escape” and assume the “I” identity, in the case of the story’s Alice, or to prevent that from happening, as Carroll attempts to do in the story.

The idea of searching for one’s objet a (and whether or not you can find it or if its presence does put an end to desire for that unattainable Other) has been alluded to in other children’s stories. My example comes from Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, by Judith Viorst. Alexander is a little boy who has pretty crummy day: He doesn’t get a toy in his cereal box, he can’t sit by the seat he wants on the way to school, he doesn’t get a dessert in his lunch pack, the shoe store doesn’t have the kind of shoes he wants, and the cat won’t sleep with him that night. All this, among other things, makes up his day, but the most significant aspect of all this is the fact that he’s not getting something (anything, really) that he wants. The idea is that Alexander’s day would go better if he just could get what he wants, so essentially, all these things (cereal box toys, shoes, desserts, cats) are a series of objets a. The less that Alexander gets, the more he wants and therefore the more miserable he is.

The book ends on an interesting note. All throughout the book Alexander insists that things would probably be better in Australia, but on the last two pages of the book, that changes. “It has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. My mom says some days are like that. Even in Australia.” What Alexander’s mom is suggesting is that it doesn’t matter if you get what you desire, you will still always want something, just as the circle with the supposedly missing piece still desired (though for something different) even after it got what it thought it wanted.

George Banks, Batman & The Name of the Father

“Lacan does articulate both a masculine and a feminine position in his theoretical model, and they are not, as in Freud, opposed to one another.  Nor are they in any way biologically determined…A person has a masculine or a feminine structure according to how he or she is situated with respect to the Name of the Father” (99).  So declares Karen Coats.  We can think of the Name of the Father as a division between the Symbolic and Imaginary (to use Lacanian terms).  The Symbolic Father regulates the Oedipus complex by intervening in the non-existent relationship between son and mother and imposing order (Law).  The Imaginary Father is an imago, an idealized father created from childhood images and interactions.  (Notably, the Imaginary Father can be idolized and glorified in positive or negative terms i.e. the best father ever or the most awful, abusive father ever).

Coats uses George Banks, the father of Jane and Michael in  Mary Poppins as a means of relating this position in relation to the Name of the Father.  Banks assumes a traditional masculine position; he is a man of wealth and he fulfills his literary and social status, “wholly determined by the signifier’s [his name's] symbolic mandate” (102).  Where there is no order, when his children are missing in the park, for instance, he attempts to impose his system upon the situation.  Worse yet is his apparent ignorance for things which may disrupt his neatly-organized reality as when he obliviously puts Katie Nana’s luggage in the car without realizing that she is leaving after his children went missing.  Nonetheless, his action of assisting her has fulfilled his masculine duty and image.  From Banks’s name, Coats points readers to the Symbolic Father; from the luggage incident, readers discover a man attempting to fill the masculine image.  As a result of Banks’s position, he can neither relate to nor recognize otherness as its waves might capsize the Symbolic/Imaginary Order that has been instilled within him.

Coats opines that Banks’s “very name indicates the relation he has to the signifier –he is a banker, and his name is Banks.  Hence his being is wholly determined by the signifier’s symbolic mandate” (102).  We might think of the superhero Batman in the same way.  His superhero moniker is not just a byproduct of his nightly superhero activities (fighting crime, saving women), he literally flies like a bat and conforms to the signifier’s mandate.  Batman’s struggle to fight crime mirrors Banks’s; he persists in his battle to eliminate crime and bring Gotham back to a state of l/Law and order (Symbolic).  Furthermore, Batman often maintains his role by doing what he thinks is right, though he can sometimes misunderstand his role as in The Dark Knight when he attempts to save Rachel, but ends up saving Harvey.  (The Joker has forced Batman to choose between saving one of the two, Harvey at one address, Rachel at another and accidentally saves Harvey as the Joker lied to him about which person was at which location.) Batman is restrained by his identity, one of the (idealized) norms of that identity being that women are viewed as precious and must be prioritized in the process of saving.

The Time for Concluding

In chapter three of Looking Glasses and Neverlands, Karen Coats discusses the link between books and the time for concluding: “the books that correspond to the time for concluding are the ones aimed at beginning readers. Learning to read involves certain important shifts for the child” (59). One of these shifts includes breaking away from the mother. When a child reads on his or her own, there is no longer a reason for the mother to read out loud. The child becomes “an active participant in the authoritative structure of written language, the code that (arguably) dominates the modernist Symbolic order” (59). The child no longer has to rely on the mother to gain information. Therefore, the “time for concluding” (59) refers to that transition from dependent to independent.

To prove this point, Coats looks closely at Phoebe Gilman’s Something from Nothing. In this story, a grandfather makes a blanket for his grandson Joseph. Joseph has this blanket all through his childhood. The older he gets, the dirtier the blanket becomes. The mother wants to throw it away, but the grandfather insists that he takes the blanket and finds new ways to use it. He goes through the motions, as the fabric that was once a blanket gets smaller and smaller. Before long, the grandfather has run out of fabric and can no longer make a new recycled item. However, Joseph now feels that it is time to conclude as he “takes up both a pen and Grandpa’s refrain: ‘There’s just enough material here to make… a wonderful story,’ transforming the entire experience, presumably, into the story we have just read” (60). Coats uses this example because of the transation that Joseph makes. He is dependent on the blanket for most of his life, but once it becomes almost useless, he finds a way to use it in a productive way: telling a story. Coats would argue that he has now become “an active participant in the authoritative structure of written language” (59).

In Nancy Werlin’s The Rules of Survival, young Matthew is dealing with an abusive mother. He feels responsible for his two younger sisters and wants to get them out of the harmful situation. He is working with the adults around him to find a safe solution for him and his sisters. This story, however, is told in the form of a narrative written by Matthew for his younger sister. He has decided that in order to make sense of the situation with his mother, he has to write it all down and explain it to his sister who was too young to remember it. In a sense, he is making the transition from helpless young child to a young man who is willing to make a difference for him and his sisters. The simple fact that he is writing about the event, shows that he understands it and accepts it. Like Joseph, Matthew “negotiate[s] for himself a position from which he can speak, rather than simply be bespoken” (61) and controlled by his mother’s hold on him.

The abject

I have two long quotes:

In its social context, ‘abjection’ means to operate at the social rim. Adolescence is a time of cultivating group identity; socially abject figures cannot seem to manage either the material conditions and habits or the identifications necessary to sustain a position in a social group… Both social and psychological abjection precipitate violence in the narratives of young-adult fiction and hence offer suggestive ways of thinking about the increasing violence of adolescent society. (138-139)

Just as we abject the unclean and improper evidences of the body’s physicality in order to constitute a clean and proper body, so in the social realm we abject the unclean and the improper, again often on the basis of physicality, in order to constitute the boundaries of community and nation…. Throughout social history, the exclusions of peoples based on race, sexuality, and disabilities have established and bolstered both personal and national identities…. Identities, communities, and nations are “permanently brittle” constructs because they are built on abjection, which haunts their borders. (141)

So then. The adolescent moves into society, either entirely unaware or only vaguely aware of it as artifice, as a construction of the Law. Society needs abjection (the naming of a thing as unclean and improper) to survive, needs to make boundaries in order to define itself. Those who (through an unquestionably performative use of Language) are deemed abject often meet with or exercise violence, there being fear and dislike between the abject and the accepted.

One of Coats’ illustrations of this is a discussion of S. E. Hinton’s young adult novel The Outsiders. She gives a synopsis: a group of young men called the Greasers (who are the socially abject heroes of the story, she tells us, excluded from the discourse of the majority) clash violently with another group, the Socs (some clean and proper young men); two of them, Johnny and Dallas, die (though not at the hands of the Socs; Johnny dies from burns he gets while saving some children from a fire, and Dallas “cannot accept Johnny’s death and challenges the police with a loaded pistol” (150).) Coats says, “That they die suggests that abjection is an unsustainable social position.… the unconscious truth of her 1967 text is that figures like Johnny and Dallas must be expelled from a clean and proper society. Ponyboy’s [the protagonist’s] successful adult identity is contingent upon his ridding himself of his associations with these abject figures” (150).

I thought of the 1995 film La haine (in English, Hate), directed by Mathieu Kassovitz and starring Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, and Saïd Taghmaoui. The camera follows three friends (Vinz, a Jew, Hubert, an Afro-French, and Saïd, a Maghrebin) through a day in their lives. They live in the banlieues of Paris (roughly equivalent to the ghettoes of America) and all three are or have been involved in riots, violent protests of their social marginalization; they are some of the socially abject of French society. (a side note: The notion of the “clean and proper” body reminds me of a remark once made by Nicolas Sarkozy, the current president of France. In 2005, as Ministry of the Interior, he called the youth of the banlieues “racaille” (roughly, “scum,” with racist connotations) and spoke of cleaning out the banlieues “a Kärcher” (referring to a manufacturer of power hoses).)

In the film the three friends move in the society of their fellow abject banlieue inhabitants, in a culture of camraderie, rap music, and violence. Toughness, sexual prowess, and humor are respected, and vulgarity is the norm. Many of the men of the banlieue speak in one of the various versions of verlan, a slang that works by inverting words (“verlan” comes from “l’envers,” or reverse). Marginalized economically and racially, they affirm their uncleanness and impropriety and transgress the laws of Language. In one scene the three end up at an art gallery, where they drink the wine and eat the food and make fun of the art. They see a couple of girls and Saïd asks Hubert to help him charm them (“Didn’t I buy you a taco last week?” he says); Hubert plays it cool with the girls, but Saïd comes on too fast. This impropriety disgusts the girls, and Saïd, Vinz, and Hubert get angry and end up yelling at everyone in the gallery (“You can all go suck dick in hell,” and “Yo momma in hell”) and breaking a champagne glass and a sculpture. They cannot play by the rules of polite society (having never been taught to abject sex properly), and when it rejects them they return that rejection with violent vulgarities. They walk out the door and the gallery owner turns around, tired and disgusted, and dismisses them with, “The malaise of the ghetto.”

I have perhaps been too quick to label Hubert, Vinz, and Saïd as abject; I only did so because they are excluded from the discourse of the majority by a lack of material wealth and power. In the above scene, each society (that of the banlieue and that of the rich) abjects the other because neither accepts the Language and Law of the other.

Becoming a Real Boy

“A.I. (Artificial Intelligence)”, the 2001 film directed by Steven Spielberg, follows the life of a boy, but certainly no “nor-male” boy. The boy, named David, is a mecha, a super advanced robot that is actually capable of not only emulating, but experiencing emotions and acting on original thoughts. Created by Cybertronics of New Jersey, David is an even more advanced type of mecha, who is able to actually feel love for whomever owns him. He is constructed to look, act, speak and love as a child does, enacting the same imprinting mechanisms that a human child does with its parents, particularly its mother. David especially imprints on Monica, his “mother,” who grows attached to him as well, until her actual son, who was sick, is able to return home and take up his role as a human son.

The story goes on for much longer than this, but first, I would like to address children as a whole. Children are some of the most familiar individuals in the world. Despite cultural differences, they follow developmental characteristics that are universal. Instinctively, the average adult will be protective and caring towards any child they come across, which is essentially ingrained within our psyches. In the most primal sense, we want the next generation, our offspring, to survive.

However, how is one supposed to react to David? He is essentially a child in all of the ways that are familiar to us, and yet he is not. Because he is not made up of the organic matter that we are made of, he cannot be human, no matter how convincing he is. He is not entirely flawless in his child-like state, either. He cannot eat, he does not blink, and he cannot dream when he is “sleeping.” He is the epitome of Freud’s theory of the uncanny, in a sense. He is everything that is familiar and homely, yet he is, concealed from perception, very much unfamiliar and unhomely. Of course, in realizing this, David’s nature is disconcerting and even frightening. He is even more frightening because he plays with our emotions, our care-giving desires. He sparks within us the desire to treat him as something he’s not, manipulating our hearts, even as we know in our minds that he is not what is familiar.

Lacanian theory can also be applied to “A.I.”, although the stages that Lacan applies to child development are skewed due to the fact that David is no ordinary child. After David’s “brother,” Martin, returns home, the two experience a sort of sibling rivalry in which Martin, who has fully been assimilated into the Symbolic, exemplifies. He is a son who has conformed to the Law of the Father. Because of this, he does not understand the queerness of David and is cruel to him, attempting to sabotage him in order to regain his position as the true son. In doing so, David’s defensive “programming” is triggered, and puts the life of Martin at risk. After this event, Henry, Monica’s husband, wishes to destroy David, but she sets off to save him.

In a pivotal scene (0:00-4:30), which I have embedded below, Monica drives David to the woods to leave him there, in order to save him from “death,” but also to separate herself from the unconditional, clinging love that David exhibits. As they drive to the woods, they pass the sign and entrance for Cybetronics of New Jersey, which represents the Father, the Symbolic realm. The creator of David is a graspable, socially real thing, and Monica stops the car, almost as if she wishes to return him, but she instead thinks better of it, realizing that he will be destroyed. She forces her reason, which lies within the Symbolic, out. Instead, she employs her fantasy that David is real, and deserving of life, reverting her mind into the realm of the Imaginary.

As Monica tries to leave David in the woods, he begs and pleads with her not to leave him there, but she, despite the tears she is also shedding, and the pain it causes her, is determined to eject David from her social reality, almost as if she is forcing him into the third term, forcing him to form a new Symbolic order outside of herself, his “mother.” When she and David first developed a bond, she read to him the story of Pinocchio, which convinced him that it was possible for him, despite the fact that he is a mecha, to become a “real boy.” As he begs, he says, “No, mommy, please no. If Pinocchio became a real boy, and I became a real boy, can I come home?” She then responds to him with, “Stories are not real!” However, as Karen Coats would say, stories inform children, shape children into what society expects of them. In this sense, David is frighteningly more real than expected. He is actually capable of taking a piece of society, even though fantastical, and applying it to himself, attempting to fulfill the example that language provides for him.

David, however, is left by Monica, and for the remainder of the film, his one true desire is to return home to her. He is aware of the hole that is missing and wants only to fill that hole with the perceived, yet literally non-existent mother of the Imaginary realm. In his quest, he both adheres to the Symbolic realm, but also diverts from it. He is far more capable of living between the Imaginary and Symbolic because he is not “nor-male.” Eventually, through a ridiculously long succession of events, he is able to have a final, peaceful, blissful day with Monica (who is not actually Monica, but a mecha who holds the memories and physical and emotional characteristics of her), in which he acts out with her all of his desires. In all his life, he does not enter into the realm of the Real, as his desires are not unconscious. He does not even have an unconscious. After all, he cannot dream. However, at the end of the film, he quite literally does. He becomes a “real boy” after Monica finally tells him that she has always loved him. His deepest desire is met and he is no longer stuck in the Imaginary, but instead of moving back into the Symbolic from which he was born, he “for the first time in his life…went to that place where dreams are born.” In entering the Real, he becomes real.