Mary Poppins

Mary Poppins enjoys looking at herself in shop windows: “Mary Poppins gave a quick glance into the window beside her. She saw herself shining back at her, very smart, very interesting […]” (149). While this habit certainly implies vanity, it also suggests that Mary Poppins is not completely of the earthly world. Mary Poppins is an ethereal creature, traveling with the wind with very little baggage, and she is not at all grounded to the earth in a physical sense. She has few possessions, and even these items seem to go invisible or somehow lose their corporeal forms only to reappear when necessary. The picture she gives Jane of herself at the end of the novel is one of Bert’s paintings, not even a photograph; this detail is meaningful because most of Bert’s paintings wash away with the rain, a natural phenomenon similar to the wind in its ability to clear the air. The fact that Mary Poppins checks her appearance in windows implies that she herself needs some assurance that she is still present in the world that humans like Jane and Michael inhabit without much existential anxiety.