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Masterplots II, British Fiction Series, Rev. Ed. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Author: Muriel Spark Given Name: Muriel Sarah Camberg Born: February 1, 1918; Edinburgh, Scotland Died: April 13, 2006; Florence, Italy Type of Work: Moral satire Time of Work: 1930-1939 Locale: Edinburgh, Scotland First Published: 1961 Principal Characters MISS JEAN BRODIE, an eccentric spinster and an individualistic teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, forced into early retirement because of her Fascist ideals SANDY STRANGER, a Brodie favorite, marked for a career in psychology; she later enters a convent to become Sister Helena of the Transfiguration JENNY GRAY, Sandy's best friend and the prettiest girl of the "Brodie set" MARY MACGREGOR, a stupid girl, destined to die young in a hotel fire, and the least distinctive member of the Brodie set; she becomes a shorthand-typist EUNICE GARDINER, MONICA DOUGLAS, and ROSE STANLEY, other girls in the Brodie set JOYCE EMILY HAMMOND, a crazy misfit, not entirely in the Brodie set; she goes to Spain to fight for Francisco Franco and is killed on the way MISS MACKAY, the headmistress of the Marcia Blaine School and Brodie's enemy, who is intent on terminating her teaching career GORDON LOWTHER, the singing master, Brodie's lover and supporter TEDDY LLOYD, another Brodie supporter, the art master for the senior girls and an artist who, though married, has a secret passion for Brodie The Novel At issue in this short novel are two competing notions of education: the nonconformist individuality of Miss Jean Brodie's set and the team spirit and school loyalty insisted upon by Miss Mackay, the headmistress of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls. The story is told in multiple time frames so that the girls of the Brodie set can reflect back from a mature perspective upon the events of their school days. Brodie believes that she has entered her "prime" in 1930, and this perception influences her teaching, which becomes all the more idiosyncratic and personal. She ignores the standard curriculum and teaches her students about art, culture, and politics in line with her own proclivities. After the Brodie set graduates into the senior school, she has two of her favorites, Jenny Gray and Sandy Stranger, teach her Greek "at the same time as they learned it." She has a passion for culture and knowledge. In later life, after her forced retirement, Brodie admits to Sandy that she fell in love with Teddy Lloyd, the art master, but did not become his mistress because he was a married man. Instead, she had an affair with the music master, Gordon Lowther, a bachelor, in 1931. Miss Mackay and the moral Miss Gaunt, another schoolmistress, have their suspicions about this affair and encourage the sewing mistresses, Miss Ellen and Miss Alison Kerr, to serve as Lowther's housekeepers, so as to spy on him. Eventually, Miss Ellen finds Brodie's nightgown under a pillow at Lowther's house, and Miss Gaunt sees that Miss Mackay is promptly told, though Miss Ellen cannot prove that the nightgown belonged to Brodie. As a consequence of this evidence, however, Lowther loses his position as choirmaster at the church of Mr. Gaunt, Miss Gaunt's brother. During the 1933 school term, Sandy discovers that others of the Brodie set—Rose Stanley, Monica Douglas, and Eunice Gardiner—have been sitting as models for Teddy Lloyd and that all of them were drawn to resemble Brodie. Brodie will not enter into a clandestine affair with the married Lloyd, but two years later, she decides that Rose Stanley should become Lloyd's lover. In 1935, Brodie begins to confide in Sandy, who tells her that Lowther has been seen playing golf with Miss Lockhart, the science teacher. Since Brodie has refused to marry him, Lowther proposes marriage to Miss Lockhart, and they are married between terms. With Lowther married, Brodie broods all the more over her romantic obsession with Lloyd. In 1937, when the girls of the Brodie set are seventeen years old, Joyce Emily Hammond, who always wanted to join the Brodie set but was never quite accepted, leaves school and runs away to the Spanish Civil War. She is killed when the train on which she is riding is attacked. During the summer of 1938, Brodie visits Germany and Austria and is much impressed by Adolf Hitler's leadership. While she is gone, Sandy has a five-week love affair with Teddy Lloyd. Discussing the affair later with her teacher and confidante, Sandy learns that Miss Brodie encouraged Joyce Emily to go to Spain to fight for Franco. In war as in love, Brodie permits her girls to live out her fantasies. Outraged by this news, Sandy goes to Miss Mackay and gives her the justification for Brodie's removal, not for her sexual behavior (any misconduct cannot be proved) but for her politics, explaining, "she's a born Fascist." Consequently, Brodie is forced to retire during the summer of 1939 on the grounds that she had been teaching Fascism. At the same time, Sandy converts to Roman Catholicism; later, she enters a convent to become Sister Helena of the Transfiguration. Discouraged by her betrayal (but uncertain about which of the girls betrayed her), Brodie is now clearly past her prime. Much later in life she begins to gain the insight that she should have had earlier. Toward the end of the novel, Monica Douglas tells Sandy that before she died, Brodie suspected that Sandy had betrayed her, but one doubts that she could understand the motive. The Characters The dominant character is Miss Jean Brodie, who represents a type: a "war-bereaved" and "progressive" spinster of Edinburgh, deprived of her first love, who was killed in World War I, driven by frustrated sexual energy and devoted to "new ideas and energetic practices in art of social welfare, education or religion." She is a proto-Fascist. She admires first Benito Mussolini then Hitler. She is out of place in the "traditional" girls' school where she teaches, constantly at odds with Miss Mackay, whose "reasoning power," she believes, "is deficient." She is a committed feminist, independent and decidedly eccentric. In a real sense, she is a great teacher, thanks to her personal charisma. As Harold W. Schneider has written, Brodie is "intelligent, energetic, individualistic, personally attractive; a woman of taste and a challenge to the stuffiness and narrow-mindedness of the people around her," such as Miss Mackay and her accomplice, Miss Gaunt, who actively promote Brodie's downfall. On the other hand, Brodie is obviously flawed in her judgment and quite doctrinaire. Her artistic and political beliefs spring from emotional instinct. "By the time we arrive at Miss Mackay's study" toward the end, when Sandy has decided to destroy the woman's career, Bernard Harrison notes, "we are mostly on Sandy's side, and the novel has turned . . . from a light social satire to a vision of metaphysical evil," an astonishing "Transfiguration of the Commonplace," to borrow the title of Sandy's later psychological treatise. Brodie's nemesis and antagonist is Sandy Stranger, whose cold, detached rationality is transposed against Brodie's emotional instincts. For that reason Brodie is the more understandable, and perhaps ultimately the more sympathetic, character. Sandy is named a "Stranger," an alien, a Judas figure. From a political point of view, her action against Brodie is justifiable, but her strange personal antipathy toward the woman is extremely complicated; her determination to seduce Teddy Lloyd, for example, for whom Sandy has no genuine affection, seems merely an attempt to demonstrate that she is as good as Rose. Sandy is meanspirited and spiteful, and Spark often emphasizes her swinish attributes. The other girls of the Brodie set are mere foils for Sandy. They are defined by their abilities and their aspirations, but Sandy's character traits are not so superficial. To Brodie, Sandy can only be "famous for her vowel sounds" and "her small, almost non-existent eyes." Brodie has no true insight into her character and therefore can only fatally misjudge her. Sandy cannot be trusted on the basis of instinct. Miss Mackay, the hostile headmistress, and the equally hostile Miss Gaunt, are flat characters representing authority, conventionality, and traditional decorum. Gordon Lowther is a relatively uninteresting, convenient bachelor, and Teddy Lloyd the unreachable married man, certainly capable of philandering, but idealized beyond reach by the romantic Brodie, who thrives on unrequited love. Themes and Meanings The major themes of the novel are betrayal and transformation, or, in Muriel Spark's more precise diction, transfiguration. For her impressionable wards, Miss Jean Brodie is transfigured—glorified and idealized by the confidence that comes with her belief that she has passed into her prime. No doubt the woman is personally impressive, but the less imaginative Miss Mackay has a point: Brodie is irresponsible in her naive enthusiasms and in her teaching habits, and this irresponsibility goes beyond her simple contempt for science and mathematics, as Sandy comes to realize. Brodie is intellectually vain and arrogant, proud and overconfident. "Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life," Brodie believes. To an extent, she is right, but she teaches the lesson of individuality too well, and as Sandy matures, she changes, accepting the authority of the Roman Catholic faith, while gradually rejecting the authority of her egocentric mentor. The theme of betrayal works on several levels. Sandy first betrays Brodie by seducing Lloyd, and she also betrays Deirdra Lloyd, the wife she has befriended to advance her conspiracy. (The Brodie scenario called for Rose to be the seducer, an honor Sandy strangely claims for her own, perhaps out of jealousy.) Sandy also betrays Brodie by converting to a religion she knows her teacher does not favor, going so far as to enter a strict convent order. The final betrayal comes when Sandy provides Miss Mackay, whose imagination is deficient, with an indisputable rationale for Brodie's termination. Sandy Stranger is fully transformed from an acolyte and disciple of Brodie's secular humanism to a subversive agent, bent on destroying her teacher and friend. In her own convoluted way, Sandy is even more obsessive than her mentor. The story of Sandy's transformation is skillfully told, conveniently weaving through several time frames from 1930 to 1939, and beyond. The story is told from Sandy's perspective, though not in the first person, and Sandy's consciousness informs the reader's moral judgment. There is truth in Sandy's perception that Brodie is ridiculous in her prime, maudlin and tiresome in her retirement, but this judgment is also harsh and inhumanly detached. In her fanatical obsession with Fascism, Brodie is dangerous. At first she is impressed with Mussolini and his Blackshirts. After she spends the summer of 1938 in Germany and Austria, she is even more impressed with Hitler and his Brownshirts. In politics, as in art, she has instinct but not insight. Sandy has superior insight but is lacking in instinct. Everything she does is, perhaps subconsciously, designed to hurt Brodie. She is obsessed with principle but lacking in sympathy and compassion. When asked at the end what was the main influence of her school days, she has to admit: "There was a Miss Brodie in her prime," yet she is responsible for shoving her teacher past her prime and robbing the woman of her vocation. When Brodie tells her "you had no reason to betray me," she is partly speaking the truth, but, as always, she is trusting her flawed instinct, which is not informed by insight. Critical Context From the time of its publication, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has been highly praised for its remarkable construction and craftsmanship. Critics have disagreed, however, about the novel's religious implications. Granville Hicks, in The Saturday Review, noted that Muriel Spark, who, like Sandy Stranger, converted to Catholicism, is a "gloomy Catholic," like Flannery O'Connor and Graham Greene, "more concerned with the evil of man than with the goodness of God." If so, Spark, like O'Connor, is brilliantly satiric and amusing in her gloominess. Moreover, the gloom can be just as easily traced to John Calvin as to the Holy See, for, as Samuel Hynes noted in Commonweal, "the setting of the novel is Edinburgh, and the spirit of Calvin broods over the novel." Both Charles Alva Hoyt in 1965 and Harrison in 1976 found a more likely novelist to compare with Spark than the "gloomy" Catholics first noted by reviewers working against journalistic deadlines. Hoyt called Spark a "surrealist Jane Austen," and Harrison made this parallel even more convincing: "Like Jane Austen," he wrote, "Muriel Spark is a moral satirist." Clearly, Spark makes fun of both her protagonist, foolishly obsessed with the notion of being in her "prime" and ridiculously self-centered, and Sandy, her Stranger nemesis, whose vision is squinted through her porcine eyes. Both characters are seriously flawed, and the novelist seems to be laughing at both of them. No doubt The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is one of Spark's most artful efforts, and it probably has done more than any other of her works to spread her reputation to a mass audience. The novel was dramatized by Jay Presson Allen in 1966 and performed at London's Wyndham's Theatre and, in the United States, in Boston and then on Broadway. This dramatization then became the basis for the Twentieth Century-Fox film version released in 1969, directed by Ronald Neame and starring the incomparable Maggie Smith as Jean Brodie. The strong character of Miss Jean Brodie is excellent dramatic material, as is the conflict between the teacher and her star pupil, Sandy. Presson's dramatization compressed the characters of Mary Macgregor and Joyce Emily Hammond into one, and, more seriously, had Sandy flaunt her betrayal to Brodie to make a tidy, dramatic conclusion, but simplifying motives and stripping the story of much of its subtlety. The film was good enough to win for Maggie Smith an Academy Award as Best Actress in 1969, but it only proved for Stanley Kauffmann, writing in The New Republic, that "the better a novel is, the less successful an adaptation of it is likely to be." James M. Welsh BibliographyBold, Alan. Murile Spark, 1986. Harrison, Bernard. "Muriel Spark and Jane Austen," in The Modern English Novel: The Reader, the Writer, and the Work, 1976. Hoyt, Charles Alva. "Muriel Spark: The Surrealist Jane Austen," In Contemporary British Novelists, 1965. Edited by Charles Shapiro. Schneider, Harold W. "A Writer in Her Prime: The Fiction of Muriel Spark," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction. V, no. 2 (1962), pp. 28-45. Stubbs, Patricia. Muriel Spark, 1973. Wildman, John Hazard. "Translated by Muriel Spark," in Nine Essays in Modern Literature, 1965. Edited by Donald E. Stanford. |
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