A Novel in its Prime: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

There are so many reasons to dislike the titular character of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  She is a lover of Mussolini and the fascist regimes seizing control in Europe in the early 1930s.  Even after the war is over, the worst thing she can say about Hitler is that he “was rather naughty.”  She is entirely self-centered, wishing to impose her own views of the world onto her students, even as she claims that she is doing the opposite.  Her form of lecturing is to talk about herself, her lovers, and her experiences, and she expects the girls to scramble hard at home to learn what they need to in order to pass end of term exams.  And of course her designs to have an affair with a man vicariously through one of her students is nothing short of disturbing.  Moreover, the narrator can be very dismissive of the woman: “It is not to be supposed that Miss Brodie was unique at this point of her prime; or that (since such things are relative) she was in any way off her head,” which only suggests that Miss Brodie’s level of insanity can only be saved by relativity.  “In this light,” Spark sums up her passage describing the “type” of woman Miss Brodie is, “there was nothing outwardly odd about Miss Brodie.  Inwardly was a different matter, and it remained to be seen, towards what extremities her nature worked her.”   

Nevertheless, even with all these character flaws, Miss Brodie is a captivating woman, as captivating to us as she is to the set of six girls that she has taken under her wings.  I cannot help but admire her determination, her confidence, her headstrong nature.  I cannot help but love her desire to teach matters of real life instead of lessons to be memorized.  And I cannot help but feel the tragic weight of her prime and her fall.  Add to this vibrant and complicated character the lives of six young women entering maturity and you have the makings of a wonderful tale.

But of course, what makes the novel so incredible (and it is truly incredible) is not the characters or the story but the writing.  Spark’s style is wry and ironic and straightforward and suggestive.  These characters and their relationships come to us so simply and simultaneously laden with meaning.  One of my favorite techniques is the way that she slides from one moment in time to another, reminding us, for example, that Mary Macgregor will die horribly in a hotel fire running back and forth from one set of flames to another until she falls down and dies, and then proceed with a story of the abuse heaped upon Mary by her classmates and teacher in what were to be the best years of Mary’s short life.  As we read the novel and consider Miss Brodie and her realm of influence, Spark continuously throws us way down the road to see where the girls are and what their recollections of Miss Brodie are.  Eunice, the sporty girl, will later marry and visit Miss Brodie’s grave on a trip to Edinburgh, but it is made clear from her conversation with her husband that she has not talked of Miss Brodie throughout the whole of their marriage.  So even as Miss Brodie declares, “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life,” we are let in on the fact that these girls will not be hers for life.  All this movement allows Spark to tell her story and keep us as readers unsettled about what it all means.  Miss Brodie is neither hero nor villain, neither culprit nor victim.  Or she is both and all.

Similarly, Sandy, the girl whose story this is as much as it is Miss Brodie’s, is a difficult to place character.  On the one hand, her flights of fancy in which she has conversations with fictional characters and fictionalizes the lives of people around her is completely winning.  On the other hand, her hardening as she sees through Miss Brodie’s plans and understands her to be a flawed human can be painful to behold.  In a lot of ways, this is the story of a girl who leaves the childish world, where adults are heroic and brave, and enters adulthood, where she comes to learn that everyone is messed up and selfish and flawed.  She gains the knowledge of weakness before she has the experience of her own weakness to allow her to feel compassion for the struggles of her erstwhile heroes.  At one point, Miss Brodie talks about her long-ago forefather, Willie Brodie, “a man of substance, a cabinet maker and designer of gibbets” who “died cheerfully on a gibbet of his own devising.”  It is clear that Sandy is the gibbet of Miss Brodie’s own devising, the insightful girl she instructed and led to the point that Sandy gave the headmistress the ammunition she needed to fire Miss Brodie with this explanation: “I’m not really interested in world affairs . . . only in putting a stop to Miss Brodie.” 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is funny and heartbreaking and thought-provoking and a blast to read.  It is intellectual and emotional.  It is simple in its thrust and complicated in its content.  It is one of those books I wanted to fly through and crawl through at the same time because I didn’t want it to end.