Brodie Essays
Brodie Essays
Brodie Essays
Critical Essays
In the Great Tradition: The Prime of Muriel Spark
In this age of book clubs and television interviews and full-page advertisements, it
is comforting (and perhaps snobbishly satisfying as well) to find now and then a
writer who has made a reputation simply by being read and admired. Only five
years have passed since Muriel Spark published her first novel, The Comforters, but
that book, and the five she has written since then, have given her a status among
younger British novelists as secure as anyones.
No one who claims to be informed on the current state of fiction can afford to
overlook her work. Her position in America is somewhat less establishedtwo of
her books are in paperbacks, but as far as I know she has not yet penetrated that
innermost sanctum, the college curriculumbut her word-of-mouth reputation
has already spread in a way that happens only to truly original, and pleasurable,
writers.
Certainly original and pleasurable and the first things to say about Mrs. Sparks
novels. Each is in its way uniquea new set of fictional problems, a new kind of
plot-invention. She has that evident pleasure in the manipulation of her medium
which distinguishes the master novelists from the journeymen. Yet in all of her
books, for all their individual uniqueness, there is a uniformity of comic tone, of
pace, and of attitude which defines an extraordinary personality and intelligence
behind the work. The joy that she takes in the making of fictions, and the attrac-
tiveness of her creating mind, are two prime sources of the pleasure that her nov-
els give; for it is a special kind of pleasure that we get from observing a finely
creative imagination in the act of invention.
In a biographical note Mrs. Spark once listed her favourite recreations as "Chess
and Disguise." There is something of both visible in her novels: a pleasure in in-
tricately patterned plots, and a pleasure in the concealment of motives and mean-
ings. Her novels are both mannered and mysterious, and this combination, along
with her comic gifts and her rapid, economical style, makes her work what it is
examples of a new kind of novel.
Mrs. Spark is a Catholic convert, and this is a point of more than parochial inter-
est. For one thing, her life as a novelist began with her conversion. Religion and
creation are, by her own testimony, intimately related: she has found Catholicism
"conducive to individuality, to finding ones own individual personal point of
view." The theme of her first novel she described as "really a convert and a kind of
psychic upheaval"; most of her subsequent work involves Catholic characters, and
the problems which their Catholicism poses in a non-religious world.
But her writing is also religious in a more pervasive, less specific way; her reality
includes the unseen, and her novels are peopled with diabolic characters (she has
wisely avoided trafficking in her comedies with saints) and inscrutable forces
which exercise mysterious powers over human activities. In The Comforters, for
example, the heroine hears voices and clacking typewriters which seem to be
composing a novel about her life as she lives it, and a demonic old servant van-
ishes and reappears before our eyes; in Memento Mori a number of old people
receive inexplicable telephone calls reminding them that they must die; in The
Ballad of Peckham Rye a devil called Dougal Douglas disrupts a working-class
community for the sheer deviltry of it; in The Bachelors a dubious medium
clearly communicates with the dead.
Mrs. Spark offers no comfortably secular explanation for any of these events; her
stories are more likely to create mystery than to explicate it, and she is content to
leave the supernatural that wayMysterious. The world of human experience is
complex, and not ultimately explicable; evil, her demons remind us, is as actual
as nasty servants and telephone calls, and reality is odder than you think.
But evil may not be quite the right word to indicate the pervasive metaphysical
presences that haunt Mrs. Sparks novels. She is not, like that other distinguished
convert, Graham Greene, devil-ridden; the diabolic creatures who turn up in her
books are more grotesque than terrifying, and their deeds are rather annoying
than destroying. They are eccentrics, liars, meddlers, and boresthe kind of
people who bring out the pettiness and uncharitableness in us, not the kind who
lead us to damnation. The true metaphysical force is less precise than this, not
clearly either evil or benign, but simply there, the author of the human story, the
Comforter. To say that Mrs. Spark has chosen to write Catholic comedies does
not explain her vision, but perhaps in a way it describes it.
It may strike a reader coming to these remarks without prior knowledge of Mrs.
Sparks work that she must be not so much a comic writer as a clownish one. Cer-
tainly a summary of her plots would not be the best way to convince a sceptic of
her essential seriousness. How, one might ask, can a novelist write seriously about
religious experience in a plot like that of The Comforters? Voices? Typewriters?
How ridiculous! Not at all. The theme of the book is the discovery, by an intelli-
gent, sophisticated, slightly neurotic young woman, of the reality of the nonmate-
rial; this discovery finds spiritual expression in her conversion, and psychological
expression in her breakdown. In the end we dont know who has operated the
typewriter which Caroline Rose heard; the mystery has not been dissipated, but
Caroline accepts and is comforted by the existence of an operator, and the book
we read is the final evidence that what she heard was real.
"Fiction," Mrs. Spark has observed, "to me is a kind of parable." That is to say, it is
beliefs shaped by the imagination. Her parables come from a Catholic imagina-
tion, but the truly creative imagination is a transforming one, and in Mrs. Sparks
case, a comic one; her curiously conceited plots embody serious matters, but they
are imaginative, not doctrinal, and her books are not likely to convert anyone
(though they may well make a secular view of things seem rather bare and bor-
ing).
To say that fiction is "a kind of parable" is to suggest that ones interest should be
on the design and meaning of the fable rather than on the customary objects of
our attention in fictionthe empathetic character and the credible, detailed
situation. In Mrs. Sparks novels this is so; her gift for intricate design is superb,
her detachment from her characters absolute. The effect of this is a reduction in
scale of individual characters (only one novel, Robinson, is a first-person narra-
tion, and this is the one novel that is clearly inferior to the others); her customary
habit is to establish a number of more or less equally important characters, and
then to compose a pattern around them, relating each to all the others. Individu-
als are likely to be treated more as "cases" (sometimes specifically medical or legal
cases) than as personalities.
The character in Memento Mori who observes his fellow septuagenarians (virtu-
ally everyone in this remarkable novel is over 70) and records their reactions to
old age in a card file is a kind of model of the way Mrs. Sparks mind works:
"What were they sick, what did they die of?" this card-filer thinks. "Lettie Colston
comminuted fractures of the skull; Godfrey Colston, hypostatic pneumonia;
Charmian Colston, uremia; Jean Taylor, myocardial degeneration " And on
through the list of his friends and coevals, coldly ticking them off. But Mrs. Spark
adds: "Jean Taylor lingered for a time, employing her pain to magnify the Lord,
and meditating sometimes confidingly upon Death, the first of the Four Last
Things to be ever remembered."
Compassion is there, but Mrs. Sparks religion protects her from that too-easy
compassion which we call sentimentality. She is neither cold nor soft-hearted; on
the whole she is amiably disposed toward her characters, finds materials for com-
edy in them, and records their nastier qualities without rancour. She is not, as has
been suggested, a satirist; her writing has neither the motive nor the tone of sat-
ire. If she is detached in her attitude toward her characters, this is understandable
in a novelist who sees people in terms of the designs into which they fit (including
the design of the Four Last Things).
One finds the same quality of detachment in Mrs. Sparks treatment of the physi-
cal world that her characters live in. There is about her novels a striking spareness
in the description of sensory experience; people occasionally have sex lives, but
none of them enjoy themselvessex is at best a distracting temptation, at worst
an abrasive emotional complication. The same is true of other pleasures of the
fleshfood, drink, the natural world may compose the physical circumstances of
a scene, but they are not dwelt on, and nobody savours them much. That this
spareness is intended rather than a limitation of literary gifts the novels every-
where demonstrate; Mrs. Spark can make the physical world as concrete and
emotive as she likes, on those occasions she likes.
Consider this passage, the last sentences of The Ballad of Peckham Rye: "But it
was a sunny day for November, and, as he drove swiftly past the Rye, he saw the
children playing there and the women coming home from work with their shop-
ping-bags, the Rye for an instant looking like a cloud of green and gold, the peo-
ple seeming to ride it, as you might say there was another world than this."
And so Mrs. Spark does say. Conversion seems to have seized her, as it sometimes
does imaginative persons, with a kind of impatience with the material. The world
of children and shopping-bags is all right for those who like it, but there is an-
other world than this, a world of minds and souls, in which the really important
human experiences take place.
Her episodes are therefore people talking, rather than people acting, or touch-
ing, or feeling, or even seeing. For this reason critics have quite rightly compared
her work to that of Henry Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett; she is in the tradition
of the intellectual novel, in which what matters is the play of ideas and experi-
ences upon the mind, and the interplay of minds upon each other.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Mrs. Sparks new novel, is very much in this tradi-
tion. Like each of her previous novels, it is both a new departure and a continua-
tion. It is different from the others in that it does without manifestations of the
supernatural; it is similar in being intricately designed, and concerned with reli-
gious ideas.
Miss Brodie is a Scottish schoolmistress who dedicates her prime (for her, the
years after 40) to the moulding of her students lives and wills. They will be, she
tells them, the crme (Miss Brodie is addicted to resounding clichs); and in the
splendid, romantic lives that Miss Brodie plans for her disciples she will live vi-
cariously a life more splendid than her own. She is a romantic idealist, of the au-
thoritarian kindone of her girls later remarks, "Shes a born Fascist"and the
Brodie set under her powerful influence becomes a collective extension of her
ego, "a body," one of them thinks, "with Miss Brodie for the head in unified
compliance to the destiny of Miss Brodie, as if God had willed them to birth for
this purpose."
So long as Miss Brodies plans for her girls are only fantasies, the girls are willing
enough to be the "Brodie set." But when it becomes clear that she seriously in-
tends that the prettiest girl in the set shall become a surrogate mistress of the
man Miss Brodie loves, in order that Miss Brodie may vicariously enjoy him, then
one of the girls "betrays" her ("betrays" in quotes because the meaning of personal
loyalty and betrayal is one of the themes of the book), and the collective, willed
destiny of the whole becomes the separate destinies of the individuals.
The novel is religious in two ways. As in many of Mrs. Sparks books, the principal
observer and commentator, a girl called Sandy Stranger, is a Catholic convert; the
theme of her own story is the theme of authority found and rejected, of Miss Bro-
dies power versus the power of the Church, and her education through the novel
is an education in the meaning of authority. But it is also religious in its treatment
of Miss Brodie. The setting of the novel is Edinburgh, and the spirit of Calvin
broods over the action. Miss Brodie is an inverted expression of that spirit: "just
as an excessive sense of guilt can drive to excessive action, so was Miss Brodie
driven to it by an excessive lack of guilt."
The authority that Miss Brodie wields is a warped and egocentric predestinarian-
ism, Calvinism without the religion: "She thinks she is Providence," Sandy ob-
serves, "she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end."
Out of this delusion arises the principal conflict of the novel, the conflict between
Miss Brodies notion of the girls as the instruments of her personal destiny, and
the girls natural, individual drives toward individual fulfilment.
Her attempt at playing Providence fails, as it must, and her girls desert her for
the more attractive business of being themselves, but the force of her effort has
had its effects, however ironically unlike her intentions. In the end a visitor asks
Sandy, now a nun, "What were the main influences of your school days?" and she
answers: "There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime."
There seems little left to say about the book by way of peroration. It is as good as
anything Mrs. Spark has done and, as should be clear by now, that means to me
that it is very good indeed. It is intelligent, witty, and beautifully constructed, and
it is newlike her previous novels it is a fresh assault upon the limits of the novel
form. Mrs. Sparks powers of invention are apparently inexhaustible, and these
unique and impressive powers make her a novelist worth taking very seriously.
"In the Great Tradition: The Prime of Muriel Spark," in The Commonweal, Vol. 75,
No. 22, February 23, 1962, pp. 562-63, 567-68.
"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Spark, Muriel: Samuel Hynes (review date 23 February 1962)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed.
Brigham Narins. Vol. 94. Thomson Gale, 1997. eNotes.com. 2006. 29 Oct, 2006 <http://lit.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/
prime-miss-jean-brodie-spark-muriel/samuel-hynes-review-date-23-february-1962>
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Muriel Spark Bridges the Credibility Gap
Muriel Spark is certainly one of the most productive novelists writing today. Since
1957 she has published eight novels in addition to verse and short stories.
Though all have received critical attention, amounting sometimes to little more
than critical puzzlement, most interest has been paid neither to her first nor her
latest fiction, but one of the central novels: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962).
For example, a few seasons ago it was adapted for the London stage, where it was
a popular success, and it was subsequently made available to American audiences
in New York City. It has most recently been made into a motion picture which has
received approving critical notice.
Critics have not acclaimed The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as Muriel Sparks "master-
piece"; neither does the novel contain sensational depictions of sex or violence
which would explain the attention it has been given. Indeed, the reasons for the
notice received by this novel rather than Muriel Sparks other fiction are not im-
mediately apparent. Reasons there are, however. And though they satisfy the
curiosity of those who ponder such questions, they also enlighten more serious
readers who seek answers to the puzzles posed by the authors imaginative, but
sometimes thematically baffling, work. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, occupying a
central position in her novels to date, is the answer book to the earlier novels and
a guidebook to those that follow. Dealing with the same questions (themes) as The
Comforters (1957), Robinson (1958), Memento Mori (1958), The Ballad of Peckham Rye
(1960), and The Bachelors (1961), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie moves away from
the depiction of unbelievable supernatural forces and towards the embodiment of
out-of-the-ordinary characteristics in quite credible characters. Bizarre, surpris-
ing, and imaginative her novels remain. But with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark leaves the incredible world of invisible, chanting voices and un-
traceable telephone callers. Though she continues to sketch a world which is filled
with demons and to imply that there is a vast reality which is not perceived by the
ordinary man, the supernatural is no longer found outside the individual but
within man himself. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie retains both the fun and serious-
ness which were so entertaining and confusing in the early novels, but it presents
them in what is to most readers, more acceptable, believable, "realistic" form.
Muriel Sparks movement towards credibility is most apparent in the main char-
acter: Miss Jean Brodie. Though it is not difficult to imagine her walking the
streets of Edinburgh or conducting a class in history, she does the same sort of
things as the demoniac Dougal Douglas in The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Everyone
who knows her recognizes her difference, yet she is undoubtedly real in an ordi-
nary sense: "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."
If Jean Taylor of Memento Mori meditates on the Four Last Things to be ever
remembered, Miss Jean Brodie is concerned with those first things to be consid-
ered, for she is dealing with the young, those who are just beginning life. And she
affects them in much the same, if less mysterious, way as the phone calls affect the
aged in the authors earlier novel.
Miss Jean Brodie is set apart from ordinary people because she, in her prime, has
come to realize the unity between the physical and spiritual sides of mans nature.
As she says, "I ought to know, because my prime has brought me instinct and
insight, both." Instinct and insight apparently give one an extraordinary vision of
the world, which would undoubtedly please Dougal Douglas of The Ballad of
Peckham Rye. In fact, Miss Brodie seems to echo him when she says, "Where
there is no vision, the people perish." Caroline Rose of The Comforters would cer-
tainly see the similarity between instinct and insight and the natural and super-
natural orders which she comes to know. Miss Brodie, like other Muriel Spark
characters who precede her, unifies the ordinary and extraordinary levels of real-
ity, and demoniacally influences the lives of those around her. She is an ordinary
school teacher in a quite ordinary school for girls, the Marcia Blaine School in
Edinburgh, Scotland. But when she renounces the world and dedicates her prime
to her girls, she manages, by most unusual and extraordinary means, to transfig-
ure the commonplace. And indeed, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace is
the title of the book eventually written by Sandy Stranger, Miss Brodies favourite
pupil.
Most of the novel is concerned with Miss Brodies moulding of the girls as she
gives them the benefit of her prime. By her unorthodox teaching methods she
attempts to develop in each of them vision, a rich awareness of the enormity of
the world and its possibilities. For instance, she teaches the history of World War I
by telling the girls the story of Hugh, her lover, who was a soldier in that war. She
teaches geography and history by describing her own vacations in Italy where she
has seen Mussolinis troops marching through the streets. She presents the sub-
ject matter, but she surrounds the facts with an atmosphere of adventure. By
combining historical fact with personal reminiscence a sense of a multileveled
reality existing and operating simultaneously is given by Miss Brodie to the girls.
She urges them to define themselves not only in terms of the ordinary world but
also in terms of the romance which accompanies it.
Miss Brodies relation to her students and to her peers, therefore, is perhaps best
understood as a relation of the "whole" person in whom instinct and insight are
united, to the "fragmented" person, who is deficient either in instinct or insight or
both. She conceives of her purpose as a teacher to be that of leading her students
toward their "prime," when instinct and insight might be united in a total life-
gesture, and the personality might attain fulfilment. Miss Brodies explanation of
her job is properly, if curiously, pedantic. She explains:
The word "education" comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It
means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in
the pupils soul. [My job] is a leading out of knowledge, and that is true educa-
tion as is proved by the root meaning.
Miss Brodie deals with the inside of a person by cultivating his nature as a human
being. She does not "thrust a lot of information into the pupils head" like other
teachers. She deals with knowledge which is a part of the human makeup but
which often lies unawakened and undisturbed. However, because she understands
insight and instinct only in terms of her own experience, her girls tend to turn
into images of her. And Teddy Lloyd, art teacher at the Marcia Blaine School, can
only paint likenesses of her after coming into contact with her vision.
The measure of her success, then, is to be found in the effect she has on her stu-
dents, the degree to which she energizes the components of instinct and insight,
and the response which the students make to this educative process.
The means are as daring as her vision, as is seen, for instance, in her plans for
Sandy Stranger and Rose Stanley, her "crme de la crme." Acting as dictator,
Miss Brodie has educated each girl for a particular role. Faithful to her philoso-
phy of education, she has not thrust these roles upon the girls, but has led out
from them their particular ability. And when her plans are fulfilled, she, the rep-
resentation of total vision, will stand back watching the various expressions of her
vision acting and interacting in a visible re-creation of the whole. Miss Brodie is
vision in its abstract (supernatural) form; Sandy, Rose, and Teddy Lloyd are vi-
sion in a physical (ordinary) form. As Sandy understands, they are "as a body with
Miss Brodie for the head." Rose, who early in life is famous for sex, is to become
the lover of Teddy Lloyd, the art master. Though Miss Brodie herself was once
involved with him, she renounces him and leaves Rose, who in Miss Brodies
mind represents "instinct," to sleep with him. Sandy, on the other hand, is famous
for her small, almost non-existent eyes. To Miss Brodie she represents "insight."
Therefore, she is chosen by Miss Brodie to act as informant on the affair between
Teddy Lloyd and Rose.
When the plan is made, Sandy is intrigued by it. "There was a whiff of sulphur
about the idea which fascinated Sandy in her present mind." The sulphurous at-
mosphere and Miss Brodies ethereal beauty at this time remind one that she is
one of Muriel Sparks demons: forces, sometimes in human form and sometimes
not, which exist simply to disrupt the ordinary and habitual, to confuse the tradi-
tional and acceptable, to blend the commonplace and the supernatural so that a
person is forced to redefine himself in the context of an environment, or reality,
filled with more possibilities than he had heretofore imagined. Their purpose is
not to destroy or harm, though sometimes they do so. Neither is their purpose to
please or to help, though they do that too. In short, their purpose is to "transfig-
ure the commonplace." Miss Brodies actions are particularly reminiscent of a
Dougal Douglas. Ronald Bridges of The Bachelors might have described her as
he did others, as little more than a creature of the air. She has made her exit
from the stage of action and is simply directing the drama from the wings.
Eventually, however, Sandy rejects Miss Brodie. The irony lies in the fact that in
rejecting her, Sandy re-creates her. In an attempt to destroy her, she becomes
her. Sandy first tries to destroy Miss Brodies plan for Rose and Teddy Lloyd to
become lovers. She does so by sleeping with Teddy Lloyd herself, thus coming to
represent, like Miss Brodie, the union of insight and instinct. Rose happily relin-
quishes her role, for without insight she has not understood Miss Brodies plan.
The author tells us that she "made a good marriage soon after she left school. She
shook off Miss Brodies influence as a dog shakes pond-water from its coat."
But Sandy has understood toward what extremities Miss Brodies nature worked;
and her understanding that Miss Brodie stands outside of ordinary reality and
attempts to direct the lives of others causes Sandy to rebel. "She thinks she is
Providence, thought Sandy, she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the
beginning and the end." Sandy, unlike Caroline Rose in The Comforters, finds no
comfort in being simultaneously freed from ordinary restraints and controlled by
extraordinary forces. She does recognize that Miss Brodies influence is a liberat-
ing one, however. She later realizes that the "creeping vision of disorder" that she
received from Miss Brodie "had not been without its beneficent and enlarging
effects." Unlike Caroline, who accepts, Sandy rejectsor tries to. In a second ef-
fort to reject Miss Brodie Sandy goes to Miss Mackay and accuses Miss Brodie of
being a fascist, which is her way of saying that Miss Brodie has tried to control
and dictate the lives of all her set. Miss Brodie, who has been an admirer of Mus-
solini, is removed from her position at Marcia Blaine School.
The third step in Sandys rebellion is her renunciation of the world by becoming a
nun. Miss Brodie is horrified by the act, since she is no admirer of Roman Catho-
lics, though "she was by temperament suited only to the Roman Catholic Church."
She does not realize that Sandy has closely followed her own course. Both Miss
Brodie and Sandy withdraw from the world and give of their experience and
knowledge, their vision, to others. Miss Brodie devotes her prime to her set;
Sandy gives to the world her widely acclaimed book, The Transfiguration of the
Commonplace, a treatise on the nature of moral perception. Sister Helena of the
Transfiguration, as Sandy comes to be known, seems eventually to realize that she
has become another Miss Brodie, for she says that the main influence in her life
was "Miss Jean Brodie in her prime."
Sister Helena is not a nun at peace with the world, for the knowledge that by her
betrayal she simply replaced Miss Brodie rather than destroyed her does not
bring tranquillity. Even the book, which visitors often come to discuss, she finds
difficult to talk about, for it is, apparently, a study of Miss Brodies "vision." Miss
Brodie was right when she said, "Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she
is mine for life."
Miss Brodies success with Sandy and the other girls is demonstrated when in
retrospect they come to understand what she was teaching them. Sandy, for ex-
ample, realizes that the world she was introduced to as a child was not the one
others saw. "And many times throughout her life Sandy knew with a shock, when
speaking to people whose childhood had been in Edinburgh, that there were
other peoples Edinburghs which were quite different from hers, and with which
she held only the names of districts and streets and monuments in common." One
of her visitors at the convent describes the Edinburgh he knew as a child as cold
and grey and his teachers as "supercilious Englishmen, or near-Englishmen,
with third-rate degrees." Sandy could not remember ever having questioned the
quality of her teachers degrees, and the school had always been "lit with the sun
or, in winter, with a pearly north light." That city, so dreary and so ordinary to
many, was not so to Sandy as a child. She remembers later how "dark heavy Edin-
burgh itself could suddenly be changed into a floating city when the light was a
special pearly white and fell upon one of the gracefully fashioned streets." For
Sandy the commonplace was transfigured.
Eunice Gardner, to whom Miss Brodie once said, "You are an Ariel," describes
Miss Brodie to Sister Helena as "marvellous fun when she was in her prime."
When her stories about Miss Brodie cause her doctor husband to remark that her
upbringing had been rather peculiar, Eunice protests, "But she wasnt mad. She
was as sane as anything. She knew exactly what she was doing." And if Dougal
Douglas is right that "vision is the first requisite of sanity," then Miss Brodie is
quite sane.
Jenny Gray, Sandys best friend, is suddenly reminded of her days as one of the
Brodie set when years later she is standing outside a famous building in Rome
and is "surprised by a reawakening of that same buoyant and airy discovery of sex,
a total sensation which it was impossible to say was physical or mental, only that it
contained the lost and guileless delight of her eleventh year." The significance of
the remembrance is not primarily sexual; it is that she recalls the unified vision of
physical and spiritual worlds which she found with Miss Brodie, a vision which
made life vibrant and rich and exciting.
But vision is not always possible. Monica Douglas, for example, is famous in the
Brodie set for being able to do mathematics in her head. Also, she is easily an-
gered. Miss Brodie objects to Monicas lack of spiritual insight and never makes
her one of her favourites. Miss Brodie explains, "thats why she has a bad temper,
she understands nothing but signs and symbols and calculations. Nothing infuri-
ates people more than their own lack of spiritual insight." Miss Brodies as-
sumption is borne out by Monicas later difficulties with her scientist husband. In
a fit of anger she throws a live coal at his sister, and the scientist demands a sepa-
ration.
Unfortunately, Miss Brodies opinion of Mary Macgregor also proves to be accu-
rate. Miss Brodie describes her as a silent lump, for she is stupid and unfeeling.
She lacks both insight and instinct. Mary never comprehends the world she faces
and is totally unequipped to deal with it. For example, when graduated to the
Senior school, she does surprisingly well at reading Caesars Gallic Wars until
someone explains to her that Latin is not a form of shorthand. She meets death
in the same kind of baffled way. Caught in a hallway into which fire is advancing
from either end, Mary is unable to find an exit and runs from one fire to the
other, distraught and confused. Mary is the epitome of the person who has no
vision at all and is, therefore, totally controlled by the forces around her. Due to
her lack of insight and instinct, she can never sense the richness of life nor deal
with its complexities, for she perceives such a small bit of it.
One of Miss Brodies fellow teachers at the Marcia Blaine School represents an-
other form of the visionless life. Miss Gaunt, as her name implies, is a sharp,
strict, practical, cold, and altogether horrifying person. She has intelligence,
which Mary Macgregor has not, but she has long since renounced anything which
has to do with the physical side of life. Muriel Spark states that "Her head was
very large and bony. Her chest was a slight bulge flattened by a bust bodice, and
her jersey was a dark forbidding green." She is a strict Calvinist, and the reader
feels that the heavy and forbidding image of Edinburgh always looms menacingly
in Miss Gaunts background, in contrast to the lovely floating city it becomes with
the presence of Miss Brodie. Miss Gaunt deals effectively, industriously, and uni-
maginatively with reality. She faces life grimly and determinedly. She has some
degree of insight, but she does not recognize the breadth of life which Miss Bro-
die does, for she has no instinct whatsoever. Consequently, her life is like her
name: gaunt.
Teddy Lloyd, on the other hand, has a great deal of instinct but insufficient in-
sight to become the painter and the man that he would like to be. His instinct is
evident in his sensuality, the basis of his art and perhaps of his life. His affair with
Sandy fulfils her personality, for afterwards she represents not only insight but
also instinct. In reverse, Sandy tries to give him the insight he lacks, but she fails.
When more and more of his portraits begin to look like Miss Brodie, she tells
him, "Why are you obsessed with that woman? Cant you see shes ridiculous?" He
refuses to listen, and his vision is incomplete, just as his body is incomplete (he
has only one arm). As a half-personality he cannot rebel as Sandy eventually does.
He can only go on painting Miss Brodies, never doing the painting which would
make a statement comparable to Sandys Transfiguration of the Commonplace.
The design of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie differs somewhat from that of Muriel
Sparks previous novels. Once again she creates a group of diverse individuals
who are presented with the same problem, but who react to it in different ways.
But in contrast to the preceding novels, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie does not
show the characters developing in an uninterrupted line from a point where their
lives are dull and ordinary, to an encounter with an extraordinary, sometimes
incredible, event, to an existence either characterized by a heightened awareness
of oneself and the world or a shocking diminution of life. Instead, early in the
novel the girls of the Brodie set are shown to the reader as they eventually come
to be. By a complex handling of time the author simultaneously creates two im-
ages of the girls. We see them in their prime and we see them creating it.
The point of view is, in effect, a double perspective. Miss Brodie, in her prime,
tells the set about her past in order to give them vision. The girls in their prime
look back at their past associations with Miss Brodie. By drawing an analogy be-
tween the girls and Miss Brodie, the authors theme is "vision" itself. She offers
the reader a statement about the nature of reality by depicting a commonplace
situation as it is transfigured by a supernatural figure. Miss Brodie offers her set
vision by colouring the ordinary facts she teaches by the force of her own extraor-
dinary personality.
The parallel between teacher and student resembles the relationship between the
voices and typewriter of The Comforters and Caroline, about whom they are writ-
ing. The voices give her vision by putting her into a novel. Later she too writes a
book in which she records what she has learnedi.e., her vision. Similarly, Muriel
Sparks theme in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Miss Brodies vision. In turn, Miss
Brodie is shown relating her somewhat limited vision by teaching her set, and
finally Sandy incorporates her broader vision in The Transfiguration of the
Commonplace.
In two earlier novels Muriel Spark has jumped ahead in time to show the final
result of certain bizarre events. In Robinson January Marlow is shown safely re-
turned to Chelsea before the reader knows what she has experienced. In The
Ballad of Peckham Rye the interrupted wedding of Humphrey Place and Dixie
Morse begins the novel, and the reader is told that the cancellation is due to
Dougal Douglas, though he has not yet entered the narrative. The structural de-
vice of disordering the chronology of events becomes far more complex in The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. By choosing to treat the plot in such a manner, the au-
thor seems to suggest that the influence of the supernatural does not spend itself
in one incredible event, but that it surrounds an individual throughout his life-
time. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie the reader sees what the girls become as well
as how they began. In the design of the novel, one observes the gap between the
two states-of-being lessen and, ultimately, close. The unremitting influence of the
supernatural, in this case Miss Jean Brodie, is underscored by the inexorable
movement of the plot to an already announced end, "towards what extremities
her nature worked her," and the ambiguities of Sandys response to the demoniac
teacher.
Just as Caroline struggles against the pre-determination of her life by the myste-
rious voices in The Comforters, so Sandy Stranger rebels against a quite visible Miss
Brodie and her effort to dominate Sandys future as well as her present. She re-
fers to Miss Brodie as a fascist, meaning that the latter insists upon being a dicta-
tor. Finally it occurs to Sandy that Miss Brodie has made the mistake of seeing
herself not just as another Mussolini, but as God himself. She sets herself up as
Providence, directing, controlling, shaping the girls. Ultimately she assumes the
power of life and death over them, and she sends Joyce Emily to Spain to fight in
the Civil War. Sandy realizes that when Miss Brodie places herself in such a posi-
tion, she limits what is possible. She limits potential reality. She narrows the world
of her girls when she makes herself the most complete expression of that world.
Indeed, Sandy eventually realizes that Miss Brodie is not Providence; she is not
the God of Calvin; she does not see the beginning and the end. And she recog-
nizes Miss Brodies "defective sense of self-criticism," which can be called an "ex-
cessive lack of guilt," as Samuel Hynes refers to it in "The Prime of Muriel Spark,"
Commonweal, February 16, 1962. Thus, Sandy must reject Miss Brodie, for it
becomes evident that even Miss Brodie is incomplete. Sandys own insight and
instinct, plus the benefit of Miss Brodies prime, ironically give her a perception
of a reality far more extensive than Miss Brodies, broad as it is. Therefore, Sandy
removes her allegiance from Miss Brodie and gives it to God by becoming a nun.
But Sandys new allegiance fails to bring peace and tranquillity as the reader
might expect it to.
She clutched the bars of the grille as if she wanted to escape from the dim parlour
beyond, for she was not composed like the other nuns who sat, when they re-
ceived their rare visitors, well back in the darkness with folded hands. But Sandy
always leaned forward and peered, clutching the bars with both hands, and the
other sisters remarked it and said that Sister Helena had too much to bear from
the world since she had published her psychological book which was so unexpect-
edly famed.
Indeed, she does have much to bear from the world, but it is not fame that dis-
turbs her. It is vision itself. Just as Ronald Bridges suffers intensely as his under-
standing of the nature of the world grows, so Sandy the nun realizes with a meas-
ure of distress the extent of the goodness and evil in this world and other worlds.
Her insight and her instinct, given to her from birth, but nourished and devel-
oped either by Miss Brodie or in reaction against her, combine in Sandy to give
her vision, which simultaneously disturbs and consoles. Certainly it transfigures
for her the commonplace. Thus Sandy Stranger, who was a stranger in this world
until she grew in understanding of reality, becomes Sister Helena of the Trans-
figuration.
"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Muriel Spark Bridges the Credibility Gap," in Ari-
zona Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 3, 1969, pp. 217-28.
"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Spark, Muriel: Ann B. Dobie (essay date 1969)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Brigham Narins.
Vol. 94. Thomson Gale, 1997. eNotes.com. 2006. 29 Oct, 2006 <http://lit.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/
prime-miss-jean-brodie-spark-muriel/ann-b-dobie-essay-date-1969>
Muriel Sparks Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl
It was with a sense of relief that Muriel Spark enthusiasts greeted The Prime of Miss
Jean Brodie, for here at last was the concretely real uncluttered by the mysteriously
occult, the supernatural, the fantastic. The Comforters had been one of the most
puzzling of first novels; one was not altogether sure what to make of it. Robinson
was almost equally puzzling, though not as complex. Memento Mori with its social
and psychological realism was absolutely lucid by comparison, notwithstanding
the identity of its mysterious caller. But with The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The
Bachelors readers were once again confronted with Mrs. Spark playing fast and
loose with the empirical world. It was easy enough to believe with Humphry Place
in The Ballad of Peckham Rye that "there was another world than this." But how
could that other world be reconciled with this concrete one within the form of a
single novel? It was as if Mrs. Spark were asking the reader to assent to the liter-
alness of inexplicable supernatural events, while at the same time the novels
purely naturalistic levels seemed to make such an assent impossible. The result
was an uneasy feeling that Mrs. Sparks two worlds kept cancelling each other out.
Among other novels, The Bachelors offers a good example of this phenomenon.
While the reader is apparently being asked to believe that a benign God, a "vigi-
lant manipulator" as he is called in the novel, is instrumental in the punishment
of Patrick Seton, the agonized existential meditations of Ronald Bridges have
such an authentic ring to them that the reader finds it very difficult to resist them
or deny their validity.
It was with some sense of relief, then, that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was
greeted, for here was not the impossible demand of assimilating the supernatural
in a realistic context. Moreover, in the title of Sister Helenas famous treatise on
the nature of "moral perception," many critics seemed to find the key to Muriel
Sparks past performances"The Transformation of the Commonplace." How-
ever, as neat as that phrase may be, it does not clarify Mrs. Sparks fictional prac-
tices. At most it indicates that her protagonists acquire a growing awareness of
themselves in relation to the world around them. But the notion of the "develop-
ing character" is certainly nothing new in fiction, certainly nothing unique with
Mrs. Spark. Nor does the transformation-of-the-commonplace approach to her
fiction even help to explain the novel in which the phrase appeared. Some years
ago, Josephine Jacobsen, in "A Catholic Quartet," Christian Scholar, 67 (1964),
attempted to do just that in an appraisal that seems strangely out of keeping with
the tone of the novel itself: "After the maiming exposure to Miss Brodies ego,
which, under the banner of Truth, Freedom and Beauty, has disclosed itself in
cruelty, stupidity and ravaging egotism, Sandy comes to feel that what is essential
is to see the commonplace in light of grace. The commonplace unilluminated is
stifling; the fabrications of the ego are cruel and basically stupid; but by transfigu-
ration, the materials of the commonplace come into their proper radiance."
Transfiguring in the light of grace the materials of the commonplace into their
"proper radiance" does not seem a conclusion that one can come to about The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, especially when one considers that in the Church Sandy
Stranger found "fascists" far worse than Jean Brodie, and especially when one
considers that at novels conclusion Sister Helena is left clutching the bars of her
grille "more desperately than ever."
This essentially religious, transformation-of-the-commonplace explanation does
not explain, for the novel leaves totally undeveloped the nature of Sandy
Strangers conversion. Moreover, when one attempts to supply the novel with the
ostensible religious significance that in fact is lacking, one must conclude that
while Jean Brodie is a free-wheeling Justified Sinner in the tradition of Calvinist
mythology, Sandy Stranger is, ironically, a child after John Calvins own heart.
Karl Miller, himself a native of Edinburgh, made this point in his review of the
novel in The New Statesman, November 3, 1961. In seeming to credit Sandy
"with exactly the sense of joy and salvation the dangers of which have already
been expounded," says Miller, the reader is confronted with a "nasty surprise
which makes the author seem to slide back before our eyes into antinomian Cal-
vinism, a justified sinner with the sourness and solipsism of her kind." Mr. Miller
consequently concludes: "Catholicism is queer in Edinburgh, but it cant be as
queer as that." More recently, in the most extensive article to date on The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie ["The Uses and Abuses of Omniscience: Method and Meaning in
Muriel Sparks The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," Critical Quarterly (Autumn 1970)],
David Lodge offers another religious explanation (though also partly "novelistic")
in an attempt to explain Sandy Strangers enigmatic motives. He says that the
novels "assessment of Miss Brodie is, in the last analysis, an ethical and theologi-
cal matter." Professor Lodge says, in effect, that Miss Brodie is punished for play-
ing God, for creating myths out of all her fictions, in contrast to Sandy, who, in
her growing moral awareness has learned the difference between "fiction" and
"truth." Though Professor Lodges conclusions are questionable, for reasons which
I will develop in due course, he is the only critic I can recall who has noted that
Sandy Strangers "moral perceptiveness" was intended by Mrs. Spark to be ironic.
This is a very important point, one that helps considerably to clear up some of the
puzzles of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. If Professor Lodge had followed through
on this point, one thinks that he might have come to different conclusions.
Another recent commentator, Ann Dobie, says [in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:
Muriel Spark Bridges the Credibility Gap," Arizona Quarterly (1969)] that the
theme of the novel is "vision itself," a vision that serves to "transfigure the com-
monplace" by providing Sandy Stranger with a knowledge of the inextricable
mixture in this world of good and evil. According to Miss Dobie, Sandy has ac-
quired this vision, "which simultaneously disturbs and consoles," from Jean Bro-
die. As far as it goes, this idea is true, of course, provided one insists that the
principle of evil is no less active in Sandy Stranger than it is in Jean Brodie; for if
as a result of a growing moral awareness Sandy determined to punish Miss Brodie
for playing God, it is obvious that Sandy herself is guilty of the same transgres-
sion. Indeed, Sandy Stranger is in the long line of moral blackmailers to be found
in Muriel Sparks novels, whose motives on close examination turn out to be very
private and essentially malicious, not as moral or religious as they pretend to be.
The evidence in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie indicates that Mrs. Spark was fully
aware of Sandys duplicity.
The attempt to assign "real" motives in the novel is a game of almost endless
speculation, and serves mainly to point up the novels central "failure." I put the
word in quotes because I suggest that to read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as if it
were a work of psychological realism is to necessarily miss its real significance.
True enough, in its realistic technique the novel seems to demand such a reading;
but every attempt in this direction requires a great deal of explaining in order to
accommodate the novels apparent gaps and obvious ambiguities. I suggest that
readers were misled primarily because Mrs. Sparks usual occult and supernatural
paraphernalia were missing from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Readers failed to
notice, it seems, that in this novel Mrs. Spark was employing an even more char-
acteristic technique: namely the novel as parable and allegory. She was also in-
dulging her sense of humour to such subtle effect, it seems, that few saw Sandy
Stranger as a comic figure. The movie version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie may
attest to the fact that the novel was taken far too seriously. In fact, the novel was
an extended joke, a joke directed at Muriel Spark herself. Its final effect is am-
bivalent, no doubt, but not ambiguous once its point is seen.
In an Atlantic Monthly review of The Mandelbaum Gate Frank Kermode wrote:
"The suggestion is, in Mrs. Sparks novels, that a genuine relation exists between
the forms of fiction and the forms of the world, between the novelists creation
and Gods." Consequently, he says that all of her novels "are in a sense novels
about the novel, inquiries into the relation between fiction and truth." If there
were no other evidence available (and there happens to be considerable), Mrs.
Sparks first novel, The Comforters, amply attests to the fact that she was extremely
interested in the question of how a work of fiction, which is essentially a "lie," can
be a vehicle for the truth. The answer is relatively simple, though no doubt phi-
losophically profound: a fiction is true in the same way that the parables of Christ
were true. Mrs. Spark wrote in Twentieth Century, 170 (1961) "Fiction to me is a
kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind its not true. Some kind of
truth emerges from it, but its not fact." In other words, as Aristotle responded to
Plato, a universal truth is no less true because it is not particular. As for allegories,
Mrs. Spark had already written a blatant one, Robinson, as well as the partially
allegorical The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Indeed, from one perspective the whole
of The Comforters itself was an allegory of free will versus determinism. Up to and
including the writing of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, therefore, there is sufficient
evidence to believe that Mrs. Spark seldom conceived of characters and events as
"real"; they are instead, for the most part, emblematic of the abstract ideas, the
universal truths, that are the occasion of her novels. She once said in an interview:
"I keep in my mind specifically that what I am writing is fiction because I am in-
terested in truthabsolute truth." One of the major purposes of The Comforters
was to illustrate how fictional forms could express absolute truths. The evidence
from several novels, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, seems clearly to sug-
gest that Mrs. Spark was never convinced that she was the truth-teller as novelist
that she wanted to be. To simplify for the moment, it can be said that The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie was written to examine once again the relation between fiction
and truth, though not as profoundly as it had been examined in The Comforters or
even in The Ballad of Peckham Rye, for that matter.
It is more complicated than this, however, for a remarkable thing about Mrs.
Spark is that whenever she deals with this particular question, she almost inevita-
bly considers the problems of Catholic belief and Freudian myths. There is a
sense in which nearly all of her novels are "about" these three subjects in greater
or lesser degree. But they are seldom treated separately; instead they are insepa-
rably linked and interrelated in a single intellectual-aesthetic construct. Consider
The Comforters, for example: clearly the novel is about the relation between fiction
and truth; it is just as clearly a novel about coming to terms with the problems of
Catholic beliefs; and though the nature of Caroline Roses neurosis is not made
very clear (it would be explicit in Robinson), there are sufficient clues in the novel
to suggest that it is primarily sexual, the most singular one being the necessity of
Carolines physically touching the loathsome carnality of Mrs. Hogg in the cli-
matic drowning episode. Mrs. Sparks three "subjects," as it were (novelistic, reli-
gious, Freudian), are almost perfectly balanced in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It
is no wonder, then, that many readers have thought of it primarily as a religious
novel, while others have considered it essentially a realistic character study. But
no one as yet has fully noticed that its major perspective is "novelistic." Professor
Lodge has come the closest to this understanding, but he was unfortunately way-
laid by asking the wrong question: namely, what is supposed to be the readers
final judgment of Jean Brodies character? Such a question assumes that the novel
is a realistic character study. I suggest instead that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is
a parable, and a highly autobiographical one, of the artist as a young girl. Fur-
ther, it seems that in this novel at least, Mrs. Spark believes that any creator of
fiction who claims to be a truth-teller is being absurdly even dangerously, preten-
tious.
In the combined characters of Jean Brodie and Sandy Stranger, Mrs. Spark made
what is perhaps her most public confession, so to speak, of herself both as person
and as novelist. I think that Charles Hoyt was correct [in "Muriel Spark: The Sur-
realist Jane Austen," in Contemporary British Novelist, edited by Charles Shapiro,
1965] when he wrote of this novel: "Surely, the conflict which gives the book its
special character, so enigmatic, so wryly amusing and yet profound, is that of Mrs.
Sparks own life." He concludes: "Miss Jean Brodie is Muriel Sparks clearest con-
ception of herself to the present and Sandy Stranger her best insight into her
most dangerous and self-destructive tendencies." Jean Brodie and Sandy Stranger
are not "real" characters in a realistic novel, then; they are allegorical figures in
Mrs. Sparks self-portrait, a portrait of the artist as a young girl.
In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie there are three "artists," none of whom ever tells
the truth, but each of whom is deluded into believing that he does so. Each of
them practices an artistic "economy" (one of Mrs. Sparks most cherished prac-
tices) that serves only to distort reality, to make it impossible to ever perceive the
truth. The most obvious example of such distortion is to be seen in the portraits
of Teddy Lloyd, the one-armed painter (a Freudian joke?). No matter whom he
paints, the finished product always looks like Jean Brodie:
Sandy was fascinated by the economy of Teddy Lloyds method, as she had been
four years earlier by Miss Brodies variation of her love story, when she had at-
tached to her first war-time lover the attributes of the art master and the singing
master who had then newly entered her orbit. Teddy Lloyds method of presenta-
tion was similar, it was economical, and it always seemed afterwards to Sandy that
where there was a choice of various courses, the most economical was the best,
and that the course to be taken was the most expedient and most suitable at the
time for all the objects in hand. She acted on this principle when the time came
for her to betray Miss Brodie.
Four years earlier, when Miss Brodie had begun to fictionalize the great love of
her life by enlarging it with real incidents out of her present experience, "Sandy
was fascinated by this method of making patterns with facts, and was divided be-
tween her admiration for the technique and the personal need to prove Miss
Brodie guilty of misconduct." (It may be interesting to note that Dougal Douglas
employed the same technique in his fictionalized biography of Maria Cheeseman,
but with an important difference: all of Dougals fictions turn out to be surpris-
ingly true in principle if not in fact.) Years later when Miss Brodie tells Sandy
about her affair with Gordon Lowther, the singing master, she concludes by say-
ing, "Well, as I say, that is the whole story." But "Sandy was thinking of something
else. She was thinking that it was not the whole story." Nor was it, of course, for
Jean Brodie was such an inveterate fictionalizer and so solipsistic in the extremity
of her supreme egotism that she was simply out of touch with reality. One of the
consistent ironies of the novel is that while Miss Brodie sets great store by "vision,"
she herself is totally lacking in that attribute. Not only does she fail to discover
who betrayed her, she fails miserably to assess the moral implication of Fascism.
Even after the horrors of World War II, the most she can say is that "Hitler was a
naughty boy." Moreover, her carefully laid plan to live vicariously in the adulter-
ous relationship between Rose Stanley and Teddy Lloyd goes awry because she
fails to perceive the true characters of both Rose and Sandy. In Jean Brodies self-
assured knowingness, one is reminded of Muriel Sparks narrative persona; as
Richard Mayne once called it, "a mother-knows-best dead certainty" (Encounter,
25 [1965]). But there is considerable difference between fictionalizing by making
patterns with facts, as a novelist must, and believing those fictions to be true, as
Miss Brodie does.
Like a novelist, then, Jean Brodie is a story-teller who tells lies. She does not lie
deliberately; indeed, she is unconscious of lying, because she fails to understand
that to arrange facts into patterns is to necessarily distort the truth. Mrs. Spark
herself was aware of this problem, from the time of The Comforters at least. In that
novel it will be recalled that Caroline Rose objects mightily to being a "character"
who is being written into a "novel." At one point she tells Father Jerome: "Its as if
the person was waiting to pounce on some insignificant thought or action, in or-
der to make it signify in a strange distorted way." But Jean Brodie is unaware of
the existence of such an epistemological problem. And so too Sandy Stranger, the
other lying "novelist" in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Sandys case is a more subtle
one, however, and for that reason, possibly, has been largely misunderstood.
Besides constantly fantasizing about love, Sandy actually commits her fictions to
paper, in particular "The Mountain Eyrie: The True Love Story of Miss Jean Bro-
die." In addition to its thematic significance, the word "true" in the title of Sandys
story is ironic in the extreme when one considers her story to be a brilliant mix-
ture of rhetorical modesromantic clichs, vulgar journalese, adolescent slang.
The result is, of course, a hilarious distortion of the truth, whatever it may be.
Throughout the novel, in fact, Sandy never seems capable of reconciling "reality"
(the evidence of her senses) with her innate sense of how things are or ought to
be. In this respect, she differs not at all from Miss Brodie. She cannot believe for
example that Miss Brodie and Hugh Carruthers ever had sexual intercourse be-
cause "their love was above all that." She cannot believe Monicas story of discov-
ering Miss Brodie and Teddy Lloyd embracing in the art room. The only way that
this incident can become "real" for Sandy is to have Monica tell the story over and
over.
Two incidents especially, however, illustrate the gap between the empirical world
and Sandys subjective understanding. In the first, during a rather traumatic field
trip to the Old Town section of Edinburgh, Sandy witnesses a drunken brawl be-
tween a man and a woman. Another woman comes up, takes the man by the arm,
and says, "Ill be your man. From time to time throughout her life Sandy pon-
dered this, for she was certain that the little womans words were Ill be your
man, not Ill be your woman, and it was never explained." The second incident
concerns Sandys friend Jenny, who one day "out walking alone, was accosted by a
man joyfully exposing himself beside the Water of Leith." Sandy is fascinated by
this occurrence, especially Jennys interrogation by a policewoman, and asks
Jenny to tell of it again and again. What disturbs Sandy most is to learn that in
her talks with Jenny the policewoman had pronounced it properly. The result was
that Sandy had to invent a new feeling in Sandy and it put her off the idea of sex
for months. All the more as she disapproved of the pronunciation of the word, it
made her flesh creep, and she plagued Jenny to change her mind and agree that
the policewoman had pronounced the word "nasty" as "nesty." "This gave rise to
an extremely nasty speaking-image for the policewoman." In a word, then, only
rhetoric is "real" to Sandy, a rhetoric that is rooted in a unique, abstracted, solip-
sistic vision. By means of such rhetoric is the commonplace "transformed." And by
such means as this do novelists tell lies by distorting reality. It is certainly not
coincidental that several times Mrs. Spark describes Sandy as having "little pig
eyes," almost non-existent eyes. Professor Lodge is probably correct, therefore, in
saying that as an "inside narrator" Sandy Stranger is unreliable. This being so, it
seems safe to assume that Sister Helenas famous treatise on moral perception was
intended by Mrs. Spark to be a joke. Whether one arranges facts into patterns
according to abstracted rhetorical, aesthetic, or moral principles, one necessarily
distorts the truth.
I have already noted David Lodges assertion that Sandys judgment of Jean Bro-
die, and consequently the readers own judgment, is ethical and religious, that
Miss Brodie is punished for playing God, for creating fictions she literally believes
in. Sandy comes to understand this, says Professor Lodge, because unlike Jean
Brodie, Sandy has learned the difference between fiction and the real world. In
evidence, Professor Lodge notes the symbolic significance of Sandys literally
burying forever in a little cave her fictionalized romance of Miss Brodies love life.
I suggest, however, that it is Muriel Spark, not Sandy Stranger, who perceives the
difference between fiction and truth, and that the novel judges Sandy for pre-
cisely the same reasons that Sandy judges Miss Brodie. Professor Lodge quotes
Christopher Ricks, who complains that Muriel Spark "commits as novelist the sins
she condemns in her characters." Readers of Muriel Spark will feel that the
charge is not unjustified; but in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Mrs. Spark clearly
has her wits about her, for if Miss Brodie becomes the hapless victim of her own
fictional illusions, so too does Sandy Stranger. It might appear that in burying the
manuscript of Miss Brodies love life Sandy abandons her preadolescent fantasies;
in fact, however, she substitutes for them another fiction, a fiction that she subse-
quently acts upon. Having heard all of the delicious details of Jennys great sexual
adventure, Sandy "had quite deserted Alan Breck and Mr. Rochester and all of
the heroes of fiction for the summer term, and fell in love with the unseen po-
licewoman who had questioned Jenny." Subsequently, Sandy imagines herself
Sergeant Anne Greys "right-hand woman in the Force, and they were dedicated
to eliminate sex from Edinburgh and environs." It is Miss Brodies "excessive lack
of guilt" about her own sexuality that Sandy must put a stop to. When Sandy fi-
nally provides Miss Mackay with the handle she needs by revealing Jean Brodies
admiration for Fascism, Miss Mackay says, "I had no idea you felt so serious about
the state of world affairs." To this Sandy replies, "Im not really interested in
world affairs, only in putting a stop to Miss Brodie." Indeed, politics is not a part
of Sandys consciousness. Her chief preoccupation, almost obsessively so, is with
sex.
The point here, however, is not to assign "real" psychological motives for Sandys
puzzling betrayal of Miss Brodie. The point is "novelistic," for in betraying Miss
Brodie Sandy acts out the role of her fictional creation, Sergeant Anne Greys
right-hand woman. Miss Brodie, too, behaves like a fictional character. It is evi-
dent, for example, that she has been corrupted by romantic fiction. Professor
Lodge notes that Jane Eyre is Miss Brodies favourite novel; more importantly
and to the point he notes that her own love life "bears a parodic resemblance" to
that novel. Whatever the nature of the real relationship between the sexes, an
inhabitant of the Twentieth Century would be sorely deluded, as Miss Brodie was,
to be guided by Nineteenth Century fictions. But if Miss Brodie was corrupted by
the rhetoric of romance, Sandy Stranger was equally corrupted by the sleazy
rhetoric of post-Victorian journalese, for all of her adolescent attitudes about sex
are informed by this rhetoric: "In the Sunday newspapers, to which Sandy had
free access, the correct technical phrases were to be found, such as intimacy took
place and plaintiff was in a certain condition. Females who were up for sex were
not called Miss or Mrs., they were referred to by their surnames: Willis was
remanded in custody Roebuck, said Counsel, was discovered to be in a certain
condition." At one extreme, then, in Jean Brodies case, sexuality is corrupted by
the transcendent innocence of romantic rhetoric; at the other extreme, in Sandys
case, it is corrupted by an implicitly dirty-minded newspaper rhetoric. Both, of
course, are distortions of the truth, whatever complex thing it may be. Sandys
burial, then, of her romantic manuscript in that (Freudian) cave is certainly sym-
bolic: it symbolizes the repression of a youthful innocent, spontaneous sexuality, a
repression that is perfectly in keeping with her ultimate vows of chastity as Sister
Helena of the Transfiguration. There is a great irony here, for it seems clear that
Sandy has not been liberated by her conversion. She has not escaped the Calvin-
ism that she desired to reject; indeed, she became its victim, guilt-ridden and
trapped, behind the bars of her grille, in its harsh moral imperatives.
Not only is truth hidden from Sandy behind a veil of false rhetoric, as it is for
Miss Brodie, but also both behave as if the real world itself is based upon novelis-
tic techniques. We have already seen, thanks to Professor Lodge, that in many
ways Miss Brodie recreates in her own love life the story of Jane Eyre, her favour-
ite novel. As for Sandy, besides acting out her fantasy as Sergeant Anne Greys
right-hand woman on the Force, when the time comes for her to betray Miss Bro-
die she acts upon the principles of aesthetic "economy" which she had learned
from both Miss Brodie and Teddy Lloyd. The question is, of course, can moral
judgments, which are rooted in the transcendent absolute, be arrived at by means
of such strictly aesthetic principles? Assuming that both novels and the world
itself have "meanings" which are "true," does one "read" the world as one reads
novels to discover that truth? The suggestion is, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,
that the answer to these questions is no, that it is dangerous to assume that Gods
real world is created on the same aesthetic principles that an author employs in
creating a fictional world. In making such a false assumption, Sandy Stranger
failed to see that art and life are radically different. Mrs. Spark makes this same
point in Memento Mori when Guy Leets is talking to Charmian Colston about her
novels. Charmian says:
"And yet, when I was halfway through writing a novel I always got into a muddle
and didnt know where it was leading me."
Guy thought: She is going to saydear Chairmanshe is going to say, "The
characters seemed to take on a life of their own."
"The characters," said Charmian, "seemed to take control of my pen after awhile.
But at first I always got into a tangle because the art of fiction is very like the
practice of deception."
"And in life," he said, "is the practice of deception in life an art too?"
"In life," she said, "everything is different. Everything is in the Providence of
God."
Ironically, of course, Charmians whole life has been based on deceptions. Even
though she knows that art and life are different, she behaves as if they were the
same. But poor Sandy Stranger is not even aware of the difference. And at novels
end, now Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, something has gone wrong; some-
how she has been trapped, somehow made a victim. She has been victimized by
acting upon her unconscious assumption that art and life make the same kind of
sense and for the same reasons.
Some years ago Charles Hoyt wrote of Mrs. Sparks novels: "The excitement in-
fused into all her best fiction, that quality which I attempted to define at the out-
set, derives from some formidable positive charge of Edinburgh Calvinism against
its opposite, the negative of mystical Catholicism." It seems clear that embodied
in the very structure of many of Mrs. Sparks novels is this unresolved Calvinist-
Catholic dualitythe Calvinist vision of the world as predestined and damned, on
the one hand, versus a liberated Catholic vision of the world as possibilities. And
though this would seem to be a strictly theological problem, more often than not
Mrs. Spark conceptualizes it in Freudian terms, so that the theological and the
Freudian seem irrevocably linked in any given novel. Whether this is done con-
sciously or whether it is instead unconsciously "mythic," so to speak, it is clear
from Robinson, among other works, that Mrs. Spark was thoroughly familiar with
popular Freudian theories. As in Robinson, we find once again in The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie this characteristic Freudian-theological configuration; and
whereas Robinson was a blatant Freudian allegory, one might therefore have rea-
son to believe that Sandy Stranger and Jean Brodie are emblematic of the Alter-
ego and the Id, respectively. They are elements in the personality of the artist as a
young girl, as well as being common coin, it seems, in the patterns of Mrs. Sparks
novels. We find, then, a classic Freudian conflict that in The Comforters and in Rob-
inson finds its resolution in Catholic belief. Only when Caroline Rose forces her-
self to touch Mrs. Hoggs carnality is her liberation complete. Significantly, of
course, this act occurs in a religious context, for in that manner and at that point
the novel proves its contention that Caroline is a free-willing agent in Gods
providential design. Similarly, January Marlow faced the same problem, and re-
solved it by rejecting Miles Robinsons cold rationality and accepting mystical
Mariology, weighted as it is, in the novel, towards the feminine, the irrational, the
creative. Barbara Vaughan, too, made a similar choice, finally liberated in her
adventures on the irrational side of the Mandelbaum Gate, finally accepting the
fact of her sexuality, for "the whole of life is unified under God."
But Sandy Stranger, the artist as a young girl, had not yet been liberated from the
conflict between her Id, Jean Brodie, and her Alter-ego, Sergeant Anne Grey and
the forbidding religion of Calvin. She had not yet discovered, as the artist as a
middle-aged woman obviously had, the syncretic possibilities of mystical Catholi-
cism. True to her instincts as an artist, however, she nevertheless realized that
here at the deeper levels of the lawless Id was the probable source of creative en-
ergy; and thus its "beneficent and enlarging effects." In Catholicism Mrs. Spark
seems to have found her identity, both as a novelist and as an individual. But in
spite of the self-assured tone of her narrative persona, her novels indicate that
hers was not an easy faith. It required living with paradoxes and impossible con-
tradictions. What better way to communicate the impossibilities of faith than in
the symbol of a convert nun with imperfect "vision," desperately clutching the bars
of her grille?
"Muriel Sparks Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl," in Renascence, Vol. XXIV,
No. 4, Summer, 1972, pp. 213-23.
"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Spark, Muriel: Gerry S. Laffin (essay date Summer 1972)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Brigham
Narins. Vol. 94. Thomson Gale, 1997. eNotes.com. 2006. 29 Oct, 2006 <http://lit.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/
prime-miss-jean-brodie-spark-muriel/gerry-s-laffin-essay-date-summer-1972>
Moral Vision in Muriel Sparks The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Sparks novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, is an economical treatise on
moral perception which exemplifies not only the necessity of such perception, but
also the terrible responsibility accompanying its acquisition. This relationship,
arising from the close association between knowledge and action, is central to the
conflict of the book and is reflected in its very structure. To understand how the
novel itself becomes a treatise on moral perception, I shall examine three dis-
cernible points of view: that of Jean Brodie herself, that of Sandy Stranger, and
that of the narrator (or point of view, properly speaking). Finally, I will move
from the work itself to examine the relationship between the author and the
novel.
From the beginning of Muriel Sparks novel, the reader is invited to view Jean
Brodie as a God-like character, a teacher-saviour surrounded by her faithful dis-
ciples whom she has chosen as the recipients of her saving message and one of
whom will eventually betray her. Sandy Stranger says: "She thinks she is Provi-
dence, she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and end."
Whether Jean perceives herself in this way or not is uncertain, but she acts as if
she were a kind of God: the God of Providence in her attempts to shape, direct,
and control the lives of her charges even after they are no longer officially hers
and God the Creator, who, in a sense, fashions a world for herself and populates
it with creatures of her own imagining.
Within the real world in which Jean lives and moves, she has created another
world, a world as it should be as opposed to the world which is. Consequently,
Miss Brodies girls are as much a product of her fancy and imagination as they
are real flesh-and-blood students at Marcia Blaines Academy. They seem to have
been chosen not for any particular, common characteristics, but according to a
principle of plenitude: one is good at math; one is noted for her voice and her
ability to recite; one for her eyes; one is famous for sex; one provides comic relief.
Other characters, such as Miss Mackay, Gordon Lowther, Teddy Lloyd, and the
Gaunt sisters, are also transformed and recreated by Jean Brodies fancy. The
more removed from present reality they actually are, as is Hugh, Jeans lover
killed in the war, the more protean they become in adopting the shapes necessary
for Jean Brodies current vision.
This vision is at once Jeans strength and weakness. It allows her to transcend the
mundane, to see values beyond the merely practical. At the same time, however, it
is confused, and she fails to distinguish between life and art; that is to say, what
ought to be prudential judgments become for her aesthetic judgments. Thus the
vision which leads her to regard Giotto as the greatest painter (and to prescribe
that view for others) is the same vision that prompts her to admire the order
which Fascism imposes upon its subjects. She is blind to the essential evils of Fas-
cism and comes to no stronger conclusion than that Hitler was a bit naughty.
Because she confuses aesthetic judgments with moral ones, it is not surprising
that how far a window should be opened or how one should comport oneself are
just as important to Jean as are larger political questions. Just as her own affair
with Gordon Lowther seems to have no moral dimension, her plan that Rose
Stanley should become Teddy Lloyds lover and that Sandy Stranger should be
the one to bring Jean the news is devised without any consideration of the moral
rightness or wrongness of the act. Such questions are irrelevant to Jean: "Just as
an excessive sense of guilt can drive people to excessive action, so was Miss Brodie
driven to it by an excessive lack of guilt." Right and wrong are the concerns of the
Miss Mackays of the world, and Jean is careful not to let their world impinge on
hers. Unfortunately, she does not see the implications of her own vision in the
lives of others who, no matter how she conceives of them, live in the real world as
well. Despite her betrayal and final abandonment, Jean never gains any insight
into what has really happened to her. Without the requisite moral vision, she re-
mains obsessed with the unimportant question of who betrayed her, rather than
with the significant one of why she was betrayed.
In contrast to Jean Brodie, Sandy Stranger acquires a broader vision of the world.
Sandy had shared her teachers romantic view of life, as is evidenced by her col-
laboration with Jenny Gray on "The Mountain Eyrie," a romantic story peopled
with characters drawn from fiction and from real life and transmogrified by the
girls young imaginations and speculations about Jean Brodies life and loves.
Like Jean, Sandy and Jenny create an unreal, romantic, fictional world, but as
Sandy matures, her perception of the world changes. By making a distinction
between the world of her own devising and the real world, she develops a moral
vision which Jean never achieves. Included in the development of that vision is
the ability to separate fiction from fact, romance from reality, the prudential from
the aesthetic, good from evil. Sandys vision reaches its fullest formulation in her
psychological treatise on moral perception, "The Transfiguration of the Com-
monplace," which she writes after she becomes Sister Helena, a member of a clois-
tered, contemplative religious order.
The title of Sandys treatise, which has spiritual and scriptural significance, illus-
trates her change in vision. The scriptural account of the transfiguration occurs in
Matthew xvii. 1-8:
Now after six days Jesus took Peter, James and his brother John, and led them up
a high mountain by themselves, and was transfigured before them. And his face
shone as the sun, and his garments became white as snow. And behold, there
appeared to them Moses and Elias talking together with him. Then Peter ad-
dressed Jesus saying, "Lord, it is good for us to be here. If thou wilt, let us set up
three tents here, one for thee, one for Moses, and one for Elias." As he was still
speaking, behold a bright cloud overshadowed them, and behold, a voice out of
the cloud said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear him."
And on hearing it the disciples fell on their faces and were exceedingly afraid.
And Jesus came near and touched them, and said to them, "Arise and do not be
afraid." But lifting up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only.
This vision of the glorified Christ afforded Peter, James and John was a kind of
beatific vision, a view of eternity. When the everyday is transfigured, the temporal
is transcended, and the commonplace, seen in relation to eternal things, takes on
eternal significance. The person who has been granted such a vision no longer
sees the world from only a temporal point of view, but rather sub specie aeternita-
tis. From that aspect, the world takes on a spiritual and moral dimension which it
otherwise does not have; it is this vision, this transfiguration, which Sandy per-
ceives.
Although the full formulation of that vision presented in her treatise does not
occur until some years later, Sandy is aware of its essential elements during her
time at Marcia Blaines Academy, and it is this awareness which leads her to be-
tray Jean Brodie. Sandy comes to see not only the divine stance which Jean has
assumed, but to recognize also that Jeans manipulationor attempted manipula-
tionof people is dangerous. She realizes the potential for evil which Jean pos-
sesses and unwittingly exercises because of her narrow visionnot only the fool-
ish pronouncements about art, music, and politics, but the tragedy of Joyce Emily
Hammond killed in Spain. Sandy realizes, ultimately, that knowledge is intimately
connected with action. Since she sees little hope that anyone else will effectively
end Jeans sway, she decides that she must do it herself.
Although she must try to see things sub specie aeternitatis, from Gods point of
view, Sandy does not identify herself with God as she suggests Jean does. Sandys
God is not the God of Calvin, the creator who has "planned for practically every-
body before they were born a nasty surprise when they died" and to whom human
actions were not meritorious; rather, he is the God of Roman Catholicism, the
creator of beings responsible for their own acts, which can merit reward and pun-
ishment. This concept of God demands that the person who would act pruden-
tially must first adopt Gods point of view and then conform his own actions to
that view.
Consequently, Sandys growth in perception, which compels her to view human
actions sub specie aeternitatis, not only leads her to take action against her
teacher but compels her to view her own act from this higher perspective. She
does not see her action as a betrayal since there is, she says, no question of be-
trayal where no loyalty is due. But she is deeply disturbed by having to have
acted, and her conversion to Catholicism and subsequent entry into a convent are
results of that action. By choosing to enter a contemplative order, she rejects the
life of action and the responsibility for judging and acting on that judgment
again. Clutching the bars of the grille separating her from the world and the ac-
tive life, she is like a caged animal, locked up so that she will do no more harm.
By stopping Jean Brodie, Sandy has in effect stopped herself. She is being precise
when she replies to the question, "What were the main influences of your school
days?" with "There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime."
In spite of Sandys wider vision, she is not a particularly likeable character. Some
of our reservations about her spring, I believe, from her striking similarity to Jean
Brodie. It is perhaps this similarity which accounts for the fact that Sandy seems
to be the only Brodie girl upon whom Jean has had a marked and lasting effect.
Most are like Eunice, who remembers Jean fondly as being a bit eccentric, but
whose life shows no lasting mark of Jeans training. Both Sandy and Jean are pas-
sionate, zealous people. If Jean implicitly thinks herself to be like God, seeing
both beginning and end, shaping people and situations for her own purposes, so
does Sandy in her decision to judge and sentence Jean. If Jean sees her students
not as individuals but as embodiments of abstractionsinstinct, insight, comic
relief (indicated by the epithets or tags often associated with them)so does
Sandy see Jean as an abstraction: "It was twenty-five years before Sandy had so far
recovered from a creeping vision of disorder that she could look back and recog-
nize that Miss Brodies defective sense of self-criticism had not been without its
beneficent and enlarging effects."
Jean, who regarded highly the economy of Teddy Lloyds painting style and tech-
nique, employs a certain economy in her own arrangement of people and events,
adapting her plans quickly and efficiently to conform to situations over which she
has no control. Sandy, when the time comes to stop Jean, acts upon the principle
that "where there was a choice of various courses, the most economical was the
best." Jeans and Sandys concern with "economy" suggests the theological di-
mension of the term, in the sense of the divine plan for man. Jean, acting as the
God of Calvin, is Providence, her plan similar to the "divine plan hidden in the
intellect of God from all eternity and revealed in the divine acts of salvation
through His prophets, through Jesus Christ, and through His Holy Spirit." The
meaning of Sandys economy goes a step further: "Divine economy likewise em-
braces the mystery of the execution of the divine plan of salvation. Creatures to
whom God communicates a participation in His causality are secondary agents
through whom He acts in applying the fruits of His redemptive act" [M.R.E. Mas-
terman, "Divine Economy," in New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1967]. Although she
does not think consciously in these terms, Sandy becomes, in effect, a "secondary
agent" when she acts to stop Jean.
Sandy herself recognizes her similarity to Jean. The potential for destruction
which she herself possesses is impressed upon her when she encounters Jean in a
hotel dining room after the war. It is not too fanciful to suggest that the title of
the book, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, refers not only to that time of life when
Jean was most flourishing, but also to Sandy. The word prime is also used for the
mark used to distinguish designations of similar quantities, as in a and , and
Sandy is certainly "Jean Brodie Prime."
Just as Sandys vision is wider than that of Jean Brodie, so the narrators point of
viewomniscientis a term used to identify one of the attributes of God, and the
method of narration underscores this quality. Although working within a time
frame, 1936 to the time of narration, the narrator prescinds from time, jumping
freely back and forth from one time to another, spanning years in one sentence.
The technique is not, of course, unusual, nor among Sparks works is it peculiar to
this novel. In a review of The Mandelbaum Gate ["The Novel as Jerusalem:
Muriel Sparks Mandelbaum Gate," Atlantic Monthly (October 1965)], for in-
stance, Frank Kermode observes that Spark deliberately gives away the end of the
story, and "in a narrative which could have regular climactic moments she fudges
them, simply because the design of her world, like Gods, has more interesting
aspects than mere chronological progress and the satisfaction of naive expecta-
tions in the reader." But this technique is particularly appropriate to The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie. There, the narrator not only assumes an omniscient, Godlike
position in relation to the material and in the method of narration, but creates
and shapes the characters themselves in a way not unlike that in which Jean Bro-
die and Sandy Stranger shape their world and its inhabitants. In addition, the
narrators vision, like Jeans and Sandys, results in actionthat of telling the
story. In this sense, what is narrated is a world in itself, a creation based on the
narrators point of view or perception.
There are, then, three visions in Muriel Sparks novel: Jeans, Sandys, and the
narrators, each one wider and more comprehensive than the preceding and rep-
resenting a higher degree of knowledge or perception. All three characters, in
their roles as knowers and shapers, act according to a principle of order discerni-
ble in their actions thereby exemplifying what Ann Dobie says about Muriel Spark
[in "Muriel Sparks Definition of Reality," Critique (1970)]: "She demonstrates that
man is inherently limited in his complete perception of [reality], but that with
each additional degree of understanding he experiences a kind of rebirth. She
describes understanding as vision, a new concept of oneself and the world which
is based upon the individuals acceptance of a basic order in both." The very struc-
ture of this particular novel reflects and underscores its message.
There is, of course, another vision implicit in the book, that of Muriel Spark her-
self. I make here a distinction between the narrator and the author to stress the
fact that the novel and everything in it, including the narrators voice, is an arti-
fact, a creation. Spark herself has said [as quoted by Dobie]: "Fiction to me is a
kind of parable," and Kermode points out that in Sparks novels "a genuine rela-
tion exists between the forms of fiction and the forms of the world, between the
novelists creation and Gods" so that all her novels "are in a sense novels about
the novel, inquiries into the relation between fictions and truth."
By depicting three incremental degrees of understanding, The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie reflects yet another degree, another vision and "rebirth," to use Dobies
word. The novel itself becomes a kind of transfiguration of the commonplace,
revealing the authors point of view and inviting the reader to share it. It is a
point of view applicable to the authors complete oeuvre. Furthermore, the novel
represents another relationship between knowledge and action. Given the artists
vision, the appropriate action for the artist is to produce a work of art. The ap-
propriate action for Miss Spark is to write a book, an action which is, in its fullest
sense, human and moral.
"Moral Vision in Muriel Sparks The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," in Renascence, Vol.
XXXIII, No. 1, Autumn, 1980, pp. 3-9.
"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Spark, Muriel: J. H. Dorenkamp (essay date Autumn 1980)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Brig-
ham Narins. Vol. 94. Thomson Gale, 1997. eNotes.com. 2006. 29 Oct, 2006 <http://lit.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/
prime-miss-jean-brodie-spark-muriel/j-h-dorenkamp-essay-date-autumn-1980>
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
With The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark became famous and rich, a cele-
brated novelist with a wide audience. The title character of the novel fascinated
readers and also became known through theatre and cinema. Vanessa Redgrave
first performed the role of the Scottish schoolteacher in Jay Presson Allens play
version in London in 1966, and Zoe Caldwell played Jean Brodie in New York.
Maggie Smith won an Oscar for her creation of the role in the 1969 film, and
Geraldine McEwan interpreted Miss Brodie for television audiences in the series
shown on PBS in 1979. Jean Brodie and her "set" of girls became widely known,
and a common response to the main character was, "I had a Jean Brodie in my
life."
The novel has also elicited complex analyses from literary critics, many of whom
judge it Sparks most distinctive and effective work. Such diversity of response
from popular media presentations with theatrical flair, to individual empathy, to
arguments about theological and moral implicationsis most appropriate to a
writer noted for her wry wit, satirical view of human behaviour, and examination
of the nature of truth and art. Her audiences bafflement mirrors Sparks own
view that, though everything is possible, no one individual can know reality. Thus
personal assertions appear comically grotesque.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is more a novella than a novel. Short, compact, and
economical, it provides a useful introduction to Spark, who wrote it in eight
weeks, calling on memories of her girlhood in Edinburgh. She has described the
novel, which most explicitly uses her Scottish heritage, as the work of "an exile in
heart and mindcautious, affectionate, critical" ["What Images Return," in Mem-
oirs of a Modern Scotland, edited by Karl Miller, 1970]. The play and film ver-
sions provided excellent vehicles for their stars; the charismatic schoolteacher
compelled admiration, though Jean Brodie remained sufficiently ambiguous to
complicate responses even with the simplification of dramatic presentation.
Sparks fiction is more elusive and needs repeated careful and thoughtful read-
ings to understand what lies below the surface appeal.
The main line of the narrative is not easy to discern, for there are many time
shifts. Actually, these are crucial to the readers understanding, for they force
greater attention. The manipulation of time leads to something more than the
amused delight that might be derived from a straightforward chronology that
realistically tells the story of a dazzling eccentric and her impressionable students.
Spark deliberately tells the reader early in the novel what the outcome of events
will be, that Miss Brodie will be betrayed by her trusted pupil Sandy Stranger.
With suspense eschewed, the interest lies in understanding why things happen
rather than what happened.
This is further emphasized by the absence of explanations from Jean Brodie of
why she behaves as she does. She is seen largely through the eyes of the girls, who
speculate about their teacher. Although the novel includes events from a period
of twenty years, the time when the "Brodie set" changed from pupils to adults, the
concentration is on their girlhood experiences. And the major focus is on one
girl, Sandy Stranger.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie begins in 1936, when the girls are sixteen and have
moved out of the junior division of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edin-
burgh and Miss Brodies class. Although they remain "the Brodie set," proving the
accuracy of their teachers maxim "Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and
she is mine for life," each now wears her hat "with a definite difference." But the
story soon shifts back to those formative years, 1930 and 1931, when six school-
girls receive a remarkable education from a "progressive spinster" who teaches in
a school of traditional character, serving as "a leaven in the lump" at "this educa-
tional factory." Monica Douglas ("famous for mathematics and anger"), Jenny
Gray ("who was going to be an actress"), Eunice Gardner ("famous for gymnastics
and swimming"), Rose Stanley ("famous for sex"), Mary Macgregor ("a silent lump,
a nobody whom everybody could blame"), and Sandy Stranger ("merely notorious
for her small, almost nonexistent eyes" and "famous for her vowel sounds"), are
selected at age ten to be the crme de la crme. Their formidable teacher epito-
mizes each as "famous" for something and introduces all to her romantic aesthetic
vision. They adopt her taste for Giotto, Pavlova, Sybil Thorndike, and the belief
that art comes before science. They have no "team spirit" in the school and are a
group set apart. Miss Brodie declares that she is in her prime, which she defines
as "the moment one was born for," and she dedicates her life to forming her girls,
giving them "the fruits of her prime."
The headmistress Miss Mackay, who believes in the slogan "Safety First" and fa-
vors practical flowers like chrysanthemums, schemes to rid the Marcia Blaine
School of Miss Brodie by discrediting her. However, this is quite difficult, since all
the girls in the set (except Mary Macgregor, who is a kind of scapegoat) are clever
and capable, and they admire their teacher. Furthermore, Miss Brodie is vigilant
and careful about appearances, however outrageously she behaves.
The obvious possibility for discreditation is sex, particularly since in 1931, the
year that the girls turn eleven and twelve and first become aware, "sex is every-
thing." Both of the men teachers at the school are certainly interested in "a mag-
nificent woman in her prime," and the girls increasingly recognize that "she was
really an exciting woman as a woman." Teddy Lloyd, the art master, is the more
dashing, for he lost an arm in World War I. But he is married and a Roman
Catholic, and Jean Brodie finds a romantic renunciation of love far more exciting
than an actual experience. She begins telling the girls of her lost lover Hugh, who
died on Flanders Field, and gradually Teddy Lloyds characteristics are fused into
her fantasies. She also plans a surrogate affair using Rose, who is Lloyds model
(for pictures that all look like Jean Brodie). The other man is Gordon Lowther,
the singing master, who is not married and an elder of the Church of Scotland.
With him, Jean Brodie does have an affair, often staying at his home in Cramond.
But she refuses to marry him, lest she be deterred from her dedication to her
girls. Finally he marries the science teacher, Miss Lockhart, because he cannot
tolerate Jean Brodies distorted romanticism. Early in the novel, Sandy and Jenny
presciently compare their teacher with their parents: she never got married, and
they do not have primes, but they do have sexual intercourse.
The way to trap Miss Brodie is, then, politics, according to Sandy. This "beady
eyed" girl, who is most like Miss Brodie in temperament and whose point of view
dominates the story, becomes Teddy Lloyds mistress in the summer of 1938,
while Miss Brodie is touring in Germany to see what Hitlers brownshirts are like.
In Nazi Germany the domineering Miss Brodie enlarges her earlier admiration
for the Italian fascisti, the marching troops of blackshirts, seen in the previous
summers holidays, "with their hands raised at the same angle, while Mussolini
stood on platform like a gym teacher or Guides mistress and watched them." The
comparison is a deliberate authorial comment, for Sandy Stranger views Miss
Brodie as "a born Fascist." Sandy is not interested in politics, but she is obsessed
with Miss Brodie. She tells Miss Mackay that Jean Brodie was responsible for
sending Joyce Emily Hammond off to Spain, ironically not to join her brothers
fight against Franco but to support the Fascist cause. This wretched girl, a late-
comer and wouldbe member of the set, is killed in a train en route. Sandy gives
the information to Miss Mackay, who then forces Miss Brodie to resign in 1939.
Because Sandy recognizes that her teachers manipulation of the set ignores their
individuality and that she has no sense of the importance of anothers life, Sandy
decides that Jean Brodies fascist control must be stopped.
By this time Sandy Stranger is no longer Teddy Lloyds mistress, but she contin-
ues to admire his economical method of presentation and uses it in her betrayal
of Miss Brodie. In less than a year, the man ceases to interest Sandy, though she
was fascinated by his mind. The most important thing that she extracts from
Lloyds mind is his religion, and Sandy enters the Catholic Church. In this, she is
in sharp contrast to Miss Brodie, who is contemptuous about Lloyds religion.
Sandy not only converts to the Church of Rome; she also enters an order of en-
closed nuns.
As Sister Helena of the Transfiguration she writes "an odd psychological treatise
on the nature of moral perception, called The Transfiguration of the Common-
place." In her middle age in the late 1950s, she is forced, because of this
achievement, to have choice visitors even though her order is enclosed. She ex-
plains to an enquiring interviewer that the biggest influence on her was neither
politics nor Calvinism, but "a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime." Some of her friends
from schooldays also visit, and they talk of their teacher. Always Sister Helena
"clutches the bars of her grille," but "more desperately than ever" when she admits
what most influenced her.
Miss Brodie spends her last years in the Braid Hills Hotel, trying to learn who
"betrayed" her. She dies of cancer in 1946 when she is fifty-six years old. In one
way, the novella is an account of this womans rise and fall, but it also chronicles
responses to her "prime." Muriel Spark has explained that she always begins with
a title and then works out the story. Both as word and idea, "prime" resonates
through the story. In no other work does she so relentlessly repeat a phrase, and
the reader is led to a rich contemplation of the meanings of "prime of life" far
beyond the narrative itself. The style of this short work, so evocative in its econ-
omy and simple language, reflected the experience of Sparks early poetic career.
In an interview [with Ian Gillham published as "Keeping It Short," The Listener
(24 September 1970)], Muriel Spark said that "Jean Brodie represents completely
unrealized potentialities." This broad statement of the theme provides a useful
way of approaching the storys meaning.
The realistic details of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie are unobtrusive, but so exactly
introduced that they establish an immediate sense of time and place. The Edin-
burgh of the 1930s is vividly evoked in Chapter Two when Miss Brodie takes the
girls on a walking excursion "into the reeking network of slums which the Old
Town constituted in those years." This is a first direct experience for them away
from the security of their middle-class homes. The poverty and desperation, the
devastating loss of human possibility, are indicated in a single line: "A man sat on
the icy-cold pavement, he just sat." They are stunned by the terrible smell of the
area; they see men and women quarrelling and a long queue of shabby men wait-
ing for the Dole. Sandy is frightened by the squalor of the Unemployed, and she
is aware of the discrepancy between these people and herself, though when she is
older she perceives a common misery that has nothing to do with economics.
Before World War II, she is more concerned about relief in Edinburgh than
events on the Continent.
Spark is not a political novelist, but she is trying to define the context in which
she lived. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie corresponds to her own girlhood in Edin-
burgh, and the historical significance is very important. The Idle Unemployed
are most obviously the casualties of the economic depression that shattered the
Western world, as the last shudder of the Great War and the wild extravagances of
the 1920s that followed it. The emerging Fascists are one answer to the defeat
and loss of spirit. Other casualties of World War I are personally shownthe lost
lover Hugh Carruthers, the maimed art master, and Jean herself.
Only one of "the legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties, women from
the age of thirty and upward, who crowded their war-bereaved spinsterhood with
voyages of discovery into new ideas and energetic practices in art or social wel-
fare, education, or religion," Jean Brodie epitomizes the plight of the Lost Gen-
eration, those who lived in a world where traditional values and expectations had
been displaced. The romantic tales with which the teacher regales her girls are an
evasion of the realities of human experience. The importance of fantasy in the
forming of the child is an accepted tenet of sophisticated psychology, but the
fantasy should result in an increasingly mature understanding and coping with
human experience.
It is one thing for Sandy and Jenny to write romantic tales modelled on their
favourite nineteenth-century narratives, Kidnapped, The Lady of Shalott, and
Jane Eyre. This allows a relatively safe youthful exploration of experienceand
an opportunity for Muriel Spark to write hilarious parodies of much-loved Eng-
lish classics and sentimental love letters. But it is quite another thing for forty-
year-old Jean Brodie to substitute fantasies of lost and renounced lovers for rec-
ognition of her own sexuality, particularly when she wants the fantasy to turn into
reality by having one of the girls take her place in Lloyds bed. A reading of The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as a menopausal crisis or unconscious lesbianism is far
too simplistic, but the text provides enough evidence to suggest these possibilities.
There is a fervid urgency about her creation of the "set" that argues a desperate
lack of fulfilment, "the unrealized potentialities" that are salient.
Nevertheless, the novel can be described as a consideration of excessive self-
indulgence, an exposition of the dangers and evil of a life that is concentrated
solely in self. For, although Jean Brodie asserts that she is giving her prime to the
schoolgirls, she is actually using them to avoid having to act herself, and her con-
stant reiteration of her self-sacrifice limits the worth of whatever she does. Sandy
early notes how Miss Brodie has "elected herself to grace." "She thinks she is
Providence, thought Sandy, she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the be-
ginning and the end." Miss Brodie believes that God is on her side and has no
idea of her own sinful nature. Hers is a very personal and secularized Calvinism.
The term "Calvinism" is used, of course, in many ways. [In an endnote, Richmond
explains: "The French Protestant theologian John Calvin (15091564) completed
the Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 in Geneva, where austere reforms
were later implemented. Civic authorities were responsible for enforcing religious
teaching, and all areas of life were regulated. In Scotland John Knox was the ad-
vocate of this theology, and in the colonial United States Jonathan Edwards in-
troduced a modified version. Intense Biblicism and resolute theocentricity, mag-
nifying the sovereignty and providence of God, are fundamental in Calvinism,
which is thus strongly related to the theology of St. Augustine (354-430), the most
influential writer in the early period of the Catholic Church. A distinction of Cal-
vinism is that it bridges the gulf between the luxury of the world and the life of
the spirit by dedicating them to the service of God. This quality was strongly ap-
pealing in an age of expanding capitalism."] In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,
Spark shows this view of humanity as a focal point of Edinburgh, and the charac-
teristics that she emphasizes are a belief in the Elect and the Damned, the idea
that mans salvation is predestined by God, and the idea of a community that is
righteously and rigorously controlled. Nominally, Jean Brodie has rejected Edin-
burghs Calvinism through her flamboyance, but in practice her crme de la
crme are a secularized elect, the chosen elite selected from the larger group.
Sandy deliberately contemplates the architectural landmarks of St. Giles Cathe-
dral and the Tolbooth in an attempt to include the Calvinist theology that is lack-
ing from her English experience. She also recognizes that Catholicism might have
been what Miss Brodie lacked. But Sandys own entry into the Roman Church is
not a simplistic triumph of Catholic values. Her betrayal, her book, her spiritual
conditionall lack certainty, as indeed is inevitable in this life, even for those who
act decisively.
A manipulator of lives, Jean Brodie admires absolutist domination, as her attrac-
tion to Fascist leaders most clearly illustrates. Further, she is not capable of rec-
ognizing her own failures; even after World War II, she goes no farther than an
admission that "Hitler was rather naughty." This grotesquely inadequate judg-
ment is like her utter failure to recognize her culpability in treating Mary Mac-
gregor with wanton unkindness, or in precipitating the death of the new girl
Joyce Emily Hammond. And obviously she has not the slightest idea of how she
influences Sandy Stranger, who betrays her precisely because she judges that no
one should be allowed to exercise such unremitting control over the lives of oth-
ers. (Paradoxically, of course, Sandy is behaving in the same controlling way; and
her "small beady eyes" symbolize her limited, narrow vision.) Perhaps nothing so
richly illustrates Jean Brodies self-absorption as her incredulity that anyone could
betray hereven Christ was betrayed, and He is God.
The novella, then, is concerned to define the nature of the human condition. The
two principals, Jean Brodie and her near double Sandy Stranger (she actually
assumes her teachers role as Lloyds mistress), know very little about it. Both fail
to recognize its essentially mundane quality. The teacher refuses to admit the
ordinary; she spins romantic fantasies to evade the limitations of life in this
worldboth those that come from political and social conditions and those that
derive from personal blindness and pride. The pupil becomes renowned for her
psychological understanding of "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace."
There is an undeniable appeal about escaping from the limits of mundane ex-
perience. This is the appeal of nineteenth-century romanticism, with its exaltation
of the artist as one who is apart from society, a being more sensitive and suffering
than others, who does not live by common standards. Muriel Spark repeatedly
explored romanticismand expressed antipathy to it.
Most members of the Brodie setEunice, Monica, Jenny, and Rosegrow be-
yond its narrow range into adults who are far less exotic and flamboyant than
their mentor, but who live quietly and responsibly, able to resist impulses that
would lead to the self-indulgences that destroy a perspective about human limita-
tions. But Sandy, who is most like Jean Brodie, lacks such repose. In schoolgirl
narratives, she casts herself as the heroine addressed by Alan Breck or Mr. Roch-
ester or as the Lady of Shalott; she fantasizes about Pavlovas depending on her
for the future of dance; she imagines herself as the right-hand woman of a mythi-
cal policewoman, in another fantasy that is a response to the ugly experience of
Jennys encounter with an exhibitionist. Even as a reclusive nun, she writes on the
theme that has defined Jean Brodies life and her own.
There are, of course, subtle differences. Sandy knows exactly what she is doing,
while Jean Brodie is described as a kind of innocent. David Lodge has argued [in
"The Uses and Abuses of Omniscience: Method and Meaning in Muriel Sparks
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," in The Novelist at the Crossroads, 1971] that the
loss of primal innocence, the fallen world, is the subject of The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie, and that Sandy must betray Miss Brodie because she has so many bad
qualities mixed with the good traits of enthusiasm, inspiration, and individuality.
But Sandy is not to be viewed without uneasiness; her hands "clutch the bars of
her grille." She has withdrawn from the world; nevertheless, she has created a
"set." Sister Helenas book has more ardent admirers than the selected schoolgirls
at Marcia Blaines School for Girls. Her reclusive life may be viewed as a renuncia-
tion of the world to parallel her teachers renunciation of a lover, or as a penance
for the betrayal. But even this does not work out according to plan, for she lacks
the repose of the other nuns in the community. They notice her nervous tension
and say that "Sister Helena had too much to bear from the world since she had
published her psychological book which was so unexpectedly famed." Neverthe-
less, the dispensation that results in this exposure "was forced" upon her. Once
again, Spark shows how separated human expectations are from the realities of
experience.
The "prime" of life is supposed to be a time of realization, when the years of
preparation and apprenticeship are turned into effective action, but the novella
shows how far Jean Brodie is from such realization. The choice of the name "Bro-
die" is significant: Deacon William Brodie was an eighteenth-century man whose
reality was very different from appearances; he was the historical source for
Robert Louis Stevenson, another native of Edinburgh, whose classic creation of
the "double life," is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Publicly very respectable in civic and
commercial enterprises, Deacon Brodie kept mistresses and conducted night
burglaries. He died cheerfully on the gibbet, and his presence in Edinburgh re-
mains very visible today. At the corner of the Royal Mile and Bank Streetin the
Old Town that the Brodie set visitstands Deacon Brodies Tavern, an imposing
institution that was founded in 1806. This is precisely the curious mixture of hu-
man experience that so fascinated Muriel Spark. Thus the name "Sandy Stranger"
is also indicative, for it suggests both shifting uncertainties and the fundamental
apartness of all people. Sandy is not simply the only English girl in the set, the
exile in Scotland, and the favourite who becomes a betrayer. She is also the essen-
tial human being who may act, but with unanticipated results.
The unexpected is what should be expected. The most trusted girl, the confi-
dante, is the betrayer. But Sandy insists that "Its only possible to betray where
loyalty is due." And loyalty was due to Miss Brodie "only up to a point," so that
"the word [betrayal] does not apply." Just after Miss Brodie asserts that Lowther
would marry her, she reads of his engagement. Mary Macgregor was not kindly
treated, but she remembers her days in Miss Brodies class as the happiest of her
life. One must retain "a sense of the hidden possibilities in all things," for there
are always startling revelations. This view of the world can be frightening, for it
shows the limits of mans control, his woeful inadequacy and the absurdity of pre-
tensions. Many in the modern world find this a despairing view, but Muriel
Sparks faith prevents that conclusion.
Her vision is not limited to this world, for her fiction has both a literal and an
allegorical level. The realistic narrative of life in Edinburgh in the 1930s is co-
gent, but it is only a small part of a much larger scheme. Spark amuses by writing
a story about schooldays; she invigorates a strong literary tradition of boys stories
(like Thomas Hughes Tom Browns Schooldays [1857] and William Goldings The
Lord of the Flies [1955]) by making her subjects girlsand very sophisticated ones,
too. She updates the classic nineteenth-century feminist heroine Jane Eyrea
shy, earnest, plain governess living in an isolated houseinto a dynamic twenti-
eth-century womanan exotic, good-looking, assured, witty teacher who moves
freely about a large city and holidays alone on the Continent. The characteristics
of the male lovers are exactly paralleled to underscore the analogy with Charlotte
Brontes novel, which the girls also rewrite in their own style. Nevertheless, the
literary exactness, like the realistic account, is not the essential concern.
The shifting time sequence serves not only as an effective device to encompass
events occurring over twenty years and to keep the reader alert to many possibili-
ties. It also functions significantly to throw human actions into a larger perspec-
tive. The events in the girls lives appear quite different from one time to another.
As Miss Brodies students, the girls are fascinated and absorbed by her fantasies
and those that they create in imitation. As adults they perceive these events as
relatively unimportant. So all events of this life, even its prime, are recognized as
very small when placed in the context of a universe that is Gods complex crea-
tion. The incidental details may not always be understood, but for the person of
faith there is a belief in a design that is not contingent upon merely human ac-
tions. Thus the resort to self-indulgent power is a grotesque distortion, important
and yet trivial and absurdly laughable.
Muriel Sparks comic vision, then, is not only a dazzling exploitation of witty lan-
guage and outrageous circumstances in the present world. It is also an extended
view of how inconsequential are human assumptions of knowledge and power
when viewed in the light of eternity. This is a wisdom not shared by Jean Brodie
and Sandy Stranger; the beady eyes do not see so far, but the novelists view is
much deeper, and it is her own point of view that Muriel Spark offers her readers.
"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," in Muriel Spark, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.,
1984, pp. 16-28.
"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Spark, Muriel: Velma Bourgeois Richmond (essay date 1984)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed.
Brigham Narins. Vol. 94. Thomson Gale, 1997. eNotes.com. 2006. 29 Oct, 2006 <http://lit.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/
prime-miss-jean-brodie-spark-muriel/velma-bourgeois-richmond-essay-date-1984>
Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Three very different novelists have one thing in common; an adult conversion
to Roman Catholicism. They are Fionn MacColla, Muriel Spark and George Mac-
kay Brown. Brown we must meantime leave to one side: his religious beliefs form
an integral part of a personal vision of natural harmony in Greenvoe. Can any-
thing useful be said in comparing such disparate novelists as MacColla and
Spark? Well, both are concerned with Scottish Calvinism in their novels. MacColla
reacted vigorously against an extreme Calvinist upbringing, and makes his cri-
tique of Calvinism central to all his novels. Spark, on the other hand, was raised
in Edinburgh, with an English mother, a Jewish father and a conventionally Pres-
byterian schooling: perhaps like Stranger she missed having Calvinism to react
against. But The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie also centres on a critique of the impact
of Calvinist thinking, and a magnificent reincarnation of the concept of the Justi-
fied Sinner.
Both novelists manage to raise an exceptionally wide range of issues in the appar-
ently narrow contexts of their novels, and to view them in some sense sub specie
aeternitatis. In both And the Cock Crew and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie there is
treatment of religion, politics, history, sexuality and artand the idea of betrayal
is central to both. The betrayals in And the Cock Crew are multiple, while the
obvious case in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is the betrayal of Jean Brodie by
Sandy Strangerwith a clearly arguable prior betrayal of the set by Miss Brodie.
MacColla and Spark both choose a central character who is in some sense of the
Calvinist enemy, and each treats this central character with sympathy and under-
standing, so that the character is eventually seen as both attractive and mis-
guided: we remember Sandy and Jenny completing their literary rendition of the
love letters of Miss Brodie and Gordon Lowther, finding it a delicate question
how to present Miss Brodie in both a favourable and an unfavourable light, for
now nothing less than this was demanded. MacCollas instinct is to go for the
jugular, and so in his denunciation of the naysaying qualities of Scottish Calvin-
ism he chooses as his central character a minister of the kirk: Spark also goes for
a traditionally central element, education. But the differences are clearly much
more striking. MacColla expresses his central interests by writing a historical
novel which demonstrates to his satisfaction the historical ill effects of the naysay-
ing of Calvinism on Scotland, while Spark expresses hers vitally in relation to her
own centuryindeed, to the city in which she spent her own school daysand the
most important political movements of the time. Where MacColla is making a
case, fairly clearly preaching, she is very laid back, and refuses to intrude judge-
ments in her novel. And of course, most crucially, she transforms the traditional
figure of the dominie into an unusual woman schoolteacher at a privileged girls
school.
All the same, perhaps these two novels have more to say than the others about the
nature and character of the Calvinist tradition underlying Scottish life.
Spark refuses to intrude judgements, we say, but the matter is more complex than
that. Can we find Muriel Spark anywhere in her fiction? Miss Jean Brodie seems
to have two narrative centres, the developing consciousness of Sandy Stranger,
and a third person narrator who is apparently uncommitted and factual. But we
should not over-readily accept this appearance: Mrs Spark has commented on
this problem, in a piece called My Conversion, published in 1961, the year of the
novel:
With a novel, you know the dialogue. It belongs to each character. But the narra-
tive partfirst or third personbelongs to a character as well. I have to decide
what the author of the narrative is like. Its not me, its a character.
The narrator in this novel has a splendid sense of comedy, and is no respecter of
persons; and the wit usually economically serves some satiric purpose or under-
mines a mood or attitude. Irony is pervasive. We can look at our first experience
of the tale of Miss Brodies lost lover, Hugh. We are nowhere told that Miss Bro-
die is being wildly romantic and self-indulgent, with apparently no awareness of
the realities of the war in which her lover died. Her own prose tells us this, as she
starts with an unacknowledged quotation from Keats, Season of mists and mellow
fruitfulness, and latches onto that alliterated f sound to make Hughs death
insubstantial, melancholy and beautiful: He fell on Flanders Field. He fell.
He fell like an autumn leaf. The narrator effectively punctures the mood while
reinforcing the alliteration by referring to the story of Miss Brodies felled fi-
anc, while Miss Brodie, unheeding, goes on to describe Hugh, inevitably, as one
of the Flowers of the Forest.
The witty comment can be lightly satirical in a religious dimension, as when gaunt
mistresses say good morning to Miss Brodie with predestination in their smiles,
or it can accumulate in gentle mockery of Miss Brodies behaviour and attitudes,
as she declaims The Lady of Shalott with a dedication worthy of Sybil
Thorndike, and perhaps too many decibels: Miss Brodies voice soared up to the
ceiling, and curled round the feet of the Senior girls upstairs. Miss Brodie en-
joins composure in the full flow of her peculiar declamatory speechIt is one of
the best assets of a woman, an expression of composure, come foul, come fair.
Regard the Mona Lisa over yonder! The narrator punctures the mood again:
Mona Lisa in her prime smiled in steady composure even though she had just
come from the dentist and her lower jaw was swollen.
The actual narration in the novel is sometimes direct from this ironic, witty but
non-aggressive narrator, and often a rendition of Sandys thoughts by the narra-
tor. Apart from the ubiquitous witty phrases, the narrator is usually careful not to
comment. She (it is surely a woman?) stands back, never judging, and only occa-
sionally offering analysis. We come to recognise these occasions as particularly
important, from their very rarity, whether it be the context offered for Miss Bro-
die by the description of the war-bereaved spinsterhood of Edinburgh, or the
passages where the narrator looks closely at Miss Brodie and religion, or at Miss
Brodie looking for a confidante, or at Sandys attempts to come to terms with
religion.
Sandy emerges as a central consciousness in chapter two, and we gradually come
to accept her as a fairly reliable guide, as we outgrow our distaste for her little
piggy eyesor indeed become irritated with the narrator for such insistence on
them. Although we learn fairly early that it was Sandy who betrayed Miss Brodie,
we do tend to trust her reactions to people, events, churches, only remaining
slightly uneasy about her clutching the bars of the grillefrom nervous tension? a
false vocation? fear? guilt?
There are other specific narrative techniques which Spark utilises to help us in
our understanding of the action: Muriel Sparks refusal to judge for us does not
remove the necessity for judgement, but transfers it to the reader as part of the
required response. The novel can be seen as a complex problem requiring solu-
tion, arranged in both a helpful and a challenging way to facilitate the readers
exercise of judgement.
The chief and most obtrusive of these techniques is to do with chronology. Con-
ventional chronology is continually interrupted with glimpses of future occasions,
and future assessments of present issues. Thus we find terrible ironies, for exam-
ple in the case of Mary Macgregor. Mary is appallingly treated throughout the
novel: the description the nagged child is a gross understatement. But we know
from the end of the first chapter that Mary will die in a fire at the age of twenty-
three, and from the beginning of the next that she will look back on these days of
bullying and victimisation as the happiest days of her life. This dismal irony is
kept firmly in our awareness, just as Vonnegut keeps the doom of poor old Edgar
Derby, shot for stealing a teapot in the ruins of Dresden, in the forefront of our
consciousness from beginning to end of Slaughterhouse Five.
The departure from simple conventional chronology offers a picture of a devel-
oping scene: in the first chapter we meet the Brodie set at sixteenand at ten.
We gradually develop a double awareness, not particularly conscious or clear cut
at the first reading, of the attractions of Miss Brodie to the ten-year-olds of 1930,
and the dangers inherent in her and apparent to Sandy by 1938. In all this we get
a lively sense of the whole of Jean Brodies prime, and all sorts of ironies and
insights are implicit in our early learning that Miss Brodie was betrayed, and that
Sandy betrayed her, and in the retrospective conversations different members of
the set have with Sandy in her convent throughout, given in flash-forward, as it
were.
In fact, the departures from conventional chronology are fewer than at first ap-
pears, and almost always brief: the narrator employs the economy of method
Sandy admires in the methods of Teddy Lloyd and Miss Brodie and employs
herself in the betrayal. With the exceptions noted above, the novel progresses
straightforwardly enough. After the introduction to the sixteen-year-olds, chapter
one gives us the beginnings of the Brodie set and our introduction to this amaz-
ing teacher and her unconventional methods, and chapter two concentrates on
the first year with Miss Brodie, especially the walk through old Edinburgh. Chap-
ter three covers the second year with Miss Brodie, in more senses than one the
sexual year, as the little girls are preoccupied with sexuality and Miss Brodie falls
in love with one master and embarks on an affair with another. This emotional
situation for Miss Brodie continues in chapter four, when the Brodie set moves up
into the Senior school for session 19323. After this, things are telescoped: three
years are virtually omitted, and chapter five deals with the girls in fourth year,
193536, while in chapter six at age eighteen Sandy leaves school, has her affair
with Teddy Lloyd and betrays Miss Brodie.
Another very effective narrative device is juxtaposition of scenes or characters so
that a vivid effect of comparison or ironic contrast can be created without overt
comment. Early in the novel, the introduction of Miss Brodie is interrupted by a
terse little paragraph about Marcia Blaine, founder of the school, like and unlike
Miss Brodie. Widow to Miss Brodies spinster, admirer of Italian patriot Garibaldi
and his red shirts to Miss Brodies celebrator of Mussolini and his black shirts,
Marcia Blaine is economically described by reference to her manly portrait
Miss Brodie is the eternal feminine. The ethos of Marcia Blaines school, with
which Miss Brodie is so much at odds, is implicit in the Founders Day bunch of
hard-wearing flowers, as well as the Bible text underlining a traditional notion of
female virtue. (Incidentally, Mrs Spark has a little joke at our expense here:
Blaine is an unusual surname, but a biographical dictionary may offer us a nine-
teenth-century American journalist and statesman called Blain, whose first names
were James Gillespie. Spark herself attended James Gillespies Girls School in
Edinburgh, and Marcia Blaines is very clearly based on it.)
Again, in the walk in chapter two, Sandys understanding of the set as a body with
Miss Brodie for the head is balanced by her vision of the queue of unemployed
men as one dragons body the snaky creature, and through her meditation we
see the Brodie girls, the Girl Guides and Mussolinis fascisti as oddly similar. A
final telling instance where juxtaposition lends resonance is in chapter three,
everybodys sexual year. After Jennys experience with the terrible beast who
exposed himself, Sandy falls in love with her imagined image of Jennys police-
woman, whom she interestingly decides to call Sergeant Anne Grey, and in
Sandys fantasy the two set out, dedicated (Sandy is not Miss Brodies pupil for
nothing) to eliminate sex from Edinburgh and environs. This immediately pre-
cedes the scene where Miss Brodie and Teddy Lloyd have an implicitly charged
conversation about Cramond, the home village of Gordon Lowther, and Miss
Brodie puts her arm round Roses shoulder and thanks Teddy Lloyd, as if she
and Rose were one. Thus early, and however unconsciously, while Sandy is react-
ing against sexuality, Miss Brodie is beginning to manipulate Rose into her own
sexual fantasies. The comment through Sandy can apply to the juxtaposing tech-
nique as well as the developing relationship between teacher and pupil: it is both
intriguing and forward-pointing:
Sandy was fascinated by this method of making patterns with facts, and was di-
vided between her admiration for the technique and the pressing need to prove
Miss Brodie guilty of misconduct.
The final specific technique we will point to here is the effect of introducing par-
allel situations. One central example should suffice. It is clear to most people
reading the book that both Jean Brodie and Sandy Stranger to some extent lead
fantasy lives, or double lives, It is made most clear in Sandys case, where her
imaginary life is a preventive for boredom, and is nourished for the most part by
her readingwhich is directed to a considerable extent by Miss Brodie. Apart
from the joint literary compositions with Jenny, we are introduced to Sandys
double life in a bizarre conversation she holds with the Lady of Shalott, who
bears, here, a certain resemblance to Miss Brodie (chanting in the classroom the
while). Miss Brodies choice of poem is significant, dealing as it does with a Lady
who is destroyed by turning from shadow to reality. Sandy holds a series of ro-
mantic conversations with Alan Breck from Stevensons Kidnapped, involved in
quest and cause and chivalry, quite transfiguring the commonplace sections of the
famous walk through old Edinburgh when she would otherwise have to attend to
the tiresome Mary: the real life fantasy here, of a married lady and her husband,
is brief and comparatively very unsatisfactory. Later Sandy moves on to Mr Roch-
ester: Miss Brodie has been reading out Jane Eyre during sewing lessons. And
later still, after Miss Brodies inspired teaching and a trip to the theatre, she
moves on to Pavlova, and has a delicious conversation, one diva to another, soul-
ful, melancholy, and irresistibly funny. Again Pavlova smacks of Miss Brodie, and
much of the comic effect rises from that one extravagant detail, the claw:
Sandy, said Anna Pavlova, you are the only truly dedicated dancer, next to me.
Your dying Swan is perfect, such a sensitive, final tap of the claw upon the floor of
the stage.
The last example of Sandys fantasy life is her invention of Sergeant Anne Grey.
The interesting things to notice are that Sandy seems always quite conscious of
the difference between fantasy and reality, and that we see no more such fancies
after she leaves the Junior school.
Miss Brodies double life is less easy to chart, because we see her only from out-
side and from her speech, and it is harder to know when she is fantasising com-
pletely and when embroidering fact (as in the new picture of Hugh after her
greater awareness of both Teddy Lloyd and Gordon Lowther). It does seem clear
that she gradually drifts further into fantasy, and determines to make it into real-
ity, when she determines to use Rose to sleep with Teddy Lloyd by proxy. And of
course she leads a very conventional kind of double life when she combines the
roles of correct Edinburgh spinster schoolmistress and weekend lover to Gordon
Lowther: this seems to cause her no trouble. She lays claim to the long tradition
of double life or split personality in the Scottish Calvinist consciousness (e.g.
Hoggs Justified Sinner, Stevensons Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) when she claims to
be descended from one of the archetypes, Deacon Brodie. As she relates, Deacon
Brodie was a pious and respected Edinburgh householder who had a conven-
tional double life, keeping mistresses and indulging in cock-fighting, and he be-
came a burglar by night for the sake of the excitement and danger involved, and
died at last for these crimes on a gibbet he designed himself as justicer: it is the
stuff I am made of, declares Miss Brodie. The character of Deacon Brodie for
many years fascinated Robert Louis Stevenson, like Mrs Spark another notable
exile from Edinburgh. He collaborated with Henley to write a play on Deacon
Brodie, and this historical character lies behind his most famous novella of double
life, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Miss Brodies double life is
more subtle and much more alarming than Sandys, and instead of growing out of
it, like the little girl, she gets imperceptibly more enmeshed in a complex web of
fact and fantasy, and a gradual determination to flesh out her fantasies.
But the notion of a double life does not finish with Sandy and Miss Brodie. Oscar
Wilde wrote an essay called Pen, Pencil and Poison, about a poet and painter,
Thomas Wainewright, who was also a forger and a secret poisoner. Teddy Lloyds
double life is by no means as sensational as this, but it lasts over years and bears
some little resemblance to Wainewrights. Wilde quotes a Zola murderer who
paints respectable people so that they all bear a curious resemblance to his victim;
and he says that Wainewright put the expression of his own wickedness into the
portrait of a nice young girl. Teddy Lloyd surely owes something to Wainewright
and Zola, as he turns out portrait after portrait of the Brodie set, each bearing an
uncanny resemblance to Miss Brodie, each secretly confessing his fascination with
her. Sandy precipitates her affair with him when she shocks him by claiming that
all his portraits, even that of the littlest Lloyd baby, were now turning out to be
likenesses of Miss Brodie, suggesting that Miss Brodie has completely taken over
life and art; and it is Sandys curiosity about Teddy Lloyds secret love for Miss
Brodie that is central to her interest in him, before she is infected by his Catholi-
cism. If we begin to see double lives everywhere, it is not necessarily just our
imagination: in an interview with Frank Kermode Mrs Spark acknowledges this
tendency:
When I become interested in a subject, say old age, then the world is peopled for
mejust peopled with them. Theyre the centre of the world, and everyone else
is on the periphery. It is an obsession. And thats how I see things. I wrote a
book about bachelors, and it seemed to me that everyone was a bachelor.
And so we find poor Gordon Lowther attempting to sustain the same relatively
mundane double life as Miss Brodie, on the one hand teacher, church elder and
choir-master, on the other hand Miss Brodies secret lover. But there is no hint of
the stuff of Deacon Brodie in Gordon Lowther: he does not relish his secret life,
and would always have preferred to marry Miss Brodie. At last his melancholy
outweighs her bed-fellowship and her catering, and he settles for a straightfor-
ward married life with Miss Lockhart. Retrospectively, even Mary Macgregor can
be seen to have lived a double life at school: her life has been fairly intolerable
throughout, but as a young adult she remembers Miss Brodies class, and its
magic for her lay in all those stories and opinions which had nothing to do with
the ordinary world: Miss Brodie herself was Marys brief double life. And every-
thing comes to have at least two aspects, not only Miss Brodie but the city of Ed-
inburgh itself. This is summed up in a telling description of Sandys different
attitudes over years to images of Miss Brodie:
Sandy felt warmly towards Miss Brodie at those times when she saw how she was
misled in her idea of Rose. It was then that Miss Brodie looked beautiful and frag-
ile, just as dark heavy Edinburgh itself could suddenly be changed into a floating
city when the light was a special pearly white and fell upon one of the gracefully
fashioned streets. In the same way Miss Brodies masterful features became clear
and sweet to Sandy when viewed in the curious light of the womans folly, and she
never felt more affection for her in her later years than when she thought upon
Miss Brodie as silly.
This profound ambiguity is central to the effect of the book: no simple attitude
toward Miss Brodie can last with any justice.
And no simple picture of Miss Brodie emerges from the brief novel: however
briefly, she is supplied with suggested and suggestive contexts in culture, art and
history, in religion, in matters particularly Scottish or typically Edinburgh, in the
politics and life of her time. Perhaps the outstanding of these suggested dimen-
sions is the one which typifies her notions of virtue and dedication and heroism
and goes far to explain her devotion to Mussolini and his fascisti, her ideal of
Italy throughout history, stemming from ancient Rome.
Her first appearance in the novel is when she interrupts the set, aged sixteen,
talking to boys at the school gates, and informs them of a new plot to force her
to resign. The understanding girls, who have clearly heard such things before,
react to her appearance and their notion of her character in terms she has no
doubt taught them:
She looked a mighty woman with her dark Roman profile in the sun. The Brodie
set did not for a moment doubt that she would prevail. As soon expect Julius Cae-
sar to apply for a job at a crank school as Miss Brodie. She would never resign. If
the authorities wanted to get rid of her she would have to be assassinated.
The image is unexpected, forceful, and a shade ominousand Caesar was be-
trayed by a set including his most trusted friend.
There are a few other memorable ancient Roman moments. Miss Brodie tells her
class about an Italian holiday, reliving her scorn of the vulgar American tourists
and her own excitement at seeing the Colosseum where the gladiators died and
the slaves were thrown to the lions. Recreating that memory, she again appears
in ancient Roman guise to the girls, until she herself destroys the mood:
Miss Brodie stood in her brown dress like a gladiator with raised arm and eyes
flashing like a sword. Hail Caesar! she cried again, turning radiantly to the win-
dow light, as if Caesar sat there. Who opened the window? said Miss Brodie
dropping her arm.
Nobody answered.
Whoever has opened the window has opened it too wide, said Miss Brodie. Six
inches is perfectly adequate.
Here the ancient Roman Miss Brodie and the archetypally Edinburgh Miss Bro-
die uneasily co-exist. She has a fine dark Roman head: her dead Hugh had ad-
mired her head for its Roman appearance, and there is another splendid image
of Miss Brodie in Teddy Lloyds presence: she seated herself nobly like Britannia
with her legs apart under her loose brown skirt which came well over her knees.
A few pages later, as Miss Brodie encounters unpleasant colleagues, the image of
patrician Roman heroine and warrior is still about her:
Good mawning, she replied, in the corridors, flattening their scorn beneath the
chariot wheels of her superiority, and deviating her head towards them no more
than an insulting half-inch.
Till the end of the sets schooldays, Miss Brodie as a Roman matron remains an
important image.
Her ardent admiration for the antique Roman past is complemented by Miss
Brodies devotion, shared by Teddy Lloyd, to Italian art through the ages. So the
girls are offered Italian paintings as well as pictures of Mussolinis fascisti as holi-
day trove. They are made familiar with the Italian Renaissance and the Mona
Lisa, and instructed that the greatest Italian painter is not Leonardo but Giotto,
because he is Miss Brodies favourite. For Miss Brodie, Mussolini is a natural and
admirable part of her Italian ideal. She admires what he seems to stand for, dedi-
cation and discipline, efficiency, elimination of unemployment, and his charisma,
and she apparently remains blissfully unaware of the bullying tactics he and his
henchmen ruthlessly employed. It is easy for us, of course, with benefit of hind-
sight, to blame an Edinburgh school-teacher for admiring Mussolini and his fol-
lowers in 1930: a great many better informed people than Jean Brodie shared her
admiration at the time. During the walk through Edinburgh we are made particu-
larly conscious of the impact Mussolini has made on both Sandy and Miss Brodie:
the event is mainly seen from Sandys viewpoint, but we can distinguish clearly
what she has been and is being taught by Miss Brodie from her new reflections on
it.
We begin with Sandys understanding of the corporate unity of teacher and girls,
a body with Miss Brodie for the head, the girls as if created to fulfil Miss Brodies
purpose. Miss Brodies clear dislike of Girl Guides with their regimented vigor-
ous look prompts Sandy to remember her paradoxical admiration for Mussolinis
marching troops. Sandy ponders on juxtaposed set, Guides and fascisti: and she
sees
that the Brodie set was Miss Brodies fascisti, not to the naked eye, marching
along, but all knit together for her need and in another way, marching along.
At this stage Sandy obviously understands even less than Miss Brodie what Musso-
lini is up to: he had put an end to unemployment with his fascisti and there was
no litter in the streets. The resemblance is in the discipline, the perfect way in
which the troops are bent to the will of the leader. And so it does seem paradoxi-
cal that the marching Guides are disapproved, until Sandy begins to suspect jeal-
ousy: the Guides are too much of a rival fascisti, and Miss Brodie could not bear
it. On the walk Sandy experiences two early temptations to betray Miss Brodie,
one by being nice to Mary Macgregor and one here by joining the Brownies, but
she recoils from them quickly. Her basic reason is interesting, because this is the
only time it is ever put in terms as strong as love: Then the group-fright seized
her again, and it was necessary to put the idea aside, because she loved Miss Bro-
die.
Now her reactions are to be further tested, by the walk through the previously
unvisited slums, Sandys first experience of a foreign country: she is to have her
first intimation of the real meaning of unemployment, as she shrinks fearfully
from the snaky creature, the queue of unemployed. They are first glimpsed,
talking, spitting and smoking, and Miss Brodie enjoins the set to pray for the
Unemployed, repeating the conventional wisdom that, In Italy the unemploy-
ment problem has been solved. It is a powerful argument, faced with Edinburgh
reality. Again the men talk and spit a great deal, reinforcing negatively the fa-
mous dictum of Lord Howard of Penrith in 1923, as blinkered as Miss Brodie:
Under Fascism, Italians no longer spit in public. Sandys discomfort and fear are
acute here: when she betrays Miss Brodie she disclaims interest in world affairs,
but she remains concerned about Edinburghs poor and unemployed: It did not
seem necessary that the world should be saved, only that the poor people in the
streets and slums of Edinburgh should be relieved. Again now she experiences
the impulse to desert the set and this time she acts on it, home being the neces-
sary warm notion to oppose to her shivering cold and fearbut she rather re-
pents her self-exile from tea at Miss Brodies shortly after.
It is of course possible that the reader knows a little more about Fascism than
Miss Brodie and Sandy, and Spark gives oblique hints for such readers. Mussolini
preached the superficially attractive idea of a corporate state, in which unions,
employers and all worked and collaborated together: it is not wholly unlike Miss
Brodies benign dictatorship over her girls, and is lightly referred to here when
Sandy finds the corporate Brodie set insufficiently warm.
But Miss Brodies Fascism is basically very simple-minded and straightforward.
After her next summer holiday in Italy she tells the girls; Mussolini has per-
formed feats of magnitude and unemployment is even farther abolished under
him than it was last year. Her devotion persists until she transfers it, in 1933, to
Hitler:
a prophet-figure like Thomas Carlyle, and more reliable than Mussolini; the
German brown-shirts, she said, were exactly the same as the Italian black, only
more reliable.
Notice that she seems unaware of the racial persecution in Hitlers Nazism which
was not inherent in Mussolinis Fascism. Hitlers methods again resemble her
own, arguably, in that some historians say that his singling out and persecution of
the Jews helped unite and cement the relieved majority of the Germans thereby
passed over: Miss Brodies outrageous picking on Mary Macgregor and making
her a scapegoat has something of the same effect. In chapter three when the class
gets sex-conscious giggles, Miss Brodie ejects Mary, one of the last to laugh, and
shuts her out:
returning as one who had solved the whole problem. As indeed she had, for the
violent action sobered the girls and made them feel that, in the official sense, an
unwanted ring-leader had been apprehended and they were no longer in the
wrong.
Nazi or not, this is acutely unpleasant behaviour. Miss Brodie may be a born Fas-
cist, as Sandy claims, but she is an instinctive and a relatively uncomprehending
one: before the war she is sure Hitler will save the world, and afterwards she inno-
cently admits: Hitler was rather naughty, surely one of the great understate-
ments!
The Italy that has become home to Mrs Spark attracts Jean Brodie almost totally:
she is under the spell of its art, history, tradition and contemporary politicsall
but the church: she rejects Roman Catholicism, and the narrator suggests that
that was the one church which might have normalized her. Miss Brodie is not
averse to meeting the Pope. That was part of her Italian holiday, and her Presby-
terian soul was satisfied by her bending over the Popes ring but not kissing it.
This was part of her visit to Rome, as her London stay was marked by a visit to A
A Milne, the creator of Pooh and Piglet. But the narrator pauses on her rejection
of Roman Catholicism. The long paragraph begins by detailing the rota of differ-
ent denominations she did accept and patronise, indicating at the least an indif-
ference to sectarian strictness. Her rejection of Roman Catholicism is arguably as
simple-minded and ignorant as her approval of Mussolini: it is a middle-class
Edinburgh belief that the Church of Rome was a church of superstition, and that
only people who did not want to think for themselves were Roman Catholics. The
narrator suggests that only the Roman Catholic Church truly suited her tem-
perament: Possibly it could have embraced, even while it disciplined, her soaring
and diving spirit, it might even have normalized her. The implication seems to
be that the Roman Church provides norms, provides in its rituals and regulari-
ties, doctrines and hierarchies a stable framework for the extreme individual to
respond to: Calvinist ideas, in part born from a reaction against the notion of a
priesthood coming between the individual and God, can help the extremist to-
ward her extremity.
MacCollas critique of Calvinism concentrated on the doctrine of the total de-
pravity of man and human society, and his belief in the life-denying consequences
of such a doctrine. Spark in contrast concentrates on the doctrine of election and
subsequent dangers of antinomianism, as Hogg did in the Justified Sinner, and
Burns in Holy Willies Prayer. The problem about predestination to grace, about
election, is that, as the Justified Sinner found, it is difficult to be sure one is of the
Elect. The temptation, as he also found, is that once convinced of his or her elec-
tion to salvation, the individual can see him- or herself as above the law thereaf-
ter, bound for Heaven irrespective of behaviour in this world. This is antinomian-
ism (i.e. flouting the principle of law,anti plus Greek nomos, law). We seem to
recognise this syndrome, for example, when Miss Brodie sees Rose as Venus in-
carnate, and above the moral laws.
Here we are told that Miss Brodie persists in her non-Roman rota of church visits
with a sublime confidence in her own status:
She was not in any doubt, she let everyone know she was in no doubt, that God
was on her side whatever her course, and so she experienced no difficulty or sense
of hypocrisy in worship while at the same time she went to bed with the singing
master.
Not only that, but she assumes the election of all her girls also:
The side-effects of this condition were exhilarating to her special girls in that they
in some way partook of the general absolution she had assumed to herself. All
the time they were under her influence she and her actions were outside the con-
text of right and wrong.
From the beginning she has promised to make her girls members of lifes lite,
or, as one might say, the crme de la crme. And as time goes on by her special
attentions and confidences she makes them feel chosen. So Miss Brodie elects
herself and her girlsas Sandy at last perceives, she has a God-complex:
She thinks she is Providence, thought Sandy, she thinks she is the God of Calvin,
she sees the beginning and the end.
It is all of course a million miles away from orthodox Calvinism, where the elec-
tion is from God, and the part of the individual is to wait humbly and fearfully.
Mrs Spark is criticising the effects of Calvinism, but by no means suggesting that
Miss Brodie is a representative Calvinist. She does not know God through the
Scriptures as the Reformers insisted, but by the wrong and dangerous means of
unassisted reason and private revelation.
Miss Brodies religion is not in the end Christian at all. It is in the end personal
and perverse, a monstrosity of egotism. Early on she applies Calvinist ideas to
artists and outstanding personages: Florence Nightingale, Cleopatra, Helen of
Troy, Sybil Thorndyke the great actress, Pavlovathese are above the despised
team spirit, which is only for lesser mortals: effectively, they are above the law.
So Miss Brodie takes all the furniture of Calvinism, so to speak, all the formula-
tions and habits of mind, and applies it to her blurred perception of reality and
fantasy. She never shows any sign of seriously believing that God exists or that she
herself could be so lowly a thing as a creature. Is she quite an innocent in her
way, as Sandy later on suggests, or is this outlandish pride, the sin whereby the
angels fell?
Italy, Fascism, the Christian churches; these are perhaps the main contexts out-
side the school in which Miss Brodie is presented, but there are others. There are
the women she most admires, those just listed, plus the Queen of England, Joan
of Arc and Britannia. There is her favourite reading, and the authors she quotes
without acknowledgement: they show no bias toward religion, unless a religion of
art, including chiefly Keats, Tennyson, Pater, Rossetti, Swinburne, the early Yeats
and Charlotte Bront. There is her contempt for contemporary British politics,
whether of right or left, in comparison with Mussolini. Miss Mackay admires
Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative Prime Minister who presided over the General
Strike of 1926, and was premier of a coalition government when the Brodie set
was in the Junior school, but Miss Brodie does notand posterity admits that
Baldwin was no match for the ruthless challenge of Fascist dictatorships abroad.
Miss Brodie also prefers Mussolini to the Scottish Labour politician Ramsay Mac-
Donald, who formed a National Government with mainly Conservative support in
opposition to most of his own party in 1931, when the girls were eleven.
What we get is a real flavour of the thirties, the more effective in that we are re-
peatedly reminded that it is the period between two wars, with reference to the
felled fianc and war-bereaved spinsters, and flashes forward to the aftermath
of the Second World War. And we see Miss Brodie in the context of her fellow
spinsters, and of the fads and trivia of the time, and of her own idiosyncrasies. We
(and the Brodie set) hear of the Buchmanites, followers of an American evangel-
ist, and we hear of Marie Stopes, the great pioneer of birth control. Marie Stopes
was another remarkable woman: at thirty-eight, virgin and with a divorce behind
her, she wrote her classic manual Married Love from booksand like Miss Bro-
die, she was Edinburgh-born.
The endearing nature of Miss Brodies Edinburgh-based mentality is seen when
her notion of the near-unrefusable proposer of marriage is the Lord Lyon King-
of-Arms: the Lord Lyon King-of-Arms is king in a Scottish context only, and in
the most limited of ways: he is chief heraldic royal officer-of-arms, for ceremonial
purposes. This can [be] seen as a harmless little limitation, linking Miss Brodie
back to her Edinburgh context. There are several other instances of this: Eunice
may not do cart-wheels at Sunday tea-parties, for in many ways Miss Brodie was
an Edinburgh spinster of the deepest dye, and we have quoted above her anti-
climactic interruption of her gladiatorial fantasy to complain that the window has
been opened to a vulgar extent. Another such instance interrupts even the af-
fecting story of the felled fianc; and the comic effect is considerable:
he fell on Flanders Field, said Miss Brodie. Are you thinking, Sandy, of doing
a days washing?
No, Miss Brodie.
Because you have got your sleeves rolled up. I wont have to do with girls who roll
up the sleeves of their blouses, however fine the weather. Roll them down at once,
we are civilized beings. He fell the week before Armistice.
The city of Edinburgh is also very important in the novel, and the old churches
and the castle are omnipresent. And this is in no way surprising: Mrs Spark [as
quoted by Alan Bold in Modern Scottish Literature, 1983] admits to a more per-
vasive influence:
But Edinburgh where I was born and my father was born has had an effect on my
mind, my prose style and my ways of thought.
So, unobtrusively, Mrs Spark supplies a vivid context of the time and the charac-
ter of her main protagonist. The novel may centre on the influence of one spin-
ster school-teacher on six little girls, in a middle-class, all-female school in a city
some have suggested is hardly part of Scotland at all, but the subject matter turns
out to be wide-ranging, and the issues universal.
But the school is also and always credible, and with great economy as ever the
narrator informs us right at the start about the general knowledge of the Brodie
set when it moved up into the Senior school. The headmistress describes them as
vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the authorized curriculum, and
useless to the school as a school. The list includes elements of very different im-
portance, world affairs, skin care and puberty, as well as Einstein and the argu-
ments of those who consider the Bible to be untrue. It is implied what Miss Mac-
kay would rather have them know, and the authorised curriculum sounds on the
dull side: They knew the rudiments of astrology but not the date of the Battle of
Flodden or the capital of Finland.
We get several glimpses of Miss Brodie teaching, and by no means all are in the
classroom: if she is not settled under the elm tree with the English grammars
open as a cover, making the little girls weep at the sad fate of her war-slain Hugh,
she is likely to be taking them to the theatre, or an art gallery, or on that most
significant landmark in Sandys education, the walk through the old Edinburgh of
the castle, the cathedral and the slums. Her teaching is certainly unorthodox, and
the girls are unaware how unusual the relaxed atmosphere of her class is until her
disappearance with Mr Lowther for a fortnight precipitates them into the unten-
der mercies of Miss Gaunt. Miss Brodies class is remarkable for absolutes and
large understandings which most of us may not associate with school at all, as
when Miss Brodie declares: Art is greater than science. Art comes first, and then
science. She turns back to the geography map, but turns again to the girls to
amplify: Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order
of the great subjects of life, thats their order of importance. And in spite of her
dictatorial ways, the class is at ease:
We do a lot of what we like in Miss Brodies class, Jenny said. My mummy says
Miss Brodie gives us too much freedom.
Shes not supposed to give us freedom, shes supposed to give us lessons, said
Sandy.
Our last set-piece of Miss Brodies teaching is on her return from an Italian holi-
day in 1931, when she brings them a Cimabue and a new picture of Mussolinis
fascisti, and details of all her summer experiences and a reiteration of her famous
belief in education as a leading out, from e, out and duco, I lead: nonetheless,
she immediately continues: Qualifying examination or no qualifying examina-
tion, you will have the benefit of my experiences in Italy. She gets carried away as
a gladiator, and returned to Edinburgh spinsterhood by an unduly open window,
and back to the romantic subject of Rossetti and Swinburne: no wonder the two
new girls stand up with wide eyes!
Is there any harm in all this? One is tempted to say no, or to argue that any harm
is well compensated for by the interest and liveliness of it all: Eunice later de-
scribes Miss Brodie as an Edinburgh Festival all on her own. The girls do scrape
through the momentous qualifying examination, with a great deal of extra knowl-
edge, some very bizarre, and an inevitably blurred notion of where truth ends and
Miss Brodies opinion begins. They are enthralled by her personality: in term
time she seems the centre of their lives. Being a member of Miss Brodies set
seems the most entertaining possibility by a long way, in the Junior school at
Marcia Blaine. Arguably, no harm would have come to the girls if Miss Brodie
had let them go when they moved up to Senior school, but her hanging on to the
girls, keeping and building on her influence with themthis was where the whole
thing began to be out of hand. The evidence of the book indicates that all the
Brodie set except Sandy shook off her influence in the end without much trouble:
but the example of Joyce Emily Hammond shows in a very dramatic way how
dangerous that influence could be.
So we come at last to consider the most enigmatic character in the book, Sandy
Stranger, the girl who loved Miss Brodie, fantasised about her, wrote of her love
life, and deduced its real life character; who was Miss Brodies confidante, her
proxy lover of Teddy Lloyd and her betrayer, who became a Roman Catholic to
Miss Brodies bafflement and a nun to her hurt despair. Although we see a great
deal of her thought processes, Sandy remains for us ultimately, as her name sug-
gests, a stranger. We do not see all of her thought processes, and as she grows up
we seldom learn of her emotional state, and so her character is very much open to
different interpretation by the individual readerso that Maurice Lindsay in his
History of Scottish Literature can describe her betrayal of Miss Brodie as moti-
vated by bitchy jealousy, while Peter Kemp attributes it to a strong moral sense.
In part it depends what emotional life the reader supplies for Sandy. She loved
Miss Brodie during the walk in chapter two, when this love is sufficient to quash
temptations to join the Brownies or be nice to Marybut it is a ten-year-olds
understanding of love, which we can hardly rely on completely. Much later we see
her bored and afflicted by the betrayed Miss Brodie, nostalgically remembering
the first and unbetrayable Miss Brodie, and one general passage indicates
warmth and affection toward Miss Brodie whenever she was seen as fallible. But it
is not a lot to go on. In general, we are unclear as to her feelings for Miss Brodie,
and her feelings for Teddy Lloyd, and her feelings about her conversion to Ro-
man Catholicism and her vocation to the convent: all we have is that repeated
image of her hands clutching at the grille: the enigma persists.
Sandys conversion is something we sense as crucially important to the book, but
we are told very little about it, and what we know is cerebral or psychological; that
she was interested in Teddy Lloyds mind because he was so obsessed with the
ridiculous Miss Brodie, that when she lost interest in him as a man, she retained
interest in the mind, and eventually extracted his faith. But this submerged con-
version matters, as does Carolines conversion in The Comforters (1957), or the
bizarre conversion and eventual martyrdom of Nicholas Farringdon in The Girls of
Slender Means (1963), the novel after The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Sandys situa-
tion is after all a little like what we know of Sparks: both were born and raised in
Edinburgh but not entirely of it, within a couple of years of each other, and both
had an English mother. Sparks father was Jewish, which helped separate her
from a conventional middle-class Edinburgh situation: we hear nothing about
Sandys father, but home is a very warm and comforting notion. Both were edu-
cated in the same Presbyterian school, and neither exactly had Scottish Calvinism
sternly presented to her, to react against: instead, Sandy had Miss Brodie. Both
eventually became converts to Roman Catholicism. All sorts of intriguing ques-
tions about Sandys young adulthood and conversion remain tantalisingly unan-
swerablehow important was Miss Brodies adamant opposition to Catholicism to
Sandys eventual acceptance of it? How important was the notion of rivalry with
Miss Brodie in her love affair with Teddy Lloyd? Or was it important, mainly, just
to frustrate Miss Brodies plans and roles for Rose and Sandy, to thwart her?
Sandy emerges as a central consciousness in chapter two, with her birthday party
deux with Jenny and her insights during the walk. But from the beginning her
too-often-insisted-on tiny eyes are on Miss Brodie, scrutinising her chest and not-
ing its different appearances. The collaborative writings with Jenny inevitably
centre on Miss Brodie, and they mirror very accurately the changes in the set
generally indicated by the narrator. In the first year with Miss Brodie they are
essentially little girls, with only the beginnings of the following years sexual ob-
session, so The Mountain Eyrie, the continuing story of Miss Brodie and Hugh,
rings hollow with melodramatic romance. But in the sexual year the set senses
the onset of sexual awareness between Miss Brodie and Teddy Lloyd and Gordon
Lowther before any of the teachers do, and when Miss Brodie and Gordon Low-
ther disappear from school for the same fortnight, it is Sandy who casually sug-
gests an affair, merely in order to break up the sexless gloom that surrounded
them, and then she suspects that the affair exists in fact. She is of course only
eleven, and subject to the onset of adolescence like any other little girl, so it
would be dangerous to make too much of her ambiguous attitude towards sexual-
ity at this time. While in fantasy with Sergeant Anne Grey she was dedicated to
eliminate sex from Edinburgh and environs, she was very excited and interested
in Monica Douglass story that she has witnessed a kiss between Miss Brodie and
Teddy Lloyd, excited and desperately trying to prove the report true by eliminat-
ing the doubts. Sandy is only typical of the set in her interest in Miss Brodies
changed appearance, and fantasies about the possibility of her engaging in sexual
activity, and she is still sharing them with Jenny, but her thoughts gradually be-
come more private. It is Sandy alone who looks at Miss Brodie as she looks at
Rose in a special way when Teddy Lloyd has remarked on her profile, though
she and Jenny continue to speculate on whether Miss Brodie can be desirable to
men. And it is Sandy alone who attempts to detect any element of surrender
about her in the affair with Gordon Lowther, although Sandy and Jenny collabo-
rate on the outspoken and highly comic fictional correspondence.
Sandy was only eighteen when she finally betrayed Miss Brodie, but the seeds
were sown long before. In a sense they were sown by Miss Brodie herself, in her
constant raising of the possibilityor impossibility: I do not think ever to be
betrayed. But it is when the girls are fifteen that Sandy begins to feel that the
Brodie set, not to mention Miss Brodie herself, was getting out of hand. She has
discovered the weird phenomenon of Teddy Lloyds paintings, that all portraits
of Brodie girls come to resemble Miss Brodie herself. It is when her little eyes
meet his with the near-blackmailing insolence of her knowledge that he kisses
her, an important moment, balancing the solitary kiss Monica Douglas witnessed
between Lloyd and Miss Brodie. Not surprisingly this, and Lloyds cruel comment
that Sandy is just about the ugliest little thing Ive ever seen in my life, leave her
in some confusion. At about this time, Miss Brodie has begun to look for a confi-
dante: she
was in fact now on the look-out for a girl amongst her set in whom she could con-
fide entirely, whose curiosity was greater than her desire to make a sensation out-
side, and who, in the need to gain further confidences from Miss Brodie, would
never betray what had been gained. Almost shrewdly, Miss Brodie fixed on
Sandy,.
A round of golf full of bunkers and power images is the setting for the first confi-
dences, and they seem harmless enough, reasons why Miss Brodie has no great
ambitions for the set, except Sandy and Rose. Obliquely and then directly, Sandy
begins to understand:
It was plain that Miss Brodie wanted Rose with her instinct to start preparing to
be Teddy Lloyds lover, and Sandy with her insight to act as informant on the
affair. It was to this end that Rose and Sandy had been chosen as the crme de la
crme. There was a whiff of sulphur about the idea which fascinated Sandy in her
present mind. After all, it was only an idea.
The Sandy who feels deprived of Calvinism, something definite to reject, is
tempted by the whiff of sulphur here, and for over a year Sandy entered into the
spirit of this plan. She enjoys the long temptation shared. But Sandy was always
more a realist than Miss Brodie, could always more clearly discriminate between
fantasy and reality. So one day in her sixth year Sandy fully realises the extent
and nature of Miss Brodies manipulative plan:
All at once Sandy realised that this was not all theory and a kind of Brodie
game. But this was not theory; Miss Brodie meant it. Sandy looked at her, and
perceived that the woman was obsessed by the need for Rose to sleep with the
man she herself was in love with; there was nothing new in the idea, it was the
reality that was new.
Miss Brodies plan is serious, and Sandy has connived at it, feeding her unreality:
She had told Miss Brodie how peculiarly all his portraits reflected her. She had
said so time and again, for Miss Brodie loved to hear it.
That summer Sandy leaves school, and while Miss Brodie is in Germany and Aus-
tria and Deirdre Lloyd and the children are in the country, Sandy seduces Teddy
Lloyd by a repetition of her insolent blackmailing stare and her knowledge of
Lloyds obsession with Miss Brodie. We have little detail, but both Sandy and
Teddy Lloyd seem more interested in Miss Brodie than in each other. That curi-
osity which Miss Brodie required in a confidante is Sandys main spur: The more
she discovered him to be still in love with Jean Brodie, the more she was curious
about the mind that loved the woman. And when she loses interest in Lloyd in
due course she retains her fascination with his religion: She left the man and
took his religion and became a nun in the course of time. Arguably, Sandy has
already twice betrayed Miss Brodie, in embracing the art master, contrary to the
terms of the plan, and in embracing his religion, which Miss Brodie so despises.
But it is doubtful if she would ever have betrayed her to Miss Mackay had it not
been for Miss Brodies utterly casual throwaway remark about Joyce Emily.
The much expelled Joyce Emily has been present from chapter one, anxious to
join the sixteen-year-old Brodie set, who are too preoccupied to bother with her.
So, perhaps a little through their faults, Joyce Emily is taken up by Miss Brodie.
For the most part the reader, like the set, knows little about Joyce Emily and cares
less. We do know that she has a brother fighting in the Spanish Civil War and
wants to go too: we know that she is anti-Franco. We learn that she ran away to
Spain and was killed in an accident. And in Miss Brodies throwaway remark we
learn a little more:
sometimes I regretted urging young Joyce Emily to go to Spain to fight for
Franco, she would have done admirably.
Sandy checks that Joyce Emily went to fight for the Fascist Franco, and Miss Bro-
die agrees: I made her see sense. It is difficult to know which outrages our ex-
pectations of a schoolteacher more, talking the girl into changing sides in the war,
or urging her to go and fight at all. Both betray a terrifying unconscious egotism
which sees Joyce Emily as a pawn rather than a human being, fulfilling a minor
ambition of Miss Brodies, as Rose was intended to fulfil a major one. The juxta-
position of this conversation with Sandys betrayal clearly indicates that this dis-
covery about Joyce Emily finally triggered the betrayal, Sandys determination to
put a stop to Miss Brodie.
The betrayal itself was a sordid affair which Sandy clearly did not enjoy. Miss
Mackay was ready with questions about Miss Brodies sex life. It is a nice irony
that Sandy impeaches Miss Brodie for teaching Fascism although it is a side in-
terest: it was a side interest in Sandys experience of Miss Brodie, but a very cen-
tral and final one for Joyce Emily.
It is easy to understand why Sandy felt is necessary to put a stop to Miss Brodie,
and the narrator adds an implication of the strong moral sense pointed to by
Peter Kemp: She was more fuming, now, with Christian morals, than John Knox.
The question that is never directly answered is whether Sandy continued to feel
justified in the betrayal. References to her later life in the convent and visits from
various members of the set are sprinkled through the novel, and the conversa-
tions always centre on Miss Brodie and the betrayal. We would suggest that Sandy
attains some wisdom, some detachment in the years in the convent when she
writes her psychological treatise on The Transfiguration of the Commonplace
although how much that owed to Miss Brodie it is impossible to say. There is no
evidence that she regretted the betrayal, ever felt it had been unnecessary, though
the cumulative evidence suggests that retrospectively she began to revalue Miss
Brodies positive side. She has accumulated a lot of information. Monica visits
Sandy in the late 1950s, and asserts that she really did witness the Brodie/Lloyd
kiss; and we learn that Sandy knew this even before Miss Brodie had told her so
one day after the end of the war: presumably Sandy had been confided in by
Teddy Lloyd as well.
These convent interviews years after Miss Brodies death show us also the continu-
ing navet of the other members of the set. It is of all people Rose who inno-
cently asks Why did she get the push? Was it sex? And it is Monica who asks
Sandy if Rose ever did sleep with Teddy Lloyd, and who ruminates that if Miss
Brodie and Teddy Lloyd were in love, it was a real renunciation in a way
although in the past they saw the renunciation claims as comic. Eunice recalls
Miss Brodie as marvellous fun, and Jenny wishes she could tell Miss Brodie about
her sudden falling in love: Miss Brodie would have liked to know about it, sinner
as she was. And that is the point at which Sandy famously replies: Oh, she was
quite an innocent in her way. Perhaps the best way to understand this is that
Sandy has become able to separate the evil Miss Brodie was undoubtedly doing in
the extremities of her late prime from her inability to realise this evil or to will it
as such. But it is also another of her enigmatic utterances, for an innocent can
mean many things, from an innocent or guiltless person through a young child
and a guileless, simple or unsuspecting person to one wanting in ordinary
knowledge or intelligence; a simpleton, a silly fellow.
At her worst, Miss Brodie is simple-minded: if she can see no harm in changing
Joyce Emilys politics and packing her off to war, to fulfil by proxy her own aim of
dedication, she is seriously lacking in the insight on which she prides herself. Her
ambitions for her girls were always alarming, if one took them seriously, because
her imagination fed her ideal of dedication with a highly coloured extremism
so, when Eunice had a religious phase Miss Brodie tried to inspire Eunice to
become at least a pioneer missionary in some deadly and dangerous zone of the
earth rather than a Girl Guide leader in the respectable Edinburgh suburb of
Corstorphine. The only moment at which Miss Brodie has enough insight to sus-
pect Sandy is when she is angry at the news that Sandy has entered the convent.
She has hardly learned from the betrayal if a few weeks before she dies she can
respond to such news thus:
What a waste. That is not the sort of dedication I meant. Do you think she has
done this to annoy me? I begin to wonder if it was not Sandy who betrayed me.
Any woman who can seriously think another may have entered a convent to an-
noy her has perhaps a lopsided view of the universe: perhaps Sandy was right:
She thinks she is Providence. She thinks she is the God of Calvin.
The book ends with Sandy in the convent, now for at least a dozen years Sister
Helena of the Transfiguration. The Roman Empress Dowager Helena, mother of
Constantine, was reputedly Britishsaid indeed to be the daughter of Old King
Cole. She transformed a conventional life by departing for the Holy Land in her
old age to search for and find the True Cross on which Christ was crucified. The
Transfiguration element in Sandys convent name recalls the occasion when
Jesus was transfigured, appeared in his full glory, to a few of the disciples: it re-
calls of course as well the title of Sandys treatise, and perhaps records a debt to
the woman who first indicated to Sandy the possibility of transfiguring the com-
monplace.
Sandy is described as in her middle age, when she was at last allowed all those
visitors to the convent: in fact she is approaching forty, the age at which Miss
Brodie entered her prime. Sandy will not have a prime. The visitors are a special
dispensation enforced on Sandy: dispensations are usually granted, not en-
forced, and she does not seem very happy in her interviews, but very evidently ill
at ease:
She clutched the bars of the grille as if she wanted to escape from the dim parlour
beyond, for she was not composed like the other nuns who sat, when they re-
ceived their rare visitors, well back in the darkness with folded hands. But Sandy
always leaned forward and peered, clutching the bars with both hands.
That is our lasting image of the unquiet nun.
"Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," in Ten Modern Scottish Novels,
Aberdeen University Press, 1984, pp. 100-22.
"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Spark, Muriel: Isobel Murray and Bob Tait (essay date 1984)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed.
Brigham Narins. Vol. 94. Thomson Gale, 1997. eNotes.com. 2006. 29 Oct, 2006 <http://lit.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/
prime-miss-jean-brodie-spark-muriel/isobel-murray-bob-tait-essay-date-1984>
Jean Brodie, the Girls, the Gate
Several of Muriel Sparks novels place characters in insulated areas, contain them
in tightly knit communities: the pilgrim centre in The Comforters (1957), the island
in Robinson (1958), the geriatric ward in Memento Mori (1959), the hostel in The
Girls of Slender Means (1963), the big house in Not to Disturb (1971), the apartment
in The Hothouse by the East River (1973), the convent in The Abbess of Crewe (1974).
Nowhere in Sparks output is the microcosmic world-within-a-world scenario
more skilfully realized than in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), arguably her
masterpiece. Rapidly written in eight weeks, the novel is set in and around an
Edinburgh girls schoolMarcia Blaine, modelled on James Gillespies, where
Spark was educatedand has for its heroine a woman physically vibrant with
vitality, assuredly in her prime.
Jean Brodie is one of the great character-creations of modern fiction, a contradic-
tory soul who distrusts the Roman Catholic Church while spending summer holi-
days in Rome in search of culture; who admires the Church of Scotland but de-
tests John Knox, its founder; who deplores the team spirit yet idolizes Mussolinis
fascisti; who articulates a doctrine of romantic love yet sleeps with the dreary Mr
Lowther and denies herself to one-armed Mr Lloyd because he is a married man
with children. Though the central part of an accomplished fiction, Jean Brodie
seems undeniably real, and Sparks friend Derek Stanford claims [in his Inside the
Forties: Literary Memoirs 19371957, 1977] to have been introduced to the original
of that audacious teacher by Muriel at the Poetry Society. Spark herself has stated
there was no "real" Miss Brodie [letter to the critic dated 5 October 1982], and
there was a Christina Kay who died during the 40s, greatly esteemed, but not
like Miss Brodie in character [letter to the critic dated 17 February 1983]. Jean
Brodie may be a fact of fiction rather than life (the distinction between the two
being blurred by Sparkian metaphysics) but then so are all Sparks characters: the
difference between Jean Brodie and the others is that she appears to have an
actual existence over and above the pages of a book that operates by implication.
This is why she has been successfully transferred to stage, cinema and television.
For thousands of readers, Jean Brodie actually exists in the same way that Sher-
lock Holmes and George Smiley actually exist. Though no saint, Jean Brodie is a
literary legend.
The authors affection for Jean Brodie and her native city gives this novel of the
1930s a period charm that is rare in the caustic Spark canon. For The Prime of Miss
Jean Brodie Spark has reserved some of her most richly lyrical prose. The novel
abounds in evocative phrases: the haunted November twilight of Edinburgh,
The evening paper rattle-snaked its way through the letter box and there was
suddenly a six-oclock feeling in the house, Miss Brodies voice soared up to the
ceiling, and curled round the feet of the Senior girls upstairs, The bare winter
top branches of the trees brushed the windows of this long [science] room, and
beyond that was the cold winter sky with a huge red sun, The wind blew from the
icy Forth and the sky was loaded with forthcoming snow, Miss Brodie, indiffer-
ent to criticism as a crag, Her name and memory, after her death, flitted from
mouth to mouth like swallows in summer, and in winter they were gone. Several
of these poetic phrases make the novel, on one level, an elegy for an Edinburgh
that has gone, though it lingers in the memory of Muriel Spark. Edinburgh, the
home of Jean Brodie, is also identified by Spark as the city where John Knox
clashed with Mary Queen of Scots; where Jean Brodies ancestor Deacon Brodie
(the original of Stevensons dualistic Dr Jekyll) roamed as a burgher by day and a
burglar by night; where spinsters such as Jean Brodie called themselves Europe-
ans and Edinburgh a European capital, the city of Hume and Boswell. Haunted
by its historic past and pressurized by the progressive spinsters of Edinburgh,
the city acquires a magical dimension: dark heavy Edinburgh itself could sud-
denly be changed into a floating city when the light was a special pearly white and
fell upon one of the gracefully fashioned streets.
The contradictions in Jean Brodies character are partly explained by the con-
trasts apparent in Edinburgh. On a long winters walk in 1930, during which
Sandy Stranger comes to the conclusion that the Brodie set was Miss Brodies
fascisti, the girls are taken from the classically proportioned New Town to the
reeking network of slums which the Old Town constituted in those years. The
Old Town is another world-within-a-world (or town-within-a-city), a no-girls-land
that has the alien atmosphere of a foreign country. Miss Brodie leads her privi-
leged girls into the unpromising land of the Grassmarket:
A man sat on the icy-cold pavement; he just sat. A crowd of children, some with-
out shoes, were playing some fight game, and some boys shouted after Miss Bro-
dies violet-clad company, with words that the girls had not heard before, but
rightly understood to be obscene. Children and women with shawls came in and
out of the dark closes. A man and a woman stood in the midst of the crowd
which had formed a ring round them. They were shouting at each other and the
man hit the woman twice across the head.
In such a city, with its internal and eternal dichotomies, reality has several strata
and a woman such as Jean Brodie can be in two minds at once. Like many Scots,
Jean Brodie has a divided self.
Theologically, Jean Brodies Edinburghwhere school-teachers bid their good
mornings with predestination in their smilesis a place fashioned by John Knox
from the philosophy of Calvin. Sandy Stranger, half-English, recognizes that the
bleak doctrine of the elect is built into Edinburgh where elegance coexists with
squalor. In fact, Spark declares, it was the religion of Calvin of which Sandy felt
deprived, or rather a specified recognition of it. She desired this birthright; some-
thing definite to reject. Increasingly, Sandy Stranger makes a connection be-
tween Jean Brodies scholastic lite and John Calvins elect. The insight causes
her to lose faith in her teacher:
she began to sense what went to the makings of Miss Brodie who had elected her-
self to grace in so particular a way and with more exotic suicidal enchantment that
if she had simply taken to drink like other spinsters who couldnt stand it any
more.
If The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is constructed around a microcosmic notion, it is
not imaginatively limited by its location: behind the (albeit fictional) reality of
Miss Brodie there are the historical figures of Knox, Calvin, Mussolini, Franco
and Hitler. Sparks novel is enormously suggestive: the account of a group of
schoolgirls and their teacher is also a statement on the nature of faith and fanati-
cism.
Jean Brodies prime is officially launched in 1930, when the heroine is 39. A
teacher in the Junior department of Marcia Blaine School, she chooses for her
disciples (the biblical subtext is evident) six 10-year-old girls: Monica Douglas,
who is famous for mathematics and subsequently marries a scientist; Rose Stanley,
famous for sex, who marries a businessman; Eunice Gardiner, famous for gymnas-
tics, who becomes a nurse married to a doctor; Mary Macgregor, famous for being
a silent lump, a nobody, who dies in a fire at the age of 23; Jenny Gray, famous
for being pretty, who becomes an actress; and Sandy Stranger, notorious for her
small, almost non-existent, eyes, who becomes a nun famous for her psychologi-
cal treatise, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Sandy, the future Sister
Helena of the Transfiguration, Jean Brodies darling disciple, is the Judas who
betrays her teacher to the head-mistress, Miss Mackay. As a result Miss Brodie is
forced to retire in 1939, the year of a new world war, for teaching fascism
especially to Joyce Emily Hammond, who dies on her way to fight for Franco at
Miss Brodies bidding.
Technically, the novel is told in a series of flashbacks and flashforwards. It opens
in 1936, breaks back to 1930 (the first year of Miss Brodies prime) then uses
timeshifts to indicate the rise of the Brodie set and the fall of Miss Brodie. Before
the final tale of Miss Brodies downfall has been told, the reader is given the date
of the heroines death: in 1946, at the age of 55, after suffering from an internal
growth. In The Comforters Spark queried the concept of authorial omniscience; in
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie she makes full use of it, magisterially providing the
reader with the information she explores in the novel. She also delivers herself of
a personal opinion as if her heroine were an actual rather than a fictional woman:
In some ways, her attitude [of hostility to Roman Catholicism] was a strange one,
because she was by temperament suited only to the Roman Catholic Church; pos-
sibly it could have embraced, even while it disciplined, her soaring and diving
spirit, it might even have normalized her.
The comment encourages the reader to believe in the reality of Jean Brodie, ap-
propriately so since she is Sparks most forgivable character.
For all her admiration of her heroine, Spark makes fun of her fantasies. There is
a reductive, comic quality to Jean Brodies assumption of the leadership of an
lite corps of schoolgirls. An admirer of Il Duce, Mussolini, she defines teaching
as a leading out, from e, out and duco, I lead. Regarding her pupils as the
crme de la crme she indoctrinates her liteher electwith her own preju-
dices. Her pupils are vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the author-
ized curriculum, being familiar with the accomplishments of Sybil Thorndike and
Anna Pavlova and, above all, with the romantic tale of Jeans lover, Hugh Car-
ruthers, who fell like an autumn leafso she informs the girls in autumn under
an elmat Flanders, a tragedy enlarged with frequent retellings. Like her he-
roesMussolini, Franco, HitlerMiss Brodie is a dogmatist. When she asks her
class to name the greatest Italian painter and one pupil names Leonardo da
Vinci, she says, revealingly, That is incorrect. The answer is Giotto, he is my fa-
vourite. In place of observations, she inflicts on the girls her dogmatic assertions:
Art is greater than science, Mussolini is one of the greatest men in the world,
and (preposterously) unemployment is even farther abolished under [Mussolini]
than it was last year.
Projecting herself as the peer of fascist dictators, Jean Brodie nevertheless re-
mains the victim of her own urban and intellectual environment, for in many
ways Miss Brodie was an Edinburgh spinster of the deepest dye. Like other Spark
heroines she is inclined to solipsism, unable to understand the wider world except
as an extension of herself. If circumstances do not accommodate her expectations
she attempts to satisfy her desires deviously. Teddy Lloyd, the art teacher, is a
married man, which means that she can only allow herself to kiss him surrepti-
tiously in the art room, a gesture she believes preserves her personal purity. Ar-
rogantly, however, she decides to make love to Teddy vicariously by sacrificing
one of her girls, choosing Rose Stanley to be her surrogate. Convinced that the
girls only exist to do her will, she feels she can thus have the best of both worlds:
the world of the Edinburgh spinster as well as the world of the romantic heroine.
In the event, it is Sandy Stranger, not Rose Stanley, who sleeps with Teddy Lloyd.
The art teacher accepts the substitute physically but remains besotted by Jean: all
his portraits of the Brodie set reproduce her features on their faces. Miss Brodies
physical affair with Mr Lowther, the music teacher, is also rationalized, for she
sleeps with this bachelor in a spirit of definite duty, if not exactly martyrdom.
Tragically, Jeans hypocrisy leads to the loss of everything that is precious to her:
the friendship of Mr Lowther (who marries the science teacher), the devotion of
Teddy Lloyd, the position she holds at Marcia Blaine, the adoration of her girls.
Surely no girls in adult fiction have ever been portrayed so unsentimentally as the
Brodie set. Sandy Stranger and Jenny Gray are obsessed with sex from the age of
10. Thinking of Miss Brodies prime, they see her belonging to a different species
from their parents. They dont have primes, says Sandy. They have sexual inter-
course, adds Jenny. Sandy, who has fantasies about the heroes of Kidnapped and
Jane Eyre, is reduced to giggles when Mr Lloyd shows lantern slides of Italian
paintings and points at the curves on Botticellis female figures. Sandy and Jenny
giggle together over the lewd mechanics of sewing machines. Between them
Sandy and Jenny concoct a romantic fiction around Jean Brodies supposed sex-
ual adventures with Hugh of Flanders Field and Mr Lowther. This subplot allows
Spark to parody romantic pulp-fiction with glorious comic results, culminating in
a letter the girls imagine Miss Brodie writing to Gordon Lowther:
Your letter has moved me deeply as you may imagine [but] there is another in my
life whose mutual love reaches out to me beyond the bounds of Time and Space.
He is Teddy Lloyd! Intimacy has never taken place with him. He is married to
another. One day in the art room we melted into each others arms and knew the
truth. But I was proud of giving myself to you when you came and took me in the
bracken on Arthurs Seat while the storm raged about us. I may permit miscon-
duct to occur again from time to time as an outlet because I am in my Prime.
Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual inter-
course, as well as your singing.
When Jenny sees a man exposing himself beside the Water of Leith, Sandy is
transported into a Walter Mitty world in which she befriends the policewoman
(suitably romanticized) who had questioned Jenny. By the time they are 12 the
two girls feel they have, imaginatively, done it all:
The world of pure sex seemed years away. Jenny had turned twelve. Her mother
had recently given birth to a baby boy, and the event had not moved them even to
speculate upon its origin.
Theres not much time for sex research in the Senior school, Sandy said.
I feel Im past it, said Jenny.
Linguistically The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a treat. Sparks use of cross-
references, for example, creates irony. Eunice Gardiner is reprimanded by Miss
Brodie for using the adjective social as a noun. The incident connects with a
flashforward, early in the novel, when Eunice, a married woman, tells her hus-
band she wishes to go and visit Miss Brodies grave:
Who was Miss Brodie?
A teacher of mine, she was full of culture. She was an Edinburgh Festival all on
her own. She used to give us teas at her flat and tell us about her prime.
Prime what?
Elsewhere Sparks dialogue provides exquisite comic exchanges. Monica Doug-
lass claim that she has seen Teddy Lloyd kissing Miss Brodie in the art room is
queried by Sandy Stranger:
What part of the art room were they standing in? Sandy said.
The far side, Monica said. I know he had his arm round her and was kissing her.
They jumped apart when I opened the door.
Which arm? Sandy snapped.
The right of course, he hasnt got a left.
The interrogation continues:
Was it a long and lingering kiss? Sandy demanded, while Jenny came close to
hear the answer.
Monica cast the corner of her eye up to the ceiling as if doing mental arithmetic.
Then when her calculation was finished she said, Yes it was.
How do you know if you didnt stop to see how long it was?
I know, said Monica, getting angry, by the bit that I did see. It was a small bit of
a good long kiss that I saw, I could tell it by his arm being round her.
Using a descriptive device, Spark attaches to the principal characters a set of
words that stick to them throughout the novel. Jean Brodie is forever proclaiming
her prime, Sandy Stranger is constantly condemned by her eyesher small, al-
most non-existent eyes, her little eyes screwed on Miss Brodie, a hypocritical
blinking of her eyes, her little pig-like eyes, her abnormally small eyes. Teddy
Lloyd first kisses Sandy because of her eyes, telling her Thatll teach you to look
at an artist like that. Mary Macgregors presence in the novel is verbally linked to
death by fire. The manner of her death is described at the beginning of the sec-
ond chapter of the novel:
[After the outbreak of the Second World War, Mary] died while on leave in Cum-
berland in a fire in the hotel. Back and forth along the corridors ran Mary Mac-
gregor, through the thickening smoke. She ran one way; then, turning, the other
way; and at either end the blast furnace of the fire met her.
Shortly after this flashforward there is an allusion to Mary who later, in that hotel
fire, ran hither and thither till she died. Armed with this foreknowledge, the
reader is then alerted to the significance of Marys panic as a schoolgirl during an
experiment in the science room when magnesium flares shoot out of test-tubes:
Mary Macgregor took fright and ran along a single lane between two benches,
met with a white flame, and ran back to meet another brilliant tongue of fire.
Hither and thither she ran in panic between the benches until she was caught and
induced to calm down.
The prose here has the poetic force of a refrain and in such ways Spark condi-
tions the readers responses to various situations in the novel.
Thematically, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a persuasive study of the litist men-
tality that powers the body of the heroine. Give me a girl at an impressionable
age, and she is mine for life, says Miss Brodie, but Sandy Stranger, the most re-
flective of the disciples, realizes that her leader is flawed by fanaticism. Ironically,
Sandys own fantasies are flattened by the sexual facts of life and she retreats from
Miss Brodie, who is suddenly seen as ridiculous rather than sublime. After ruining
Miss Brodies teaching career, Sandy retreats further from everyday reality, not
into a school but into the Catholic Church, in whose ranks she had found quite a
number of Facists much less agreeable than Miss Brodie. It is Sandy Stranger,
alias Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, who delivers the last words in the book,
from the isolation of her nunnery. Asked about the main influences in her life
Sandy says there was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime. The commonplace has
been transfigured: Sandys life, like the readers, has been enriched by the char-
ismatic personality of Jean Brodie, who, for all her faults, has a poetic panache.
Jean Brodie, the Girls, the Gate, in Muriel Spark, Methuen, 1986, pp. 63-86.
"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Spark, Muriel: Alan Bold (essay date 1986)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Brigham Narins. Vol.
94. Thomson Gale, 1997. eNotes.com. 2006. 29 Oct, 2006 <http://lit.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/
prime-miss-jean-brodie-spark-muriel/alan-bold-essay-date-1986>
The Narrative Structure of Muriel Sparks The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Because the narrative line of Muriel Sparks The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is often
interrupted and time seems to be just a plaything of the author, a first reading
may leave one feeling dislocated. Further investigation, however, proves that
Spark regularly introduces flashforwards and fantasies into the novels present
time in order to demonstrate the unforeseen ways in which the teacher, Jean
Brodie, influences her students, especially Sandy Stranger.
The novel depicts "the Brodie set," a group of six middle-class schoolgirls who are
variously influenced by one teacherJean Brodie. It follows these girls from the
time they are ten years old until a few years after they leave school. The story is
centred on one student, Sandy Stranger, whose actions finally lead to the firing of
Miss Brodie, and who later becomes a nun. The novels chronology runs from
1930 into the 1950s. This time line is punctuated by two kinds of out-of-time-
sequence events: the flashforward, in which future events are actually depicted;
and the fantasy, in which a character imagines or describes events that do not
take place in her "real" world. While there are a few brief flashbacks, and some
occasional references to past events, it is primarily the use of flashforwards and
fantasies that distort the forward motion of time or disrupt the readers sense of
the novels "reality."
Since the novels publication in 1961, critics have found many ways to explain
Sparks particular way of sequencing the events of this novel. David Lodge con-
cludes [in "The Uses and Abuses of Omniscience: Method and Meaning in Muriel Sparks
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," in The Novelist at the Crossroads, 1971] that
the jumps forwards and backwards in time, the pointed interventions of the
authorial voiceconstantly check any inclination we may have to lose ourselves
in the story or to sink into emotional identification with any of the characters; it
detaches us from the experience presented and makes us think about its mean-
ing, or meanings.
In addition, Lodge finds that the flashforwards are useful because they "present
the extension of Miss Brodies influence on the girls in their adult life simultane-
ously with their relationship as teacher and pupils." The movement between pre-
sent and future creates a view of reality termed "Godlike" by Anthony Burgess [in
The Novel Now, 1967], and "disorderly order" by Alan Kennedy [in "Cannibals,
Okapis and Self-Slaughter in the Fiction of Muriel Spark," in The Protean Self, 1974].
Adding the time shifts, fantasies, and authorial interventions to the depiction of
events in the "real world" does create "a series of dislocations, each of which dis-
turbs ones former conception of the novel and transforms it into something new"
[Bernard Harrison, "Muriel Spark and Jane Austen," in The Modern English Novel,
edited by Gabriel Josipovici, 1976].
While these and other critical explanations all add to our understanding of the
novel, I do not think enough detailed attention has yet been given to Sparks
technique, a technique which economically allows her to show how an individual
is formed by a unique combination of internal and external forces. Neither the
individual nor those around her will necessarily understand all these forces or
their relative value (which are most significant, which least, etc.); the creation of
an individual is marvellously complex. As we watch the evolution of Sandy
Stranger, we are privy to the influences of people, places, and information, to the
plans of Sandys teacher, and privy also to Sandys fantasies and future. Spark
forces us to see that no individual could have predicted the adult Sandy would
become; no one around her could have seen how the pieces of her individual
puzzle would fit together. Ann Dobie concludes [in "Muriel Sparks Definition of
Reality," Critique (1970)] that in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie "experiences of hu-
man beings are seen often to be precarious, inconclusive, and transitory though
they are considered by the characters to be of great moment." At the same time,
events which are not presumed to be of great importance may turn out to have
great significance.
Let us turn now to these events. I will look first at time present, and then move on
to the flashforwards, followed by the fantasies. I believe it is necessary to pause
here, however, and define flashforward.
A flashforward is more than a reference to the future (these are common in novels
of all periods) because it includes description, action and/or dialogue, not just
summary of what will occur: it is an actual scene in future time. In many parts of
this novel there are also brief references to the future. Rose Stanleys future repu-
tation for sex, Monica Douglass later fame "for mathematics and anger," and
mention that the six girls will all feel differently about their studies in the Senior
School a few months later, are three such references. However, these do not con-
tain descriptions of place, narration of action, or dialogue. What I am calling
flashforwards contain one or more of such dramatizing elements.
Time present in this novel runs from 1930 into the 1950s. It begins with the six
girls of the "Brodie set" at age ten, takes them through Junior and then Senior
school, and then moves on to the betrayal, retirement, and death of Miss Brodie.
It includes Sandys entry into a convent and conversations about Miss Brodie
among Sandy, Eunice, Rose, Monica, and Jenny, and then ends with a conversa-
tion between Sandy and a young man who has come to the convent to interview
her.
Although time present in the novel begins with 1930, the novel opens in 1936,
when the six girls who make up the "Brodie set" are all sixteen. In eight pages we
become acquainted with the girls current qualities and with Miss Brodies endan-
gered status as a teacher at the Marcia Blaine School. There are two brief refer-
ences to the past: one indicating that when the girls moved from the Junior to the
Senior school they were already a distinctive group, and the other noting that
these girls have had a "secret life" for six years. At the end of this introductory
scene, Stark reminds us of the date and, simultaneously, lets us see that Miss Bro-
die, a teacher in the prime of her powers who espouses an eccentric set of non-
traditional educational objectives, mourns the loss of certain traditional values:
"These years are still the years of my prime. Here is my tram car. I daresay Ill
not get a seat. This is nineteen-thirty-six. The age of chivalry is past." This scene
has sometimes mistakenly been seen as taking place in present time, with the rest
of the novel an "extended flashback from the point when the girls are aged
sixteen" [Lodge].
When the next paragraph opens with "Six years previously " we, as readers,
might think that we have moved to a flashback. Only later do we realize that the
first eight pages were a flashforward and that the time present of the novel begins
on page 16, in 1930. Throughout the novel, Spark is very careful to keep the
reader oriented in time. There are constant references to the season, school term,
actual year, or to the age of the girls. All of these pinpoint where the reader is
and root the novel in a particular historic time period. They also allow us to re-
turn, in an orderly fashion, from the fantasies and flashforwards that are such
striking features of the novel.
Altogether, eleven flashforwards interrupt the present time of the novel. The first,
as mentioned above, shows the six girls of the "Brodie set" in 1936; the second
depicts the death of Mary, the sets scapegoat; the third shows Eunice, in the year
1959, having a conversation with her husband about the possibility of putting
flowers on Miss Brodies grave; and the seventh, in 1946, describes Monica talk-
ing to Miss Brodie, now in a nursing home. Miss Brodie wonders if it might be
Sandy who "betrayed" her to the schools headmistress so that she lost her teach-
ing position. The ninth flashforward focuses on Jenny, now a married forty-year-
old, who is overwhelmed by a sexual fantasy as powerful as her youthful sexual
imaginings. The remaining six flashforwards all emanate from Sandy and show
her talking with or about Miss Brodie. Sandys flashforwards most strongly high-
light the influence that Miss Brodie actually had, as opposed to the one described
in present timethe one she intended to have.
Flashforward four shows Sandy, now a nunSister Helena of the Transfiguration,
in conversation with a young man from Edinburgh. They contrast their memories
of the city, and the man describes the forces that influenced him in his teens:
"Auden and Eliot[;] the Spanish Civil War." He then asks Sandy about the
greatest influence upon her: "Was it political, personal? Was it Calvinism?" "Oh
no," said Sandy. "But there was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime." And since Sandy
has said that influences in teen-age years are often important "even if they pro-
vide something to react against," we suspect that such was Miss Brodies role for
her. Jean Brodie wished to have a positive influence on her students, but for
Sandy, the teachers most important function may have been a negative one.
Flashforward five begins with Monica, in the late 1950s affirming to Sandy that
she really did see Miss Brodie kissing the art teacher, Teddy Lloyd, back when
she and Sandy were in the Junior school together. It then moves to a conversation
between Miss Brodie and Sandy, in 1946Miss Brodies last year of life and
Sandys last year outside the convent. Miss Brodie confirms the love she and Mr.
Lloyd shared and states that they never did become lovers. She admits she is now
past her prime, and she tries to make Sandy her confidante. Sandy is fairly unre-
sponsive, but she does give Miss Brodie one bit of emotional support by telling
her ex-teacher that her "prime" was a "good prime." This scene reveals a cool
Sandy, withholding herself from her teacher, who finally has to ask "are you lis-
tening, Sandy?" The flashforward here confirms that Sandy, once so wrapped up
in her teachers every idea and activity, no longer desires intimacy with Brodie.
Flashforward six continues the conversation between Sandy and Jean Brodie in
1946. It is here that we discover that it was Sandy who betrayed Miss Brodie and
discover too that the teacher who once fascinated her is now "tiresome."
Flashforward eight begins with Rose and Sandy as adults, talking about Mary.
Sandy wishes she had been nicer to the unfortunate Mary, given the sad end to
which she came. And Rose asks "How were we to know?" making the question of
influences, foresight, and the unstable nature of reality stand out boldly. The
flashforward then jumps back to the time and setting of flashforwards five and six,
with Miss Brodie wondering if it were Mary who acted against her. Sparks flash-
forward technique makes it clear that Miss Brodie is blind to the actual way she
affected her students. She cannot tell which of the girls were "loyal" to her and
which particular one betrayed her.
In flashforward ten we observe Sandy telling Rose that Miss Brodie lost her job
because of her political views, not because of her sexual activities. The scene shift
and we observe Sandy and Monica discussing Miss Brodies love for the art
teacher, Teddy Lloyd. The two women agree that Miss Brodies "renunciation" of
Lloyd had some meaning, since she "was a woman in her prime." These scenes,
taken together, confirm that Sister Helena has transformed her earlier relation-
ship to and ideas about Miss Brodie in ways her teacher could never imagine.
The last flashforward is very brief; it merely inserts a note to show the frivolity of
Miss Brodies politics, for she admits to Sandy, after the war, that Hitler was
"rather naughty." Sandy has no line or look, but she is the silent recipient of this
odd assessment of Hitler, and we know it is stored in her mind.
All eleven flashforwards are interwoven into the time line of 1930 through 1938,
the years the Brodie set is in school. The fantasies, however, occur only during
the time the girls are in the junior division19301932.
In the fantasies, as in the flashforwards, proprietorship belongs mostly to Sandy.
Of the eleven fantasies, two are shared between Sandy and Jenny, who together
are writing "The Mountain Eyrie," the love story of Jean Brodie and Hugh Car-
ruthers (Miss Brodies first love, who died in World War One). Of the remaining
nine fantasies, one is Sandys solo writing of this love story, while the other eight
are Sandys vivid imaginings of conversations with romanticized characters.
In five of her conversational fantasies, Sandy speaks with figures from books that
are favorites of Miss Brodie: the Lady of Shalott; Alan Breck, the hero of Kid-
napped; and Rochester, from Jane Eyre. In another fantasy, Sandy is a dancer
with the skill and status of Pavlova. The two discuss the difficulties of the misun-
derstood artist. Spark uses these fantasies to demonstrate the effect of Miss Bro-
dies romanticism on young Sandy.
In two fantasies Sandy is a colleague of Sergeant Anne Grey, the female inspector
who questioned Jenny after Jenny was surprised by a man exposing himself. In
these two fantasies Sandy and Anne Grey discuss the "intimacy" that has been
occurring between Jean Brodie and the music teacher, Gordon Lowther; Sandys
youthful sexuality is expressed here more explicitly than in her earlier fantasies,
for as she and Anne Grey gaze at each other "their mutual understanding [is] too
deep for words," and Sandy finds her imagined colleague "thrilling." Spark seems
to point here to the natural sexuality of the young Sandy, which forms part of her
real life attachment to her teacher. Perhaps because of the teachers actual sexual
activity with Gordon Lowther, Sandy seeks a fantasy outlet to redirect her girlish
feelings. The confused sexuality that will surround Sandys ongoing relationship
to her teacher is forecast in this fantasy.
The remaining fantasy is a fleeting argument with an imagined husband. The
conflict fantasized seems to echo the conflict which Sandy (in time present) is
experiencing concerning how to treat her classmate Mary. It is an odd insight
into a life Sandy never consciously considersthe life of the mundane, married
woman. One knows that Sandy will become a nun, marrying an institution rather
than a person. This fantasy therefore seems to encapsulate unresolved sexual
tensions of the young girltensions that will be exacerbated by her affair with
Teddy Lloyd, Miss Brodies rejected lover, and which may form part of her mo-
tive for religious conversion.
In Prime, Sparks juxtaposition of fantasies and flashforwards with time present
adds to our knowledge of Miss Brodies effect on Sandy, and, to a lesser extent,
her effect on the other girls. In her fantasies, we see the young Sandy attempting
to play the role of a romantic heroinetrying to become the equal of models Miss
Brodie has placed before her. As a young girl, Sandy longs to live up to her ad-
mired teachers ideals. We also see, via flashforwards (which are not fantasies, but
realities) the actual consequences of Sandys interaction with Miss Brodie. Mean-
while, in the present time of the novel, we watch the egocentric and idiosyncratic
Miss Brodie attempt to shape Sandy and the other girls in the set. She tries to
give them what she thinks is a valuable education, one that will allow them to
become extraordinarydedicated to work or love. She attempts to attract their
love and loyalty, assuming that if given a student "at an impressionable age" she
will make that girl hers "for life."
The education and influence offered by Miss Brodie do not last for life, except in
negative or distorted ways. In her discussion of Prime [in "A World at War: One Big
Miss Brodie," in Communities of Women, 1978], Nina Auerbach focuses on the power
of Miss Brodie to serve as a "primary" source of development upon all the girls
but Rose. However, none of the girls become famous and dedicated artists, fulfill-
ing the hopes of their old teacher. Jenny becomes a minor actress, Eunice a
nurse, Mary a shorthand typist, and Monica an undistinguished science worker.
Rose, who marries well, casts off "Miss Brodies influence as a dog shakes pond-
water from its coat." Joyce Emily, a temporary member of the group, dies in
Spain, on her way to fight on the Loyalist side, having been influenced by Miss
Brodie to attempt a heroic destiny. In Joyce Emilys case, Miss Brodies influence
was completely detrimental, although Miss Brodie herself insists on seeing the
girl as a heroine. The remaining student, Sandy, converts to Catholicism and
becomes Sister Helena. She is dedicated to her religious life, but Miss Brodie tells
Monica, "that is not the sort of dedication I meant."
In a way, one could view this novel as a comedy of errors. Miss Brodie acts erro-
neously, although she thinks she is acting in the best interests of her pupils to lift
them above the run of ordinary life. Sandy also acts erroneously for, although she
becomes a nun, she is lacking in the peace and serenity that a religious conver-
sion ought to allow. She "clutches the bars of the grille" when she talks with visi-
tors; her dedication to a religious life seems to be based more on need than on
transcendent peace or joy. In fact, no mention is made of any religious rewards
Sandy has received from her life as a nun. The lives of both women have gone
comically awry. As Judy Little points out [in Comedy and the Woman Writer:
Woolf, Spark, and Feminism, 1983], this is the kind of comedy which questions
the way the world is ordered and which presents "a relentless mocking of truths
otherwise taken to be self-evident or even sacred." The method Spark employs to
achieve this comic effect largely depends on shifts into future time and into the
imaginative world of Sandy Strangers mind.
In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark sets up a careful counterpoint of
flashforwards and fantasies which work against the actual 1930s setting of the
novel most effectively. This historical period, in which European fascism devel-
oped, is a perfect backdrop against which to display Jean Brodies eccentric au-
thoritarianism. Brodies hopes to influence her star pupils to fulfil her own ro-
mantic dreams of heroism, artistic fulfilment, dedication to discipline, and elitism
are detailed in the time present narration of the story. However, as Spark demon-
strates, through the use of out-of-time-sequence events, Brodies actual influence
does not match her conscious intentions. Spark uses eleven flashforwards to pre-
sent future events, showing the true consequences of Miss Brodies actions and,
particularly, the effects of these actions upon Sandy. Spark interjects eleven fanta-
sies which exhibit otherwise hidden aspects of Sandys youthful mind, aspects
which will later be sublimated into Sandys betrayal of Miss Brodie and her uneasy
conversion to the life of a nun. Together, the fantasies and flashforwards drama-
tize the unexpected ways in which a seemingly dedicated teacher can affect her
pupils.
"The Narrative Structure of Muriel Sparks The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," in The
Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 4, Summer, 1990, pp. 488-98.
"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Spark, Muriel: Anne L. Bower (essay date Summer 1990)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Brigham
Narins. Vol. 94. Thomson Gale, 1997. eNotes.com. 2006. 29 Oct, 2006 <http://lit.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/
prime-miss-jean-brodie-spark-muriel/anne-l-bower-essay-date-summer-1990>