8. THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE

THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE: Muriel Spark
One of Spark's best-known and most critically acclaimed works, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) centers on morality, manipulation, and betrayal at a school for girls in Edinburgh, Scotland, during the 1930s. Praised for its structural complexity, the novel juxtaposes past, present, and future events as well as fantasies as it documents the decline of the title character—the teacher Jean Brodie—and her effect on her students. Mary Schneider has stated: "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has long been recognized as a brilliantly woven novel, complex in its narrative techniques and themes."
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a novella by Muriel Spark, appearing first in The New Yorker and later published by Macmillan in 1961. By far the best-known of her books, the bizarre, unforgettable character of Miss Jean Brodie helped make Spark an internationally famous, and a leading figure in modern Scottish literature. It was adapted into a stage play in 1968, a film starring Maggie Smith in 1969, and a TV serial in 1978.
PLOT SUMMARY
In 1930s Edinburgh, six ten-year-old girls are assigned Miss Jean Brodie as their teacher: Sandy, Rose, Mary, Monica, Eunice, and Jenny. Miss Brodie, intent on their receiving an education in the true sense of the word educere, to lead out, would give her students lessons on art history or her love life and travels. Under the mentorship of Miss Brodie, the girls begin to stand out from the rest of the school as distinctively Brodie. In the Junior School, they meet the singing teacher, the short Gordon Lowther, and the handsome, one-armed Teddy Lloyd, a married man with six children. These two teachers form a love triangle with Miss Brodie, each loving her, while she only returns the affections of Teddy. Miss Brodie never acts on her love, except once to exchange a kiss which Monica witnesses.Dick Reed as Teddy Lloyd and Lauren Bloom as Jean Brodie in the theatrical version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
During a two week absence from school, Miss Brodie enters into a love affair with Lowther instead of Lloyd, on the grounds that a bachelor makes a more respectable paramour. During these two years in the Junior School, Jenny "was accosted by a man joyfully exposing himself beside the Water of Leith".
Soon the girls are promoted to the Senior School, where, though dispersed, they retain their identity as the Brodie set. Miss Brodie keeps in touch with the girls after school by inviting them over as she would when they were her students. Miss Mackay, all the while, is trying to separate the Brodie set and find good reason from the girls to fire Miss Brodie. When the Kerr sisters, also teachers at the school, are employed as Mr. Lowther's housekeepers, Miss Brodie tries to take over their duties. She moves in with Lowther, and embarks on the task of fattening him up with extravagant cooking. The girls, now thirteen, visit Miss Brodie in pairs over at Lowther's house, where all Miss Brodie does is ask about Mr. Lloyd in Lowther's presence. It is at this point that Mr. Lloyd asks Rose, and occasionally the other girls, to model for his art. Each face he paints ultimately resembles Miss Brodie, details which her girls report to her and which she is thrilled to hear. One day when Sandy was over visiting Lloyd, he kisses her for peering at him with her little eyes.
Before the Brodie set turns sixteen, Miss Brodie tests them to discover which of her girls she can really trust, ultimately choosing Sandy as her confidante. Miss Brodie, obsessed with the notion that Rose should have an affair with Lloyd in her place, begins to neglect Lowther, who ends up marrying Miss Lockhart, the chemistry teacher. Joyce Emily steps briefly in the scene, trying unsuccessfully to be included among the Brodie set. Miss Brodie took her under her wing separately, however, encouraging her to run away to fight in the Spanish Civil War, to fight on the Franco side, where she immediately dies. The girls, now seventeen, begin to head in their different directions. Mary leaves the school to become a typist and later dies in the hotel fire. Jenny leaves the school early for a career in acting.
After the four remaining girls of the set graduate, Eunice becomes a nurse, Monica becomes a scientist, and Rose finds a handsome man to marry. Sandy, interested in psychology, finds Mr. Lloyd's stubborn love and his painter's mind fascinating. For five weeks during the summer, when Sandy is eighteen, she has an affair with Mr. Lloyd, alone in his house while his wife and children travel. Sandy becomes less and less interested in Lloyd, and more and more with the mind that loves Jean Brodie. In the end, Sandy leaves him, takes his religion, and becomes a Roman Catholic nun.
Before this, however, after the year is over, Sandy meets with the headmistress and blatantly admits she wants to put an end to Miss Brodie. Sandy suggests Miss Mackay try accusing her of Fascism, which results in the loss of her job. Miss Brodie could not, until the very end of her life, imagine that it was Sandy, her confidante, who betrayed her to the headmistress. Sandy, however, now Sister Helena and the author of "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace", remarks after Brodie's death that "it's only possible to betray where loyalty is due". When visitors come to visit Sandy at the nunnery, they ask what was her biggest influence in writing her book. Sandy replies, tightly gripping the bars of the grille, that it was a Miss Brodie in her prime.
CHARACTERS
Jean Brodie
The story centres on a relatively small cast of characters, with Miss Brodie at the centre. In her self-declared prime, Brodie has surrounded herself with six girls chosen to be her "Brodie Set". The most recognised of the cast is Brodie herself, a rich character whose persona is developed in every page. She is beautiful yet fierce, keen yet ignorant, intellectual yet deranged, passionate yet lacking a lover.
Miss Brodie is described as dark-haired and having a dramatic Roman profile. She is a progressive teacher in a conservative school, but refuses to leave because she feels she is needed most at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls. She fearlessly admires Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and Hitler, at the same time being herself a progressive feminist.
She is in love with the art teacher, Teddy Lloyd, a married Catholic with six children, but has "renounced his love in order to dedicate [her] prime to the young girls in [her] care." She cares for her set, developing their intellect and love of art, yet is thoughtless enough to encourage Joyce Emily to run away to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where she immediately dies. Despite her sharp mind, she can hardly discern which of her set betrays her, resulting in the loss of her job.
"She thinks she is Providence, thought Sandy, she thinks she is the God of Calvin." In some ways she is: in her prime she draws her chosen few to herself, much as Calvinists understand God to draw the elect to their salvation. For whatever reason, Brodie rejects others, even passively sentencing Joyce Emily to death with her encouragement. The number and members of her set are constant from the beginning, paralleling again Calvin's belief in predestination and unconditional election. Renouncing her lovers, she insists on setting up some of her girls to be their paramours in her place. At the same time, she is undoubtedly mortal, unable to pinpoint which of her girls betrayed her, and eventually dying of cancer.
With Jean Brodie, Spark embodies what she feels is the spirit of Calvinism. With regards to religion, Miss Brodie "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." Feeling herself fated one way or another, Miss Brodie acts as if she transcends morality.
Sandy Stranger
Of the set, "Miss Brodie fixed on Sandy," taking her as her special confidante. She is characterised as having "small, almost nonexistent, eyes" and a peering gaze, which ultimately sparks a relationship with Mr. Lloyd, who kisses her when she dares to look at an artist that way. Miss Brodie repeatedly reminds Sandy that she has insight but no instinct. Sandy rejects Calvinism, reacting against its rigid predestination in favor of Roman Catholicism. She assumes the name Sister Helena of the Transfiguration of Jesus when she enters a religious order. Interested in psychology and psychoanalysis, she writes a book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, which Miss Brodie heavily influenced.
Rose Stanley
Opposite of Sandy, Rose is a beautiful blonde with instinct but no insight. Though somewhat undeservedly, Rose is "famous for sex," and the art teacher Mr. Lloyd, taking an interest in her beauty, asks her to model for his paintings. In every painting, however, Rose has the likeness of Miss Brodie, whom Mr. Lloyd stubbornly loves. When Miss Brodie will not have an affair with Mr. Lloyd, she insists in vain that Rose take her place. Both Rose and Sandy are the two girls in whom Miss Brodie places the most hope of becoming the crème de la crème. Again contrary to Sandy, Rose "shook off Miss Brodie's influence as a dog shakes pond-water from its coat."
Mary Macgregor
Dim-witted and slow, Mary is the outcast of the group, and the scapegoat of Miss Brodie. Whatever it is, Mary silently bears the blame for everything that goes wrong. At the age of twenty-four she dies in a hotel fire, killed by running to and from inside the burning building.
Monica Douglas, Eunice Gardiner, and Jenny Gray
Interested in science and excelling in mathematics, Monica is the brainiest of the set. Also known for her anger, Monica later in life throws a burning coal at her sister-in-law, resulting in her husband's demand for a legal separation. Of the girls, Eunice is the most athletic, sometimes even asked by Miss Brodie to perform somersaults for comic relief. Jenny Gray, beautiful and eloquent, is Sandy's best friend, writing stories together and gossiping about sex; her traits land her in a career of acting.
STYLE
Spark unfolds her plots not sequentially, but piece by piece, making extensive use of the narrative technique of prolepsis (flash-forward). For example, the reader is aware early on that Miss Brodie is betrayed, though sequentially this happens at the end of their school years. Gradually Spark reveals the betrayer, and lastly all the details surrounding the event are told. Spark develops her characters in this way, too: Joyce Emily is introduced right away as the girl who is rejected from the Brodie set. Only later does Spark reveal the circumstances around it, Joyce Emily's history, and her running away to Civil War-era Spain in the 1930s.
With this technique, the narrator of the story is omniscient and timeless, relating the entire plot all at once, and gradually building up the detail. Spark also creates characters that share in our humanity, exhibiting both flaw and goodness, so that no one character can easily be called good or bad. Hal Hager, in his commentary on the novel, writes of Sandy and Miss Brodie:
The complexity of these two characters, especially Jean Brodie, mirrors the complexity of human life. Jean Brodie is genuinely intent on opening up her girls' lives, on heightening their awareness of themselves and their world, and on breaking free of restrictive, conventional ways of thinking, feeling, and being.
BASIS OF THE STORY
While the name of Jean Brodie may be taken from a real person (see Jean Brodie), the character of Miss Brodie was based in part on a Miss Christina Kay, the teacher Spark had for two years of her schooling. Miss Kay taught at James Gillespie's School for Girls, the basis for the Marcia Blaine School for Girls. Spark would later write: "What filled our minds with wonder and made Christina Kay so memorable was the personal drama and poetry within which everything in her classroom happened."
Miss Kay was the basis for the good parts of Brodie's character, but not the more bizarre, to wit, Miss Kay did hang posters of Renaissance paintings on the wall, but not of the Fascisti. There is no indication that in reality any of Spark's teachers in real life supported Generalissimo Franco. Franco's supporters were almost unanimously Roman Catholic, the religion Sparks would adopt later in life.
In real life Christina Kay looked after her widowed mother, not the music teacher who was in love with her. Similar to Miss Brodie's influence over Sandy in religion and writing, Miss Kay encouraged the young Muriel Spark to become an author. There are elements of Spark's life in Sandy's: Spark, like Sandy, rejected the predestination of Calvinism, converting to Roman Catholicism, despite growing up in heavily Presbyterian Edinburgh.
Spark's novel was turned into a play by Jay Presson Allen, which opened on Broadway in 1968, with Zoe Caldwell in the title role, a performance for which she won a Tony Award. This production was a moderate success, running for just less than a year, but it has often been staged by both professional and amateur companies since then.
However some have questioned whether the play is a particularly faithful adaptation. The number of girls in the Brodie Set is reduced from six to four (Mary McGregor, Sandy, Jenny, and Monica) and some of them are composites of girls in the novel. Mary McGregor is a composite of the original Mary McGregor and Joyce Emily, although mainly based on the original Mary the episode of dying in the Spanish Civil War is given to her, and rather more is made of this incident than in the novel. Jenny is a composite of the original Jenny and Rose, in spite of her name she has more in common with Rose, since it is she who Miss Brodie tries to manoeuvre into having an affair with Mr Lloyd.
Allen adapted her play into a film in 1969, which was directed by Ronald Neame. It is remembered for Maggie Smith's performance in the title role, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. There was also a notable performance from Pamela Franklin as Sandy, for which she won the National Board of Review award for Best Supporting Actress.
Interestingly Gordon Jackson played Gordon Lowther, and Rona Anderson, who was married to Jackson in real life, played chemistry teacher, Miss Lockhart, whom Lowther married in the film. Robert Stephens, then Maggie Smith's real-life husband, played Miss Brodie's married lover, Teddy Lloyd, and Celia Johnson played the austere and antagonistic school headmistress, Miss Emmeline MacKay. Rod McKuen was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song for "Jean", which became a huge hit for the singer Oliver in autumn 1969. The play also underwent modification for the film; it cut out a few scenes showing Sandy in later life as a nun.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was adapted by Scottish Television into a seven episode television serial in 1978, also written by Jay Presson Allen, and starring Geraldine McEwan. Rather than recapitulate the plot of the novel, the series imagined episodes in the lives of the characters in the novel, such as conflict between Jean Brodie and the father of an Italian refugee student, who fled Mussolini's Italy because the father was persecuted as a Communist.

CRITICAL RECEPTION
Most critics consider The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to be Spark's finest novel. Commentators have noted its thematic richness as well as its technical achievements, particularly Spark's handling of time through flashbacks and flash-forwards. Others have remarked on Spark's writing and narrative organization, praising it as concise and economical. Rowe has written that "Nothing is wasted in [The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie], which is so much about a waste of human energy." Although many scholars consider the novel to be primarily a character study centered on Sandy and Miss Brodie, others have argued that the novel's focus is metafictional. Gerry S. Laffin, for instance, has suggested that "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a parable, and a highly autobiographical one, of the artist as a young girl. Further, 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, pretentious."

(Rishi Kumar Nagar)