The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

葛萌

【Abstract】Miss Brodie is not an ordinary woman. With her very famous word “I am in my prime” she becomes the most remarkable teacher in Marcia Blaine School. She creates a Brodie set made of her favourite girls. She promises to the girls “if only you small girls would listen to me, I would make of you the crème de crème.” Miss Brodie gives the girls a sense of group identity and thereby attempts to dominate the lives of her pupils. Major topics in this novel include control, betrayal and religion. The first topic is concentrated on Brodie's attempts to influence the girl's actions and beliefs. Miss Brodie's admiration for fascism reinforces the topic of control. Sandy, in her recollections of "the Brodie Set" and its emphasis on conformity, likens the girls to Mussolini's soldiers.

【Keywords】 relationship, prime, control, betrayal

1 The Strangeness of Sandy Stranger

Sandy is at the centre of the Brodie set and Miss Brodies special favourite and therefore, the nearest one of the set to Miss Brodie. She is very different indeed from the rest of the girls in the Brodie set not only for her face features “her vowel sounds…h(huán)er small, almost non-existent eyes” but also her slightly strange name. Her surname suggests, perhaps, both someone is strange (eccentric) and who is estranged (distanced, alienated). It is certainly not that Sandys behaviour or personality is odd because she is sociable and normal to everyone she encounters. Yet the hints within her surname are with reference to the unexpectedly strong and individual deed of her later years: betraying Miss Brodie and entering a secluded convent. Both involve a rejection that attempts to refusal of Miss Brodies determination and her former school years.

Sandy is a less predictably and unarguably girl than the others. Her small eyes, which are her main claim to fame, draw her attention to her powerful tendency observation of others and also hint at the piercing, analytical intelligence, which she brings to bear in her observation. “Small, deep-set eyes suggest a narrow, discriminating gaze, whereas large, prominent eyes would have hinted at a wide, all-embracing, rather thoughtless stare.” (David, 28.) Such a detail of Sandys face feature suggests a signal from the author to readers: Sandy has uninfluenced personality. For S. R. David, Sandy is “probably the most capable of summing up Miss Brodie: she is not only the cleverest of the girls but also, obviously, the most spiritually alive and intense. Further more, her puzzling utterances seem to come as fragments of a coherent, complex but settled understanding of the nature and significance of Jean Brodie.” (David, 36.)

2 The Betrayal of Sandy Stranger

After Sandy has suddenly found out about Miss Brodies influence on Joyce Emily Hammonds decision to go to Spain where she will meet her death, the narrative moves instantly to the scene of betrayal. Sandys gradual distrust of Brodie, and the reason for her eventual “betrayal” of her teacher stems from this moment. Speaking explicitly to Sandy, Miss Brodie predicts, “Rose and Teddy Lloyd will soon be lovers.” Hence Sandy realizes that this fantasy is not a game, not “unreal talk,” but real manipulation. For Sandy Miss Brodie “was obsessed by the need for Rose to sleep with the man she herself was in love with.” Sandy understands now that in truth Miss Brodies dramatic posturing masks a real intention to play God in the lives of her students: “She thinks she is Providence … she thinks she is the God of Calvin.” In the end Rose is not manipulated into becoming Mr. Lloyds lover, however; she shakes “off Miss Brodies influence as a dog shakes pond-water from its coat.” And at same time, Sandy, instead of Rose, becomes the lover of Lloyd and rejects the “excesses” of Miss Brodie ‘s prime, becoming a nun. There is the relevant passage, which follows on from the account of how Sandy and Lloyd have an affair, even though he is still obsessed with Miss Brodie. As Spark noted: “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. By the end of the year it happened that she had quite lost interest in the man himself, but was deeply absorbed in him mind, from which she extracted, among other things, his religion as a night sky is full of things visible and invisible. She left the man and took his religion and became a nun in the course of time. (Spark, 123.)

Sandy becomes a Roman Catholic, which is the religion to which Muriel Spark was converted in 1954. This seems a most unusual route to religious belief: Finding out her partner is still really in love with someone else in the course of an adulterous affair, Sandy dose not react as a jealous rival but detaches herself to become a secluded nun. This involves again, Sandys name Stranger und her “strange” behaviour. Her response to Miss Brodies control seems to be puzzling and her later interest in the working of the human mind is something of which Sandy has shown signs before that is clearly caused greatly under the pressure of this first adult situation in which she finds herself. Yet her investigation does not lead only to a deeper understanding of human psychology, but also to a sudden religious commitment. It is as if she stumbles upon the right religion for her, and she is suddenly, completely, and mysteriously overwhelmed by it.

This conclusion of Sandys life offers to readers that a soul has been saved, or rightly taken an important decision. (Montgomery, 96.) Sandys Catholicism is presented, both implicitly and explicitly, as a reaction against the Calvinist Miss Brodie. Miss Brodies notion that Catholicism is a religion for people “who did not want to think for themselves” is thoroughly disproved by Sandy, at least, for it as a Catholic that she states “her odd psychological treatise on the nature of moral perception”, which in its oddness and in its fame is clearly the product of someone too much thinking for herself. As it is presented in this novel, Catholicism seems to be capable of accommodating a very wide range of temperament: Sandys anguished, intellectualised truth-seeking; Teddy Lloyds simple, spontaneous sinning, possibly even Miss Brodies “soaring and diving spirit”. On the contrary, the Calvinist Church of Scotland ejects Gordon Lowther because of his affair with Miss Brodie. In comparison with Calvinism, there seems to be no such incompatibility between Catholic sinners and their church. Of course, it is not that Catholicism condones sin; however, it seems capable of coming to terms with sinners in a way that the Calvinist church cannot, at least in this novel. The reader probably wonder why Sandy seems to be such a tormented Catholic and the probable answer, as so often indicated in this book, surely lies in Miss Brodies influence. The teacher has developed Sandys capacity for striking, individualistic action with which Sandy herself becomes the main victim.

3 Conclusion: Imagining the World Around Us

Muriel Sparks main business is to tell the story of the girls grow-up and in particular Sandys relationship with Miss Brodie. The development of the girls is expressed less in terms of academic progress but rather in terms of their growing understanding love and sex, and of their ability to interpret the adult world. In this respect Spark is particularly good at portraying the inner lives of her characters.

One of the most brilliant ways, which the author adopts to make readers feel that they are getting right inside one of her major characters, is her depiction of Sandy who is speaking truth. Readers feel that of all characters Sandy is probably the most capable of understanding the nature and significance of Miss Brodie: she is not only the cleverest of the girls but also the most spiritually alive and intense. Besides this, Spark presented us a very distinguished feminine role in this novel, full of incompatibility, however——Miss Brodie, a teacher with “the lofty idea” and self-confidence to make her girls “crème de crème”, devalues common science knowledge and instead, emphasises her own experiences in the classroom; Catholicism is not her favourite but she esteems Italian culture and even if Italian fascism; She has a sexual affair with Lowther, however, keeps on “great and romantic” love with Lloyd at the same time. Miss Brodie is not a hero, of course, does not represent a kind of the evils because for Sandy, “she was quite an innocent in her way.” The story of Miss Brodie is merely a tragedy in this work: she is used to be fascinating amongst her girls, but becomes hardly bearable in the end while she loses her credit to her girls. As Hal Hager stated, “Miss Brodie is a colourful creation—strong willed, forceful with her students yet acutely aware of the unorthodox, even unacceptable nature of her teaching methods in the context of her teaching environment. The practices she employs to shape and instruct “her set” encourage readers to think beyond the confines of traditional female roles.” (Quoted in Montgomery, 96.)

Miss Jean Brodie is a character inspired by Sparks own childhood and adolescence in Scotland and Spark was quite open about the fact that one of her teachers was the model for Miss Brodie. (Alan Bold, 51) The image of Miss Brodie is also interpreted by one of her pupil Sandy in the novel. In this respect, readers probably suggest if Spark thereby attempted to hint her own insight to the environment of her childhood. Maybe, the novel contains both details of fact and interpretation of fiction. Fiction is always its own world, self-contained and finally making sense. As Spark said, fiction is a lie from which, at best, a truth emerges. Each time a book is read afresh, a new attempt to reach that truth is being made. (B. Cheyette, 135) Jean Brodie, as a “colourful creation”, is likely to be forever just outside our reach. That is probably why the book stands up so well to reading till today.

References：

[1]Bold, Alan. Muriel Spark. London: Methuen, 1986.

[2]Cheyette, B. Writer and Their Work: Muriel Spark. London: Northeote House Publishers Ltd., 2001.

[3]Felice, Renzo De. Interpretations of Fascism Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977.

[4]Joseph Hynes, ed., Critical Essays On Muriel Spark. Oxford: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992.

[5]Laffin, Gerry S. “Muriel Sparks Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl.” Renascence vol. xxiv 4 (1972): 220.

[6]Linehan, Thomas. British Fascism 1918-1939 Parties, Ideology and Culture: Studies in Modern History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

[7]Montgomery, Benilde. “Spark and Newman: Jean Brodie Reconsidered” Twentieth Century Literature 43 (1997): 94-106.

[8]Richard, Thurlow. Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996.

[9]Rowe, Margret Moan “Muriel Spark and the Angel of the Body.” Critique 28 (1987): 169.

[10]Sproxton, Judy. The Woman of Muriel Spark. London: Constable, 1992.

[11]Whittaker, Ruth. The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark. London: The Macmillian Press Ltd., 1982.

[12]Woof, S. J. ed. Fascism in Europe. London: Methuen, 1981.