MarvinFreeman reviewed The prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Intriguing Form; Puzzling Message
Content warning Spoilers Aplenty!
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is on the top novels lists of BBC and the Guardian, and included in the Modern Library. How it got there is a mystery to me. The novel's most remarkable attribute is its use of flashforwards.
What's a flashforward? Before the novel is a third over, we know how it will end. Spark tells us the fates of all the characters, including Miss Brodie. Miss Brodie will be betrayed. Jenny will become an actress. Sandy will become a nun. Mary will die in a fire. The flashforwards repeat. Sometimes adding a detail or elaborating; sometimes simply repeating.
Curiously, rather than diminishing interest in finishing the novel, the fates of the characters are so unexpected that they create suspense -- how can this character end up there? Who betrays Miss Brodie and in what way.
The plot swirls around two main questions -- Why does Sandy force Miss Brodie to lose her job at the school? And why does Sandy become a nun?
The answer to the second remains opaque. Unless Spark is delivering what she finds a comic thump to Miss Brodie's betrayer -- a thump so over the top that we are supposed to find it funny. Perhaps Sandy is punishing herself? For what she has come to view as a moral transgression? I really have no idea.
As to the second questions, why did Sandy betray Miss Brodie? On this the book provides at least some grounds for speculation but no clear answer. Perhaps Sandy rebels when Miss Brodie's manipulation of the girls becomes too great: When Miss Brodie's own purposes start to drive her plans for the girls. Perhaps Sandy has judged that Ms. Brodie's behavior is immoral. Because Miss Brodie is too controlling? Because Miss Brodie has sex before marriage? Because Miss Brodie admires Europe's fascists? Whatever the reason, Sandy takes it on herself to deliver a punishment by supplying the headmistress with a reason to dismiss Miss Brodie.
Miss Brodie is in many respects is admirable.
It is not to be supposed that Miss Brodie was unique . . . or that (since such things are relative) she was in any way off her head. She was alone, merely, in that she taught in a school like Marcia Blaine’s. There were 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 welfare, education or religion. . . They went to lectures, tried living on honey and nuts, took lessons in German and then went walking in Germany; they bought caravans and went off with them into the hills among the lochs; they played the guitar, they supported all the new little theatre companies; they took lodgings in the slums and, distributing pots of paint, taught their neighbours the arts of simple interior decoration; they preached the inventions of Marie Stopes; they attended the meetings of the Oxford Group and put Spiritualism to their hawk-eyed test. Some assisted in the Scottish Nationalist Movement; others, like Miss Brodie, called themselves Europeans and Edinburgh a European capital, the city of Hume and Boswell. . . . [T]hose of Miss Brodie’s kind were great talkers and feminists and, like most feminists, talked to men as man-to-man.
She is unconventional -- in what and how she teaches and that she teaches at all. She is also unconventional in her sexual mores. She has strong opinions about how one should behave and what one should believe. She has an affair, at least of the heart, with a married man, who becomes obsessed with her. A man she describes as the love of her life. She has premarital sex with a colleague. She hides these affairs from her girls incompletely and irregularly -- sometimes admitting them; sometimes apparently bragging of them. Sometimes disguising them. Yet, the girls are not deceived at all. Perhaps this is what leads the girls, near the end of the book, to find Miss Brodie "ridiculous."
A clue: Sandy does not view her action as a betrayal:
“It’s only possible to betray where loyalty is due,” said Sandy. “Well, wasn’t it due to Miss Brodie?” “Only up to a point,” said Sandy.
The problem, for me, remains: What was that point? One too easy answer: Miss Brodie encouraged a girl to go fight in Spain on the side of Franco, and the girl is killed during a Republican raid on the train carrying her into Spain. Sandy learns this a paragraph or two before she tells the headmistress of Miss Brodie's fascist political views to force Miss Brodie out.
I can't believe Spark intended this as the "last straw" for Sandy. It is simply too facile: It comes from nowhere. The girl who dies is introduced near the end of the novel and then disappears, and neither Sandy nor the other girls indicate that Ms. Brodie's admiration for the fascists of the day offends them.
Could it be that Sandy comes to believe that Miss Brodie's manipulation of the girls has become too great? And that Miss Brodie must be stopped?
Teachers, in conveying their opinions about things, indoctrinate their charges to some extent, intentionally or not. In Miss Brodie's case, there is no doubt the indoctrination is deliberate. Miss Brodie believes she is correct and that the girls should share her beliefs. Perhaps, in the 60s, then the book was published and most popular, this would be enough of a crime for Sandy's punishment of Miss Brodie to be justified. Yet, I doubt that, and I can't say that I find Miss Brodie's belief that she is correct particularly unusual or reprehensible, even among teachers.
Yet, Miss Brodie goes beyond well-intentioned instruction. Eventually, as the girls become adults, she plots to use two of them to carry out roles that may somehow carry out Miss Brodie's desires. Miss Brodie wants one of the girls to have a sexual relationship with the married lover Miss Brodie has renounced. (The other girl is to keep Miss Brodie informed.)
Plotting to use her former pupils in this way is horrid. If the girls felt compelled to play those roles, Sandy's meting out punishment and putting a stop to Miss Brodie's ability to control her pupils would be laudable. Yet, Miss Brodie's plotting comes across more as wishful thinking. When one of the girls, Sandy (who Miss Brodie thought would be the reporter) ends up having an affair with the married man, it is absolutely clear that Sandy engages in the affair for her own purposes. Sandy has the affair partly to see whether she could exert power over the man.
Ultimately, I found the book unsatisfying. I came away from the book unchanged and unchallenged. I found nothing to inform my view of the world or the people in it. Wrestling with the two conundrums taught me nothing at all. Complicating the problem, I found Miss Brodie's unconventional approach to education and to sexual relations mostly admirable. I was never able to reach the conclusion that Sandy ultimately mentions -- that Miss Brodie is ridiculous.