Jean Brodie, the Girls, the Gate
[A Scottish poet and critic, Bold has written extensively on Scottish literature. In the following excerpt, he remarks on language and character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.]
Several of Muriel Spark's 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 Spark's 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' school—Marcia Blaine, modelled on James Gillespie's, where Spark was educated—and 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 contradictory soul who distrusts the Roman Catholic Church while spending summer holidays in Rome in search of culture; who admires the Church of Scotland but detests John Knox, its founder; who deplores the team spirit yet idolizes Mussolini's 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 Spark's friend Derek Stanford claims [in his Inside the Forties: Literary Memoirs 1937–1957, 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 Spark's 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 Sherlock Holmes and George Smiley actually exist. Though no saint, Jean Brodie is a literary legend.
The author's 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-o'clock feeling in the house,' 'Miss Brodie's 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, indifferent 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 Brodie's ancestor Deacon Brodie (the original of Stevenson's dualistic Dr Jekyll) roamed as a burgher by day and a burglar by night; where spinsters such as Jean Brodie 'called themselves Europeans 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 suddenly 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 Brodie's character are partly explained by the contrasts apparent in Edinburgh. On a long winter's walk in 1930, during which Sandy Stranger comes to the conclusion that 'the Brodie set was Miss Brodie's 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-girl's-land that has the alien atmosphere of a foreign country. Miss Brodie leads her privileged girls into the unpromising land of the Grassmarket:
A man sat on the icy-cold pavement; he just sat. A crowd of children, some without shoes, were playing some fight game, and some boys shouted after Miss Brodie's 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 Brodie's Edinburgh—where school-teachers bid their good mornings 'with predestination in their smiles'—is 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; something definite to reject.' Increasingly, Sandy Stranger makes a connection between Jean Brodie's scholastic élite and John Calvin's 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 herself 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 couldn't 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. Spark's novel is enormously suggestive: the account of a group of schoolgirls and their teacher is also a statement on the nature of faith and fanaticism.
Jean Brodie's 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 gymnastics, 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 psychological treatise, 'The Transfiguration of the Commonplace'. Sandy, the future Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, Jean Brodie's 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 Brodie's 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 Brodie's prime) then uses timeshifts to indicate the rise of the Brodie set and the fall of Miss Brodie. Before the final tale of Miss Brodie's downfall has been told, the reader is given the date of the heroine's 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; possibly 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, appropriately so since she is Spark's most forgivable character.
For all her admiration of her heroine, Spark makes fun of her fantasies. There is a reductive, comic quality to Jean Brodie's assumption of the leadership of an élite 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 'crème de la crème' she indoctrinates her élite—her elect—with her own prejudices. Her pupils are 'vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the authorized curriculum,' being familiar with the accomplishments of Sybil Thorndike and Anna Pavlova and, above all, with the romantic tale of Jean's lover, Hugh Carruthers, who fell 'like an autumn leaf'—so she informs the girls in autumn under an elm—at Flanders, a tragedy enlarged with frequent retellings. Like her heroes—Mussolini, Franco, Hitler—Miss 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 favourite.' 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 remains 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 surreptitiously in the art room, a gesture she believes preserves her personal purity. Arrogantly, 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 Brodie's 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, Jean's 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 Brodie's prime, they see her belonging to a different species from their parents. 'They don't have primes,' says Sandy. 'They have sexual intercourse,' 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 Botticelli's 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 Brodie's supposed sexual 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 other's arms and knew the truth. But I was proud of giving myself to you when you came and took me in the bracken on Arthur's Seat while the storm raged about us…. I may permit misconduct 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 intercourse, 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.
'There's not much time for sex research in the Senior school,' Sandy said.
'I feel I'm past it,' said Jenny.
Linguistically The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a treat. Spark's 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 husband she wishes to go and visit Miss Brodie's 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 Spark's dialogue provides exquisite comic exchanges. Monica Douglas's 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 hasn't 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 didn't 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 eyes—her 'small, almost 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 'That'll teach you to look at an artist like that.' Mary Macgregor's presence in the novel is verbally linked to death by fire. The manner of her death is described at the beginning of the second chapter of the novel:
[After the outbreak of the Second World War, Mary] died while on leave in Cumberland in a fire in the hotel. Back and forth along the corridors ran Mary Macgregor, 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 Mary's 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 conditions the reader's responses to various situations in the novel.
Thematically, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a persuasive study of the élitist mentality 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 reflective of the disciples, realizes that her leader is flawed by fanaticism. Ironically, Sandy's 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 Brodie's 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: Sandy's life, like the reader's, has been enriched by the charismatic personality of Jean Brodie, who, for all her faults, has a poetic panache.
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