The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Muriel Spark Bridges the Credibility Gap
[Dobie is an American educator and critic. In the following essay, she discusses the novel's point of view and the development of its major characters.]
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 Spark's "masterpiece"; 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 Spark's other fiction are not immediately 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 author's 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, surprising, and imaginative her novels remain. But with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark leaves the incredible world of invisible, chanting voices and untraceable 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 seriousness 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 Spark's movement towards credibility is most apparent in the main character: 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 ordinary 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 considered, 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 author's 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 man's 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 certainly see the similarity between instinct and insight and the natural and supernatural orders which she comes to know. Miss Brodie, like other Muriel Spark characters who precede her, unifies the ordinary and extraordinary levels of reality, 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 transfigure the commonplace. And indeed, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace is the title of the book eventually written by Sandy Stranger, Miss Brodie's favorite pupil.
Most of the novel is concerned with Miss Brodie's molding 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 Mussolini's troops marching through the streets. She presents the subject 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 Brodie's 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 fulfillment. Miss Brodie's 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 pupil's soul…. [My job] is a leading out of knowledge, and that is true education 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 pupil's 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 students, 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 "creme de la creme." Acting as dictator, Miss Brodie has educated each girl for a particular role. Faithful to her philosophy 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 representation 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 vision 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 Brodie's 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 atmosphere and Miss Brodie's ethereal beauty at this time remind one that she is one of Muriel Spark's demons: forces, sometimes in human form and sometimes not, which exist simply to disrupt the ordinary and habitual, to confuse the traditional 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 "transfigure the commonplace." Miss Brodie's 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 Brodie's 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 relinquishes her role, for without insight she has not understood Miss Brodie's plan. The author tells us that she "made a good marriage soon after she left school. She shook off Miss Brodie's influence as a dog shakes pond-water from its coat."
But Sandy has understood toward what extremities Miss Brodie's 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 Brodie's influence is a liberating one, however. She later realizes that the "creeping vision of disorder" that she received from Miss Brodie "had not been without its beneficient and enlarging effects." Unlike Caroline, who accepts, Sandy rejects—or tries to. In a second effort 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 Mussolini, is removed from her position at Marcia Blaine School.
The third step in Sandy's 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 Catholics, 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 Brodie's "vision." Miss Brodie was right when she said, "Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life."
Miss Brodie's success with Sandy and the other girls is demonstrated when in retrospect they come to understand what she was teaching them. Sandy, for example, 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 people's 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 gray 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 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." 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 "marvelous 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 wasn't 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, Sandy's 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 angered. Miss Brodie objects to Monica's lack of spiritual insight and never makes her one of her favorites. Miss Brodie explains, "that's why she has a bad temper, she understands nothing but signs and symbols and calculations. Nothing infuriates people more than their own lack of spiritual insight…." Miss Brodie's assumption is borne out by Monica's later difficulties with her scientist husband. In a fit of anger she throws a live coal at his sister, and the scientist demands a separation.
Unfortunately, Miss Brodie's opinion of Mary Macgregor also proves to be accurate. 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 Caesar's 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 Brodie's fellow teachers at the Marcia Blaine School represents another 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 Gaunt's background, in contrast to the lovely floating city it becomes with the presence of Miss Brodie. Miss Gaunt deals effectively, industriously, and unimaginatively 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 Brodie 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 insight 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 fulfills 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? Can't you see she's 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 Sandy's Transfiguration of the Commonplace.
The design of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie differs somewhat from that of Muriel Spark's 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 images 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 between the girls and Miss Brodie, the author's 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 coloring the ordinary facts she teaches by the force of her own extraordinary personality.
The parallel between teacher and student resembles the relationship between the voices and typewriter of The Comforters and Caroline, about whom they are writing. The voices give her vision by putting her into a novel. Later she too writes a book in which she records what she has learned—i.e., her vision. Similarly, Muriel Spark's theme in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Miss Brodie's 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 returned 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 device 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 author 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 lifetime. 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 Sandy's response to the demoniac teacher.
Just as Caroline struggles against the pre-determination of her life by the mysterious voices in The Comforters, so Sandy Stranger rebels against a quite visible Miss Brodie and her effort to dominate Sandy's future as well as her present. She refers to Miss Brodie as a fascist, meaning that the latter insists upon being a dictator. 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 position, 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 recognizes Miss Brodie's "defective sense of self-criticism," which can be called an "excessive 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. Sandy's own insight and instinct, plus the benefit of Miss Brodie's prime, ironically give her a perception of a reality far more extensive than Miss Brodie's, broad as it is. Therefore, Sandy removes her allegiance from Miss Brodie and gives it to God by becoming a nun.
But Sandy's 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 received 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 unexpectedly famed.
Indeed, she does have much to bear from the world, but it is not fame that disturbs her. It is vision itself. Just as Ronald Bridges suffers intensely as his understanding of the nature of the world grows, so Sandy the nun realizes with a measure 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 developed 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 Transfiguration.
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