In her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark chooses to handle time in an unconventional manner. The story jumps back and forth through time. At the beginning, we are introduced to the six girls of the “Brodie set” at age sixteen. The narrator paints a brief portrait of each of them before jumping backward in time six years to describe how the girls at age ten first became the Brodie set.
As the novel progresses, it fails to follow a strictly chronological narrative. Chapter 2, for instance, begins with the now twenty-four-year-old Mary Macgregor (one of the girls) looking back on her experiences with Miss Jean Brodie and also meditating on some of her experiences during World War II. Other girls also reflect on their memories from an adult perspective throughout the novel.
These reflections, which are set in the 1940s while the primary storyline takes...
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place in the 1930s, allow readers a glimpse into the future. We learn long before the girls or Miss Brodie, for instance, that one of the “Brodie set” will eventually betray their teacher. Through these “future” moments that actually reflect the story's true present setting, we also have the opportunity to compare and contrast life before and after World War II.
Further, time passes quite quickly in the 1930s sections allowing us to witness the flow of events and the growth of the girls as the novel progresses. In one section, the girls are ten years old and just becoming the Brodie set. Then, almost before we know it, they are eleven, then twelve and so on. Pretty soon, they are “back” to where they were at the beginning of the book at age sixteen.
These chronological irregularities allow us to view the interconnected stories of Miss Brodie and the girls from varying perspectives, and this gives us a much broader and more nuanced view of the plot and the characters. We can see how the girls change over time under Miss Brodie's influence and how their experiences with her affect them even into adulthood. While Spark's choices in the realm of time are definitely unique, they are also quite effective.
The novel takes place at a girl's school during the 1930s. Mussolini and Hitler are in power and looked upon with increasing loathing by the British as it becomes evident they are bent on starting a war with Great Britain. Miss Brodie, meanwhile, is a fascist sympathizer. She has visited Germany and has a great admiration for the order Hitler has imposed on the country. She also, like a fascist, believes in elites. In fact, in the school, she picks out a handful of girls as her special favorites because of the qualities she sees in them, calling them the "crème de la crème."
While the novel is largely framed chronologically with the events of Miss Brodie's life as the 1930s progress, along with the expected backstory on her life, Spark breaks this conventional frame by inserting the thoughts of Miss Brodie's students as they reflect on their school days later in life.
This time scheme serves two purposes. First, it builds suspense. We learn, for example, that one of the girls will betray Miss Brodie as a fascist, but we don't know which one, which keeps us reading. Second, the multiple viewpoints of the girls give us multiple perspectives on Miss Brodie. For example, Rose
shook off Miss Brodie's influence as a dog shakes pond-water from its coat.
For Sandy, however, whose point of view often dominates, Miss Brodie had a profound effect. The temporal breaks thus allow us to evaluate the complexity of who Miss Brodie was as her students absorb her over time. This technique emphasizes that while Miss Brodie was making faulty political decisions, she was doing so in real time without the benefit of hindsight. Yet hindsight, the novel shows, can be equally fragmentary and uncertain.
What makes this novel so interesting is the way in which it treats time. Although on the whole the story is told in a chronological fashion, with events from 1930 up until the summer of 1939 being described to us, at various stages the story jumps ahead into the future which enables the author to reveal to us important information regarding the fates of various characters that would be impossible in a more traditional narrative approach.
Sparks uses this technique to juxtapose the future and the present in this novel, which in turn makes us think about the accuracy of such interpretations from a vantage point of the intervening years. One example that you might like to think about would be the way in which the students reflect on their thoughts and feelings about Miss Brodie in their adult lives when they look back. Mary Macgregor sees her school years as halcyon days of happiness. Eunice remembers Miss Brodie as being "full of culture." Sandy, even though she was responsible for the downfall of Miss Brodie, admits that she became successful in her field because of the inspiration of this figure.
The time scheme therefore helps us to analyse how memories function and how certain chapters in our lives, even though they are long passed in terms of the number of years that have gone by, are still just as vivid and real as ever because of the influence that they have had on us.