Creme de la Creme

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark

1961, Macmillan

In a recent issue of The Believer, Nick Hornby wrote in his "Stuff I've Been Reading" column about a recent rash of Muriel Spark novels in his life, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I was rather delighted to read this, as I myself had just finished the same novel, spurred on by an ignorance of Spark's work in light of a new biography.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a very brisk novel at just barely over a hundred pages, but Spark's character development is surprisingly complex for such economical use of space. The plot revolves around the so-called "Brodie set" of an elite private girls' school in England. The Brodie set is a group of girls who fell under Miss Jean Brodie's unconventional tutelage in their youth and maintain her ideals through their adolescence.

The plot of the book meanders quite a bit for such a short novel: essentially, Miss Brodie is eventually fired for her unusual methods and it's revealed that one of the Brodie set is her betrayer. Spark spins the plot out as a mystery of sorts: which one could have done it?

The true driving force of the novel is in Spark's characterization of Miss Brodie and her students. Miss Brodie is a famous character in literature, in part because of the very successful film adaptation in which Maggie Smith plays Miss Brodie. Part of the character's longevity is in her idiosyncratic mannerisms and aphorisms ("For people who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like") ; Brodie is prone to spouting phrases in the manner of a parrot, the most notable of which is where the novel derives its title: "I am a woman in my prime."

For Brodie, the idea of a prime entails her engagement in the world around her, both culturally and sexually. she tries to imbue in her pupils an interest in taking part in the world around them, chiefly in art and socialism, two of her largest passions. Her teaching revolves largely around long-winded lectures regarding Italian are and Italian fascism. Her pupils gather around her, holding their history books in front of them as a pretext for the prying eyes of the administration of the girls' school.

While her students are impressionable and naive, Brodie does not condescend to them in discussing such topics. Indeed, it seems her goal is to inculcate these ideals in their young minds. In this, she does not directly succeed. Spark offers a bird's-eye view of the girls as they grow older and none become raging socialists or artists; instead, the qualities that rub off on these girls is a sense of belonging or membership, much like one offered by a community or a private club.

The Brodie set is joined together by this sense of strong definition, each viewing themselves and their group as though from the outside, understanding the perspective an outsider has in evaluating a tight-knit private group. They carry themselves with the sense of superiority that is wholly unjustified; there is nothing to distinguish these girls from the others except their admittance into Brodie's affections. And like all such groups, it is inevitable that it crumbles as each individual girl pursues her own interests, particularly sexual ones.

One of Brodie's most unusual habits is in divulging the details of her sexual past to her impressionable students. She details for them the true romance of her life: a lover who was separated from her during the war. Brodie relays her saga as though reading Bronte to her students, and as young girls tend to do, each of her students eats it up.

This rather frank (and as a teacher, I can soundly say inappropriate) bit of personal history gives a context to two of the major themes of the novel: what Brodie means when she says she is in her prime, and the sexual development of her students.

As to the latter issue, Spark's exploration of the girls' sexualities benefits largely from her non-linear prose. Spark gives herself the opportunity to flash both forward and backward in her characters' narrative arcs. For example:

Mary Macgregor, although she lived into her twenty-fourth year, never quite realized that Jean Brodie's confidences were not shared with the rest of the staff and her love-story was given out only to her pupils...She thought this briefly, but never again referred her mind to Miss Brodie, but had got over her misery, and had relapsed into her habitual slow bewilderment, before she 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 heard no scream, for the roar of the fire drowned the screams; she gave no screams, for the smoke was choking her. She ran into someone on her third turn, stumbled and died. But at the beginning of the nineteen-thirties, when Mary Macgregor was ten, there she was sitting blankly among Miss Brodie's pupils. "Who has spilled ink on the floor - was it you, Mary?"

Such narrative play has a chilling effect; Mary's presence in the beginning and in the end of this passage is oblivious to her ultimate fate, rendered so matter-of-factly by the author that one is unsure whether she intends it to play for laughs.

Regardless, Spark uses this shifting through time to reveal the adult lives of the students, and consequently, their sex lives. As the girls grow older, they speculate a great deal upon Miss Brodie's love life, in particular as it intersects with two potential suitors among the staff of the school. The girls, as students do, gossip about Miss Brodie's possible involvement with each of these men. Spark fast forwards a great deal to their teenage years as each of these girls begins sitting for one of the possible lovers, an art teacher, in his studio.

Each girls tries to varying degrees to ingratiate herself to the art teacher, even trying to seduce him. Strangely (perversely?) each of his successive portraits looks like none other than Miss Brodie herself, strengthening Brodie as the glue that holds the set together and, moreover, their defining aspect. Brodie's influence is so far-reaching that none of these girls can successfully forge an identity for herself, not even as a sexual object for this man who has been tainted by his love for their teacher.

As for the former theme, that of what it means to say that one is in one's prime, the reader gradually begins to doubt the accuracy of Miss Brodie's declaration. When she announces that she is "in her prime" it is a bit vague what she means by that: that she is at the peak of her life (intellectually? sexually?) or that she is about to reach her peak? That she is ripe for the picking?

But Miss Brodie's actions during her stint as a teacher belie these claims. She shacks up with an invalid teacher in part to jilt her married lover. She reminisces too obsessively about her past love - in fact, communicates through her obsession that perhaps this love affair is truly her prime. The less successful Brodie becomes, the more she clings to the lingering power she has over her set. It becomes apparent that her insistence on instilling in her students her values is the dying gasp of a woman past her prime, trying to regain control over her life through the minds of impressionable ten-year-olds. To build and preserve a legacy.

And yet, Spark holds Brodie at an arm's-length. She is never overtly judgmental towards her title character and she deprives the reader of the kind of close third-person perspective that would allow a fuller picture of Brodie's psychological state. Miss Brodie is a woman identifiable through her actions, not her thoughts. The reader becomes one of her students, puzzling over her odd behavior and unable to know her emotions or thoughts in an intimate manner.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie keeps its main character a mystery one can solve by reading between the lines. It seems, then, that the novel is as much about the futility and inability to truly know those in your life, even those whose influence over you is greatest.

When one of her girls ultimately betrays her, the impression of Brodie being well past her prime is firmly cemented in her nearly daft inability to identify her betrayer and her obsessive rumination over which it could be. She has become, and perhaps always was, a small woman hiding behind her aphorisms, witticisms, insights and demands. That Spark is able to simultaneously stir up sympathy for Brodie's complete obliviousness and satisfaction at her receiving comeuppance is as much a mystery as Brodie herself.