Muriel Spark – ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’

In 1982, Geraldine McEwan put in a relentlessly ball busting performance as Mrs Proudie in the BBC’s The Barchester Chronicles, a perfectly cast adaptation of Trollope’s The Warden and Barchester Towers, in which even against the apoplectic indignation of Nigel Hawthorne’s Dr Grantly, she was the one who came across as the force of nature. In 1978, she played Miss Brodie in an ITV adaptation of this novel, giving a subtler performance, but still in many ways domineering. Watching the TV series in the wake of McEwan’s death last January, I felt as though it was setting me a puzzle. She was – as in the novel – a maverick primary teacher at Marcia Blaine school for girls in Edinburgh, in the early 1930s. A dull school in the main, she was its ‘leaven in the lump’, wilfully disregarding the expectations of Miss Mackay, the headmistress; in fact disregarding every reasonable expectation that a teacher should teach the subjects set. She would put a long division sum on the blackboard in case of intruders, and then hold forth about her holidays in Italy, or about ‘Il Duce’ (Mussolini, her hero). She held that culture, and particularly art, are paramount, and taught these to the complete exclusion of anything mathematical or scientific. She tried to encourage – no, demanded – a passion for the arts, weaving her own life story into her lessons (a love lost in the Great War), to show that life and art are inseparable. She wanted her pupils to build successful lives on this foundation, rather than on one of learned dates and times tables. I mean, that’s great, isn’t it? All apart from the bit about Mussolini.

That was the puzzle, and it was never adequately explained. The series ended abruptly, having done the rounds of the Brodie set, which was all very entertaining, but didn’t explain this fascistic streak in a character otherwise, on balance, just about sympathetic. The novel is darker, though it’s possible to hold on to the benign Miss Brodie for quite a while, if you’re determined. You can even feel sorry for her:

Miss Brodie had a hard fight of it during the first few months when the Senior school had captivated her set, displaying as did the set that capacity for enthusiasm which she herself had implanted. (p. 83)

Talking to Sandy and Rose of an upcoming confrontation with her boss (‘I am summoned to see the headmistress’), she gives an attractive explanation of her philosophy:

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. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion, from the Latin root prefix in meaning in and the stem trudo, I thrust.’ (p. 36)

Sandy in particular doesn’t buy this, and sees the danger in Miss Brodie’s magnetic personality and iron will. What if she isn’t drawing out what is latent, but is carrying along these young, impressionable girls in a torrent of her own making? That is akin to what Mussolini and Hitler did. ‘Hitler was rather naughty’ (p. 122) she remarks to Sandy after the Second World War, in the last year of her life (she dies at 56 – strikingly close to Mrs Proudie’s 57, as though these forceful characters McEwan played were bound to blow themselves out before their time). The danger Sandy senses in Miss Brodie’s influence is borne out when she encourages a troubled pupil called Joyce Emily to run away to the Spanish Civil War – to fight for Franco. There is also an increasingly creepy love nonagon between Miss Brodie, art master Teddy Lloyd, music teacher Gordon Lowther, and the six girls of her set. Lloyd is married, so Miss Brodie renounces him, and he takes to inviting the girls round and painting them, with the resulting portraits all resembling Miss Brodie. She has an affair with Lowther, and invites the girls in pairs to his house, pumping them for information about Mr Lloyd, and trying to push Rose into an affair with him. This is unsuccessful, but Sandy takes Rose’s place (the girls are now 18), surrendering her will to the monstrous situation that Miss Brodie, losing control, sinking from her prime, has caused. And yet she eventually comes to acknowledge that there was something worthwhile in her after all:

It was twenty-five years before Sandy had so far recovered from a creeping vision of disorder that she could look back and recognise that Miss Brodie’s defective sense of self-criticism had not been without its beneficent and enlarging effects; by which time Sandy had already betrayed Miss Brodie and Miss Brodie was laid in her grave. (p. 86)

A puzzle.