The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
By Muriel Spark
Splendid by Destructive Egotism
By MARTIN PRICE
January 21, 1962
ive years ago there appeared a brilliant novel which dealt with the psychic upheaval of a young woman recently converted to Catholicism. The heroine was filled with doubts and surrounded by doubters; most of all she was troubled by voices which (to the clicking of their busy typewriters) read aloud to her the novel of which she was a helpless part. Eventually she recovered and wrote the novel herself. It was called "The Comforters," the first of a remarkable series of comic tales, of which "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" is the latest.
Muriel Spark has a persistent religious theme, the problem of fusing matter and spirit. Her novels are filled with puritanical souls suspicious of the flesh, with charlatans who exploit the yearning for pure spirituality, with old people who cling to outworn bodies and young people who are baffled by the mysteries of the flesh. In "Memento Mori," the octogenarians resentfully receive phone calls that remind them they must die. In "The Bachelors," a demonic spiritualist seeks his physical release in murder while he conducts sÈances. The devil of "The Ballad of Peckham Rye" undoes marriages, and the austere puritan in "Robinson" writes attacks on the dangers of Marian doctrine.
It is, in fact, the doctrine of the Incarnation, the mysterious "acceptance of matter," that provides the point of view from which Ms. Spark can see, with both clarity and warmth, the plight of divided or incomplete people. She writes with cool exactness, a firm voice (each tale has its own) and compassionate wit. In her new novel (originally published last fall, in shorter form, in The New Yorker), she deals with a violent woman whose romantic spirit is impatient with all but the Absolute.
Most of us have known someone like Miss Jean Brodie. She may have been a teacher, as in Mrs. Spark's novel, a somewhat disreputable aunt or an unspeakable cousin, perhaps the mother of one's best friend. Miss Brodie is a preposterous woman. She seizes upon the docile little girls (in a respectable Edinburgh school during the Nineteen Thirties) and makes them her elect, her "créme de la créme." She spins tales of her dead lover; she tells them about Giotto, she introduces them to the secrets of cosmetics; she tries to make them Europeans instead of dowdy little provincials. Miss Brodie's hectic and undisciplined enthusiasms include fascism as well as Tennyson; each is an approach to the Absolute she seeks. For Miss Brodie has triumphantly entered her "prime." She speaks of it with such conviction that it becomes a visible presence to her girls, like a splendid garment. And yet, ridiculous as it is, Miss Brodie's prime is a vitality of spirit that is just as real as the girls imagined.
Mrs. Spark moves back and forth in time. We follow the six girls of Miss Brodie's "set" from their tenth year to their eighteenth, but we also see their middle age and look back at Miss Brodie from beyond her prime, her betrayal and her death. The central problem of the book is the connection we gradually discover between the vivid posturings of the domineering teacher and the image of one of her girls, now Sister Helena, author of a psychological treatise called "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace," a nun who nervously grasps the bars of her cell as she receives her visitors. For, of all of Miss Brodie's girls, it is not Eunice ("famous for her spritely gymnastics and glamourous swimming") or Rose ("famous for sex") who feels her influence and becomes her counterpart; it is Sandy Stranger, the clever, imaginative one.
Sandy comes, in time, to see Miss Brodie's romantic fervor as inverted Calvinism, the reaction of a religious woman against a dour creed. Sandy alone cares enough to react in turn, cruel in her awakened moral conscience, committed finally (perhaps even trapped) in her own religious dedication as Sister Helena. ("That is not the sort of dedication I meant," says Miss Brodie in her splendid egotism. "Do you think she has done this to annoy me?")
The prime of Miss Brodie involves the two male teachers at the school--the art master who is married and must be romantically renounced (but who keeps painting Miss Brodie in all his portraits of her special girls), and the music master who can be used as a lover and controlled like a child. Finally, Miss Brodie becomes "her own Absolute"; it is, however, "a destructive process, since sources of replenishment are not self-generated." Miss Brodie's sources of replenishment are her girls, so long as she can control them, and she ends by offering them to the lover she cannot have--an idea that carries, for Sandy, a "whiff of sulphur."
All this we see through the eyes of the girls, creatures of unshaped energy in immature bodies, framing their nervous awareness of sex in romantic fantasies ("Allow me," reads the imaginary letter they compose from Miss Brodie to her lover, "to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing"). Each of them has her distinctive promise, but in some it is never realized. Miss Brodie becomes the memory of that restless and imperious spirit which may be buried or split, tamed or transfigured. It is a dangerous and destructive spirit at worst, and it can be "beneficent and enlarging." But "Miss Brodie's masterful features becomes clear and sweet to Sandy when viewed in the curious light of the woman's folly, and she never felt more affection for her in the later years than when she thought upon Miss Brodie silly."
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