Under Several Covers:
Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page
As a lover of
strange and unique fiction, I’ve sometimes found that the most unusual works
take on unassuming and seemingly conventional forms and then slowly reveal
their layers of perversity through the most unexpected means. The Marquis de
Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
immediately strike the reader as mad works of virtuosic style and ambitious
scope, but, for instance, a novel such as Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies
takes perhaps half its volume before readers start scratching their head in
amused befuddlement. A book that recently took me for such a surprising series
of turns—and one that I’ve owned two copies of and that had passed (or not
passed) through nearly two decades’ worth of shelves, boxes, and
collection-downsizings because of its ho-hum self-description and its thoroughly conventional collection of blurbs—is Muriel Spark’s
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Billing itself as a novel about the
effects of an Edinburgh girls’ school teacher upon the lives of her six
favorite charges—with one of them ultimately destined to betray her in some
undisclosed way—the book doesn’t exactly compel the prospective reader into its
world the way that novels such as The Tin Drum or One Hundred Years
of Solitude do. Perhaps in the hands of Charlotte Brontë or Gustave
Flaubert, this premise might sound promising, but published in 1961, in a
period of extremely arrière-garde
New Yorker fare, this novel might cause the uninitiated reader to expect
its fictional terrain to occupy a place somewhere between slight and trite.
But even though the book opens with
a fairly conventional description of the school’s mise-en-scène—which in fact
turns out to be both a flashback and a flash-forward—establishing “the Brodie
set” and some of the levels of belonging and not-belonging that membership in
this chosen group affords its individual girls, Spark’s narrative techniques
soon start to seem a bit odd. The Brodie set comprises just six girls from a
specific form at a specific time in Miss Brodie’s life who then remain under
her aegis for the rest of their school years, and Miss Brodie constantly refers
to this somewhat motley group as “the crème de la crème,” even though the only
really unique aspects about most of them are their willingness to be chosen and
their (and their parents’) unlikelihood of exposing the teacher to her
superiors. Miss Brodie has cannily vetted each of them to become her disciples,
and when each is introduced (and reintroduced) to the reader, Spark almost
always repeats what each girl was “famous for.” At first this makes the novel
read a bit like a creepy kids’ book whose author chooses one or two attributes
per girl to help the reader remember and distinguish between the characters,
but both Brodie’s and Spark’s repetitions soon reveal themselves to be much
more sophisticated devices. Even though Classical motifs echo throughout this
novel, these aren’t just the mnemonic and metrical epithets of epic poetry
(“pious Aeneas,” “wily Odysseus,” “white-armed Hera,” etc.). These are
attributes that Miss Brodie has either chosen the girls for in her plan to bind
them together, play them off of each other, and ultimately bind them to her, or
else that she’s cultivated in them over the years to serve her needs.
At first Miss Brodie comes off as a
marvelously eccentric and progressive teacher, exposing her girls to profound
worlds of art and thought rather than to the banalities of standard
grade-school instruction, but then through Spark’s own marvelously eccentric
(but highly controlled) meanderings through these girls’ lives and minds—past,
present, and future—the reader watches Miss Brodie’s facets become sickening
rather than dazzling, ultimately proving herself to be not an inspired
pedagogue but a ludicrous demagogue (and far worse). Miss Brodie visits Italy
often, and she immerses the girls in Renaissance art, which certainly heightens
their sensitivity, but she also greatly admires Mussolini and extols the
ostensible order that he brings to his country. After a year or two her
admiration gravitates toward Hitler. Even more dangerous for the girls,
however, is Miss Brodie’s manner of entangling them in her love life—past,
present, and future. It seems at first that she’s introducing them to the fuller
life of true womanhood, but as the girls’ natural enthrallment with romance
becomes piqued and then irreversibly engaged, the reader watches in disgusted
amazement as they fall into roles that allow Miss Brodie to live out her own
sickest fantasies through them, if not exactly in the way that she expects.
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| Maggie Smith in the 1969 film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie |
Spark’s approaches in revealing Miss
Brodie’s grotesque world are widely varied and always surprising, with each
glimpse into the lives of her characters—especially Sandy, who takes on
shocking roles in Miss Brodie’s machinations, and in the novel as a whole—coming
at totally unexpected times and always in the most unusual manner. The reader
at first expects this to be a book that moves toward a standard revelation of
which character betrays Miss Brodie, but Spark thwarts all normal expectations
of both plot and form in this novel. One of the characters’ inner monologues
reveals fairly early on who betrays Miss Brodie, and by then the novel’s
bizarre maze of fascinations has already led the reader’s imagination and
expectations in totally unforeseen directions.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
has had a cult following since its publication, and perhaps one of the reasons
why its cult hasn’t widened is because—in the same way that its unique contents are belied by the conventional that way it’s been marketed and discussed—the novel’s deep strangeness is
somewhat covered by fairly conventional prose. Although always deliberate and
precise, Spark’s writing is only occasionally beautiful or moving, which in
some ways works in both the book’s favor and disfavor. There’s a strong undercurrent
of political allegory in Miss Brodie’s despotism, and just as England didn’t
fight Hitler because of his dangerous ideologies but rather because it was
obliged to stop him—initially only because of a mutual-defense pact with
Poland; there were a shocking number of Hitler-supporters in England, and in
the United States, and across the world, but Spark leaves all this
significantly unstated—the specific member of the Brodie set who betrays her
does so not because Miss Brodie teaches Fascism, which is merely the most “expedient”
way to get her fired, but simply because Miss Brodie must be stopped. So even
though the myriad sicknesses in this novel aren’t handled with the linguistic
magic of, say, Lolita, its inconspicuous language plays nearly
innumerable bait-and-switch games, perhaps mirroring Miss Brodie herself in the
way that it surreptitiously seduces the unsuspecting reader into a complex
world of deep and insidious corruption. In showing the reader not an overtly mad Hitler-figure dashing his way through a wildly horrific novel, but rather a cannily twisted member of our own side’s establishment weaving through a quietly controlled narrative structure, Spark’s subtler approach to exposing tyranny reveals a much more ordinary and thus much more thorny problem to eradicate: our own undiagnosed sickness.
—David Wiley
