Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

On the surface level, Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel is about a group of schoolgirls in 1930s Edinburgh who are under the influence of a deceivingly charismatic teacher called Jean Brodie (who is, as the title suggests, ‘in her prime’). Even though the storyline chronicles the girls’ school years from the years under Miss Brodie’s guidance to their later school years (where they are separated from both Miss Brodie and each other), the novel repeatedly looks forward to the years during and after the war. Thus, early on we find out not only that Rose ‘will be known for her sex,’ but also that Mary will die young in a fire, that Sandy (through which the novel is focalised) will join a convent, and most importantly: one of Miss Brodie’s ‘set’ will eventually betray her.

However, in addition to the more mundane events of the schoolgirls’ lives, the novel also functions as an allegory for the workings of fascism. Even though Miss Brodie’s focus on the girls’ individual assets seems to run contrary to fascism’s focus on the masses, it shows the attraction of fascism precisely by allowing the girls an escape from the conformity that the other teachers advocate. Miss Brodie becomes the girls’ teacher at an impressionable age, which allows her to abuse her position and the girls’ admiration for her to become the model for womanhood which the girls should strive towards. This slow indoctrination and its resulting loyalty allow her to increasingly direct the girls’ lives for her own cruel enjoyment and personal gain.

The link to fascism can also be made because Miss Brodie is not discreet about her admiration for Mussolini, which somewhat complicates the novel’s categorisation as an allegory. She prominently displays a picture of the blackshirts in her classroom and returns from a holiday in Italy with enthusiasm and admiration about the political changes in process. As time progresses, this admiration for Fascism’s leaders, such as Mussolini (and Franco) also includes Hitler, whom she hails as even more productive in his methods. Sandy is observant enough to recognise that what Miss Brodie is doing to the group of girls is morally reprehensible, which is why she eventually betrays Miss Brodie’s fascist sympathies to the headmistress, who then fires her. However, Sandy is also critically self-aware enough to recognise the lasting impact Miss Brodie has had and will continue to have on her, as the novel ends with Sandy telling people that the main influence in her school years was “a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime” (Spark 171).

One advantage of discussing such atrocities as fascism indirectly is that it briefly suspends moral judgement and thus opens up room for identification with, in this case, Sandy’s initial admiration for Miss Brodie. Robert Eagleton’s discussion of perpetrator fiction centers around the fact that it appears to avoid precisely an engagement with the ‘why’ (Eagleton 15). Eagleton gives examples of ‘perpetrator novels’ that appear to provide identifiable, manifest reasons and motivations as to why certain people become perpetrators, but which at the very last moment ‘swerve’ to avoid the true engagement with the ‘why.’ Instead, Eagleton favours novels such as Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2006) or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which acknowledge that the ‘why’ as a singular explanation does not exist and thus do not set out to provide it.

Peter Brown shows that the group dynamics become evident in Miss Brodie and her set’s treatment of Mary, who is accepted into the group but only so the other girls and their teacher can use her as a scapegoat. For example, Sandy considers being nice to Mary, but she fears that by being nice to Mary she might also call Miss Brodie’s wrath upon her. The narrative appears to mirror this treatment by giving the reader almost no personal details about Mary. However, as Brown argues, this is countered by Spark’s use of irony, and thus “the moral force of the novel resides precisely in the ways that it implicates readers in Mary’s victimization while simultaneously enabling them to recognize that implication” (245). The novel thus puts the reader in a position where they have to reflect on their own acts and assumptions, and thus the seemingly neutral nature of reading / witnessing is called into question.

Judy Suh argues that the novel serves as an example of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘micro-fascisms,’ by showing that the school, and in this case Miss Brodie’s classroom, serves as a place for the production of “distinctly individual self-policing identities” (91). Moreover, Suh argues that by creating the fascist character as a woman and aesthete, Spark pushes us beyond [simply deeming her an ‘innocent fascist’]” (Suh 88). However, she observes that most critics still tend to write off Miss Brodie’s fascist idealisations as either aesthetically-motivated, misplaced or simply naïve, though Suh herself rightly points out that even after World War II she refers to Hitler as merely “rather naughty,” which shows a more overt ideological involvement (qtd. in Suh 87).

Brown, Peter Robert. “There’s Something About Mary: Narrative and Ethics in the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” Journal of Narrative Theory 36, no. 2 (2006): 228-253.

Eagleton, Robert. “Avoiding Evil in Perpetrator Fiction.” In Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film, edited by Jenni Adams and Sue Vice, 13-24. Edgware: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013.

Suh, Judy. “The Familiar Attractions of Fascism in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” Journal of Modern Literature 30, no. 2 (2007): 86-102.

Author of this entry: Lotte van den Eertwegh

Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. London: Macmillan, 1974.