Heads up! Spoilers ahead!
That Miss Jean Brodie is such a character isn’t she? Elusive, brash, mercurial, pathetic. You can think of a dozen different adjectives and they’d probably hit the spot. Great? Some can argue for her greatness, as Gatsby himself is great. She had after all, impacted the lives of the closest of her students, better known as the Brodie set. Each different from the next, wearing their panama hats differently to suit their personalities, each carries some form of damage from their mentor, some damage more irreparable than others.
Controversial? I think this is the most appropriate adjective for Jean Brodie, as a character in the novel and also for her place in literature. In the novel, she teaches what she wants, her opinions mingling with facts and muddling them, tells her students the stories of her love affairs — and moulding her students in the process. Giotto is the best Italian artist because it’s her favourite, no matter about Leonardo da Vinci or Caravaggio. She changes the definitions of words to suit her purpose — not wrong, but not entirely accurate either. Jean Brodie’s battle with Miss MacKay, the principal of Marcia Blane, is always ongoing like oil and water. Brodie teaches fascism and socialism — Mussolini and the Nazis were Ay-Okay, they’re redistributing wealth properly and society will be the better for it.
In literature, the book belongs somewhere in the second wave feminism. A handful of book lists cited the book as a feminist text, but that confuses me as Miss Jean Brodie is the epitome of toxic femininity. Many feminist reviewers don’t agree that Jean Brodie should be put on a pedestal, and rightly so. We can applaud her proactiveness in the pre-war era to blare her forward-thinking opinions, and having an attitude to match. But in the post-war era she is irrelevant, her “prime” completely diminished and she leaves us as a pathetic figure that went out with a whimper, trying to figure out who forced her into “early retirement”. Jean Brodie is a cautionary tale, and those who take her for granted as a heroine must have read a different book.
I read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in one sitting on a plane from Perth to Kuala Lumpur. I thought that I would have finished it halfway through the flight, but it took me the entire five hours and beyond to finish. And I suspect that I will reread the book again at some point. I love Spark’s prose — her omniscient narrator effortlessly jumps back and forth through time to borrow information from the future, and slips them into the past — how Mary dies in a hotel fire, as lost trying to find her escape as she is trying to answer the questions her teacher imposed on her; how Rose becomes a sex addict and Sandy ends up in a convent. We are constantly questioning how the past plays it hand on the future, and how the mould sets. In hindsight, I should have gone slower in my reading, as it is a book that demands reflection on every line, and lines too beautifully written to be consumed recklessly like cheap beer.
It is not until we learn more about Jean Brodie’s flings that the book take a massive swerve. It remains a comic novel, but as the girls mature, the damage that their teacher caused them become more transparent. In the weekends, the girls would take turns to go to the art teacher’s house, Teddy Lloyd, so that they can model for him. Needless to say, he is hopelessly in love with Brodie but hopelessly married with too many babies. He would paint the students regularly, but would not be able to remove the traces of Jean Brodie from each of the girl’s faces. Even in art, the students would also resemble her. Things take a turn for the worse when Lloyd begins to paint some of the girls nude, as though they were proxies for Brodie. As the relationship between Brodie and Lloyd is impossible, she uses her students as her own proxies.
Her other fling in the book is with Gordon Lowther, the singing master. Coming from inherited money and being a bachelor, Lowther lets Brodie control his life, using his mansion as her second home and a place where she also congregates with her students on the weekend. The relationship is toxic from the beginning, Brodie uses Lowther to get back at Lloyd, quite openly in front of Lowther as she asks her students who have been to the Lloyd house about him and his family. Lowther is a simp and could do nothing lest he loses Brodie. She uses him practically as a punching bag.
In this way, Jean Brodie is a notorious creation in literature. Think about Gide’s The Immoralist, Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert in Lolita. These characters are absolutely terrifying not because they are necessarily vile, but that they are well and truly possible. There is nobody more dangerous than somebody missing his or her moral compass. Like Humbert Humbert, Jean Brodie grooms children to her purpose. Brodie tries to live her life through her students, including her sexual love. The children are only vehicles for her unrealised intentions. Brodie’s recklessness culminated in the death of one of her newer students who traveled to Spain to take up arms in the civil war, only to be killed in the train before she even did so. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is really a novel about influence and vulnerability — the story of villains.
