Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean B rodie

Novel

This novella is a rich book that needs to be conquered─as if one could!─round and around and with noise, as the Israelites conquered Jericho.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve attempted to form a coherent timeline for this brief book. This last time I decided that it was easier to do it for One Hundred Years of Solitude than for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. One has to accept that it is a book with neither beginning nor end─but with a thick Byzantine middle. Yet, it is cogent by virtue of its precise flash forwards, flash backwards, and resonant images; the latter acting as anchors in time.

The resonant images are: the elm tree, a walk through Edinburgh, a fire, transfiguration of the commonplace, and the word menarche.

Miss Jean Brodie─the maverick teacher with progressive, or more aptly perilous, ideas─appears on the surface to be a level-headed, vastly informed, and attractive lady. Her presence looms so large that teachers and students alike feel intimidated; even the headmistress is.

The reality is otherwise. She teaches her pupils─the Brodie set─to be leaders, the crème de la crème, so that they can “belong to life’s elite.”

She uses the Socratic method to mold heroines, superior women. She wants her pupils to be individualists, to do for oneself and not for the group; that is, team effort be damned. A victim of her times (1930s), she admires Hitler and Mussolini, and it is this spirit of Fascism that she instills in the Brodie set.

The ideal of idividualism as a goal, is contrary to American democracy where elitism is viewed as pernicious. Book like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand also raise the ugly issue of elitism--power and domination

What Muriel Spark left behind is a book about negative, autocratic leadership. My way or no way. You are with me or against me. Sandy, her pet pupil, in the end betrays her, and Miss Brodie is fired from her job for misconduct. Because of the very same education she received from Miss Brody, this betrayal was bound to happen. She taught the Set that violence and cruelty were acceptable, discouraging love of neighbor, care, cooperation, harmony─group nurturning.

In Donna Tartt’s Secret History we also see that Julian, an elitist teacher, also attempts to mold superior students. This is an attitude goes back to Plato and Socrates who in The Republic advocated a ruler caste.

The result is that elitism creates monsters. Schools with that slanted point of view (Ivy League universities) create leaders which the nation comes to regret--after the fact.

First published in 1961, The Prime of Miss Jean, finds itself established as a quirky, and often ill-admired book.

Besides the mastery of technique (especially of fictional time), this brief book stands as a negative paradigm of human relations, education, leadership, communication, and motivational insights.