Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie Essay Research

Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie Essay, Research Paper

Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie depicts the coming of age

of six adolescent girls in Edinburgh, Scotland during the 1930’s. The

story brings us into the classroom of Miss Jean Brodie, a fascist school

teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, and gives close encounter

with the social and political climate in Europe during the era surrounding

the second World War. Spark’s novel is a narrative relating to us the

complexities of politics and of social conformity, as well as of non-

conformity. Through looking at the Brodie set and the reciprocities

between these students and their teacher, the writer, in this novel,

reviews the essence of group dynamics and brings in to focus the adverse

effects that the power of authority over the masses can produce. Sparks,

in so doing projects her skepticism toward the teacher’s ideologies. This

skepticism is played out through the persona of Sandy Stranger, who

becomes the central character in a class of Marcia Blaine school girls.

Sandy’s character is even more focally sculpted than the teacher’s

favored disciples who came to be known as the Brodie Set; a small group of

girls favored by Miss Jean Brodie in her Prime. The Brodie Set is a social

system and a enigmatic network of social relations that acts to draw the

behavior of its members toward the core values of the clique. The teacher

Miss Jean Brodie projects upon this impressionable “set,” her strong

fascist opinions. She controls this group on the basis that she is in her

prime. Her prime being the point in life when she is at the height of

wisdom and insight. Sandy pejoratively uses the personality traits and

ideology of Brodie to overthrow her, by unveiling them.

Sparks is clearly opposed to the kind of authoritarian power and

control that is exercised over the impressionable adolescents by a

conniving school teacher. The writer thus uses the pitfalls of social

conformity found in classical studies, in order to make specific points.

For example, research done by social psychologists Muzafer, Carolyn Sherif

and Solomon Asch treated social conformity as an aspect of group dynamics

(Coon, 560). This is present in Spark’s novel, as seen by the dynamics of

the group formed by a teacher named Miss Brodie. Brodie’s students, like

the subjects of the said psychological studies, conform to a set of

beliefs under the pressure and power of suggestion despite what could be

better judgement. This is shown in the passage when Sandy expresses the

desire to be nice to Mary, but decides not to because she knew that such

an action would not be in accordance with the Brodie Set’s system of

behavior (Spark, 46). The narrator says about Sandy:

She was even more frightened then, by her temptation to be nice to

Mary Macgregor, since by this action she would separate herself, and be

lonely, and blameable in a more dreadful way than Mary who, although

officially the faulty one, was at least inside Miss Brodie’s category of

heroines in the making. Theorists would say that an individual tends to

conform to a unanimous group judgment even when that judgment is obviously

in error (Coon, 561). The more eager an individual is to become a member

of a group, the more that person tends to orient his or her behavior to

the norms of the group (Coon, 561). This eagerness is true of Sandy

Stranger. Miss Brodie often makes reference to Sandy overdoing things, or

trying to hard. If the Brodie Set must hold their heads high, Sandy held

her head the highest (Spark, 35). Miss Brodie warned that “One day, Sandy,

you will go too far.” Also, the more ambiguous the situation, the greater

the group’s influence on the individual (Coon, 562). When the group’s

judgment reflects personal or aesthetic preference, however, the

individual feels little pressure to conform as is the case with Spark’s

character, Sandy Stranger.

Brodie’s fascism, born of an authoritarian political movement that

developed in Italy and other European countries after 1919 as a reaction

against the political and social changes brought about by World War I, is

projected in this novel as the unsettling proliferation of socialism and

communism in Europe during the 1930’s and 1940’s. The early Fascist

program was a mixture of left and right wing ideas that emphasized intense

nationalism, productivism, antisocialism, elitism, and the need for a

strong authoritarian leadership (Homans, 451). This was the Brodie

ideology. With the postwar economic crisis, a widespread lack of

confidence in the traditional political system, and a growing fear of

socialism, Fascist ideology began to take root in Europe (Homans, 451).

The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie takes us into a time when the spirit of the

times reflected Voluntaristic philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer,

Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson and to Social Darwinism with its

emphasis on the survival of the fittest. These personalities, like that of

the fictitious Miss Jean Brodie, saw fascism as an effective,

internationally appealing mass movement. Brodie, herself, is depicted as

the personification of this fascist movement in the Marcia Blaine School

for Girls. A movement against which society, as personified by Sandy, must

resist.

It becomes Sandy’s mission to examine and expose the dynamics of

how the power of suggestion enforced by an authority figure such as the

teacher Miss Brodie, would adversely affect the socio-cultural dynamics of

school life, freedom of choice and the social liberty of each girl in the

Brodie Set. In the struggle and vie for social liberty and freedom from

adverse indoctrination, Sandy betrays the anti- Catholic Miss Brodie and

defiantly converts to Catholicism by becoming a nun.

Nonconformity, is thus played out as a result of Sandy’s rejection of

the Brodie group norms. Sandy did not observe those norms. Sandy’s

defiance of the group’s norms becomes so great that the society of Brodie,

itself, dissolves under her attach. Sandy’s antagonism, in fact, becomes