The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

(c) Copyright 2021 by Kathleen Spaltro.

All Rights Reserved.

Having reread Muriel Spark's short novel, I watched an adaptation for Scottish TV. Besides attending a stage production in Pitlochry, Scotland, in 1985, I have seen the famous film many times. While I enjoy Spark's fiction and find The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie intriguing, it is not my favorite Spark novel. I prefer and often reread with delight A Far Cry from Kensington as well as Loitering with Intent. Yet a discussion of the meaning of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is full of interest.

My husband and I just discussed the first two TV episodes. While we both find Jean Brodie fascinating, he intensely dislikes her, while I see her appeal, have a certain sympathy with her, but dislike what she does (rather than dislike her). We agree that she is histrionic and narcissistic with a ruthless need to shape weaker selves into what she wants them to be. The novel follows Miss Brodie's pupil Sandy into a future as a cloistered nun who writes a psychological treatise, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Jean Brodie marks Sandy for life because Sandy perceives in Miss Brodie the evil desire to use others regardless of their needs or their separate existence. In other words, Sandy's experience of Jean Brodie creates her perception of what human evil is.

Thinking about this some more, I would say that Jean Brodie lives entirely within her imagination. Governing both her political beliefs and her personal decisions, it triumphs over any sense of reality. That's what's wrong with her. Frederick Rolfe (the author and artist Baron Corvo), too, (according to a former friend) "had only the vaguest sense of realities." He once painted a depiction of a saint and others in which all the human figures had Rolfe's own features.

Romanticism, according to Isaiah Berlin, exalted subjective understanding over objective reason, the subjective experience over "real world" customs and rules and procedures. Berlin contended that fascism was/is Romanticism translated into politics.  "Fascism too is an inheritor of Romanticism," Berlin wrote in The Roots of Romanticism: "The hysterical self assertion and the nihilistic destruction of existing institutions because they confine the unlimited will, which is the only thing which counts for human beings; the superior person who crushes the inferior because his will is stronger, these are a direct inheritance — in an extremely garbled form, no doubt, but still an inheritance — from the Romantic movement; and this inheritance has played an extremely powerful part in our lives." 

A Romantic and an open admirer of 1930s Fascism, Jean Brodie disguises under her expression of teacherly devotion her unappeasable desire to subordinate her pupils to her will and imagination. As a superior being, she feels entitled to shape their lives. 

Our subjective perceptions need to be checked against some sort of objective criteria, however imperfect. Otherwise, what tells us whose subjective perceptions are accurate? There is no way to determine accuracy, and force/power rushes in to fill the gap. Jean Brodie admires the violence of fascism because she misunderstands it as strength.

Flannery O'Connor

 

Flannery O’Connor

 

(c) Copyright (2021) by Kathleen Spaltro 

All Rights Reserved.  

Greatly admiring Joseph Conrad, Flannery O’Connor  adopted his definition of art as “a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.”  For her,  the invisible universe, or the reality of divinity, penetrated every facet of the visible universe and gave each facet its meaning.  According to O’Connor, fiction “should reinforce our sense of the supernatural by grounding it in concrete observable reality.” 

This central purpose of her writing has at least two consequences.  It explains her rendition in her brilliant short stories of a constantly recurring divine comedy:  most of her characters, when challenged to grow beyond their limited and self-centered perspectives, fail to respond to grace and, indeed, actively reject its moral imperative.   Dramatizing this rejection of the divine imperative, O’Connor’s sledgehammer prose style bludgeons the reader, who emerges from her stories both highly amused and deeply shocked.  No one can quickly forget stories like “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “Parker’s Back,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “The Enduring Chill,” or the utterly stunning “The Displaced Person.”

However, her reputation as a Roman Catholic author may seem to form a barrier between O’Connor and many readers.   So far from being naïve about this barrier, she knowingly and intentionally wrote, not primarily for a Catholic audience, but instead for a public that scorned her beliefs.   I myself think that a reader’s acceptance or rejection of Roman Catholic dogma is irrelevant to an enjoyment and appreciation of  O’Connor’s stories.  Anyone—atheist, agnostic, Christian, Jew, or other believer—who believes in a moral imperative and understands the moral struggles of human beings can understand O’Connor’s vivid dramatization of moral challenges.

Most of these characters who fail to respond to grace are Southern whites, usually evangelical Protestants but sometimes unbelievers.  Mrs. Turpin, a saved Christian in “Revelation,” is an exception.  She accepts the point of her own shattering experience:  that the spiritual pride of the righteous and the saved blinds them to their human puniness and inadequacy in the divine gaze.  In her vision of the saved on Judgment Day, “she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”   For anyone seeking to interpret O’Connor,  “Revelation” provides a touchstone by portraying Mrs. Turpin’s brave and admirable self-encounter.

Zora Neale Hurston

 

                          Zora Neale Hurston

                                        (c) Copyright (2021) by Kathleen Spaltro.

                                                              All Rights Reserved.     

I envy another reader who comes fresh and new to my favorite authors.  Every two years or so, I chuckle my way through all of Barbara Pym’s novels, and my familiarity with them only deepens my delight—yet, what fun it would be to read Pym again for the first time!  I feel that way as well about Zora Neale Hurston’s novels.  A stunning original, Hurston could boast of engaging charm and enormous appeal.  I simply like her—very, very much.

Her distinctive voice mesmerizes me as I read Jonah’s Gourd Vine or Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Besides her gift for narrative, her diction possesses an extraordinary verve.  Witness this description of a bereaved husband:  “He sought Lucy thru all struggles of sleep, mewing and crying like a lost child, but she was not.  He was really searching for a lost self and crying like the old witch with her shed skin shrunken by red pepper and salt, ‘Ole skin, doncher know me?’  But the skin was never to fit her again.”  Or note this description of a wife’s disillusionment:  “So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush.  The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor.  It was there to shake hands whenever company came to visit, but it never went back inside the bedroom again. . . . She wasn’t petal-open anymore with him.” 

Besides enjoying Hurston’s style, I find her choice and treatment of subject matter very interesting.  While she portrayed her parents’ marriage in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston depicted in Their Eyes Were Watching God the growth of a woman’s self-awareness and of her determination to realize fully her own dreams and destiny.  An appendage of the first two men in her life, Janie Starks dares to break away from safety and to love passionately.  Her daring leads to the gratification of self-fulfillment and to the knowledge of her own inner strength:  “The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall.  Here was peace.  She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net.  Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder.  So much of life in its meshes!  She called in her soul to come and see.”

Both Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God dwell on African American characters interacting almost entirely with one another—a notable focus on African American society.  Hurston herself grew up in Eatonville, Florida, which in 1886 became the first incorporated community run by black people for black people.  Her father, a Baptist pastor, served three terms as Eatonville’s Mayor, and she returned to Eatonville many times in her adulthood.  An anthropologist trained by Franz Boas at Barnard College, Hurston sought out and preserved African American and West Indian folklore.  Her anthropological knowledge enriched her novels.  Reading her overpowering work is like touching a live wire.

The two Library of America volumes devoted to Hurston include four novels, short stories, anthropological studies, her autobiography, and nonfiction.  

Edith Wharton

 

Edith Wharton

 

(c) Copyright (2021) by Kathleen Spaltro.

                                    All Rights Reserved.     

Many events have shown how difficult transatlantic communication can become and how deep a divide can exist between American and European values, attitudes, heritages, and experiences.  Henry James explored this territory in many novels and stories—such as The American, The Europeans, “Daisy Miller,” and The Portrait of a Lady.  His friend Edith Wharton likewise returned often to this topic, as the several volumes devoted to Wharton in the Library of America testify.  Like James, Wharton seemed especially fascinated by Americans who have become Europeanized.

Two such Europeanized Americans appear in Wharton’s  novel The Age of Innocence (1920) and her novella Madame de Treymes (1906).  Both women have married European men whose flagrant adultery has broken the marriages.   Disillusioned by their European lives and now attracted to American lovers, both women seek safety and security in American values and relationships, which they idealize.  Each considers the choice of divorce, which both European society and American society discourage.

Fanny’s and Ellen’s predicaments cause their American lovers to experience to the depths the powerful differences and similarities between European and American points of view.  Ellen’s lover Newland Archer, in advocating for her not to return to her Polish husband, also realizes the entrenched resistance of American society to the dissolution of Ellen’s wretched marriage and its deep disapproval of his own adulterous feelings for her. 

In portraying Archer’s passion for Ellen and Durham’s for Fanny,  as well as the eventual fate of both these women, Wharton outlined both differing and similar societal attitudes towards sexual irregularities, marriage as a passionate relationship between lovers, marriage as the bedrock of family life, and women as sexual beings, wives, and mothers.  

The Age of Innocence in particular dwells on the tension between the desire for a passionate life (and its attendant disgrace) and the pull towards the assumption of one’s duty to parents, spouses, and children (and its attendant denial of one’s deepest self).  It presents in a remarkably complex way both the dullness of duty and its moral superiority, both the fascination and depth of passion and its selfishness.  

Sarah Orne Jewett

 

Sarah Orne Jewett

 

(c) Copyright (2021) by Kathleen Spaltro.

All Rights Reserved.

 

A summer visitor to a seaside country town in New England, although she essentially remains an outsider, slowly becomes absorbed into the web of smalltown coastal life.  Her narration loosely strings together sketches of people and places, their unity provided by her own presence and the common locale.  This serves as the framework of the most memorable novels and stories reprinted in the Library of America Sarah Orne Jewett volume:  Deephaven, The Country of the Pointed Firs, and “Dunnet Landing Stories.”

The two novels and the stories all possess the charm of a sepia photograph come suddenly to life.  If the family legend retold by your elders entertains you and an episodic, plotless structure doesn’t bother you, Jewett will give you as much pleasure as she has given me.  As Helen, the narrator of Deephaven, comments, “It is wonderful, the romance and tragedy and adventure which one may find in a quiet old-fashioned country town, though to heartily enjoy the every-day life one must care to study life and character, and must find pleasure in thought and observation of simple things, and have an instinctive, delicious interest in what to other eyes is unflavored dulness.”

Read the best first—The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896); then enjoy its slighter but similar predecessor Deephaven (1877); lastly, savor your reunion with Country of the Pointed Firs characters in “Dunnet Landing Stories” (late 1890s).   Helen and Kate, the young ladies who visit Deephaven, prefigure the unnamed narrator of the Dunnet Landing novel and stories.  While Helen and Kate befriend Mrs. Kew, who lives with her husband in the Deephaven lighthouse, the older writer who visits Dunnet Landing befriends her landlady, Mrs. Todd,  the town herbalist who works closely with its country doctor. 

At least as interesting as the portrayals of the local characters are the depictions of Mrs. Todd’s herbs and the medicinal use she makes of them in doctoring the townsfolk.  She tells stories, too, of dead but not forgotten friends, like “poor Joanna,” jilted a month before her wedding day and impelled by melancholy to seclude herself on thirty-acre Shell-heap Island until she died.  Mrs. Todd also tells her lodger about “The Queen’s Twin,” a local woman born in the  same hour as Queen Victoria and about “The Foreigner,” a Frenchwoman married to a local captain and marooned by his death in the misery of local hostility and incomprehension—a pathetic and deeply moving tale.