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.
