Alright, now we are picking up the pace. "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" is a quirky little novel about the short career of an elementary school teacher in a small girls school in Edinburgh in the mid-1930's. This teacher, as you may have guessed, named Miss Jean Brodie, chooses several girls to be a part of an exclusive group that she seems to dote upon. She chooses each girl because they are all to be "famous" for something. To put it simply, one is brainy, one is beautiful and will be known for her sexuality, one is athletically gifted, and one is stupid and dies early, and so on. Miss Brodie is disliked by many of her colleagues because she seems to be progressive and wants to try new ways of teaching and emphasize different ways of thinking than what is the norm at a British private school. She has romantic relationships with both the male Art and Music teachers, while her relationship with the female science teacher is strained. She talks often of a love she lost in the First World War, and of her trips to Italy where she believes Mussolini and his black shirts are doing amazing things (whoops). As the story progresses, more and more teachers at her school lose their patience with her and her small group of favorite girls.
Initially, I assumed this would be the story, told many times since in literature and film, of a teacher with new ideas and a progressive outlook on education becoming unfairly discriminated against and forced out, something like "Dead Poets Society" except with girls. Surprisingly, that is not the case. Miss Brodie's attention to her girls doesn't seem to be rooted in a desire to help them, at least not completely. It seems to be more about having control over those girls' lives, and being associated with any success they eventually have.
Eventually Miss Brodie is betrayed by one of her own girls, who lets slip the romantic relationships that the teacher has had with her male colleagues. Due to those relationships, as well as the positive statements she had made about Mussolini, Hitler and their followers in her classroom, she is forced to resign, and she ends up losing the influence she once had on her girls, though they do keep in touch. Years later, we see that none of her girls end up in the places she originally had foreseen for them.
In reading up on Spark's message behind this novel, I found that much of the focus is supposed to be on the simple truth that we don't know that much about people. People's motivations, secrets, and desires are largely hidden from those around them, even those closest to them. Authors often write from an omniscient point of view, while they may not share everything with the reader, they know everything about their characters. Spark demonstrates that characters can be written in a way where their real selves are hidden from everyone, even the author. Did Miss Brodie want to help her girls, or control them? This is not revealed, and chances are the answer is a little of both.
I also realized while reading "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" that years of reading history books, biographies and legal texts, I am having a hard team reading critically and looking behind the literal meaning of the text for the author's purpose. This was especially evident to me in reading this novel and in retrospect a huge problem I had in dealing with "The Sound and the Fury." I need to focus on reading more critically in the future. See, I am improving myself! Yay!
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