The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (May 2019)
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Muriel Spark’s 1961 tale about a young teacher’s relationship with her prized pupils. There isn’t much I can say about this work, however, without ruining the plot so I will turn my attention here to some of the more interesting insights Spark scattered into the story.
The main idea behind the title is that the teacher, Jean Brodie, feels she is in her prime. The meaning isn’t perfectly clear to her handpicked students but over the course of the novel we see some suggestions about the expression. Brodie teaches based on a belief that goodness, truth, and beauty are the price for safety. The risks she takes in the name of these goals initially enchant her students. A similar predilection for art and religion ahead of philosophy and science place her once more at odds with her curriculum but, again, she finds ways to work her convictions into her job.
Broadly speaking, her students’ educations benefit from the approach. A teacher who brings knowledge out of rather than forces knowledge into a student meets a pure definition of education that standardization makes impossible. But things aren’t so simple – a child’s education is much more than the sum of accumulated knowledge by graduation. Brodie losing sight of this fact is a primary catalyst for the various events in the story. As one passage notes, children generally struggle to see differences among adults, and Brodie’s failure to consider this is perhaps one reason for how events unfold. She also forgets that betrayal for a child is often as simple as a broken promise and this casual interpretation makes it very unlikely for a child to build up a functioning idea of loyalty.
Another larger lesson in the work is how a personal narrative compels individuals to bend truths in order to fit the larger story. As time passes, more events occur that require such finesse. The idea of ‘being in her prime’ pushes Brodie forward while also blinding her to certain shortcomings about herself and those around her. At some point, a personal narrative will lose its relationship to truth if an honest incorporation of new events is sacrificed to protect the integrity of the story. Those outside the narrative arc but close enough to its effect will often betray the fiction for no reason beyond their own blindness to another’s intentions.
The longtime appeal of this book is a manifestation of how great novels must see the entirety of human existence. The big ideas above are supplemented by little insights – such as the way silence can ease a difficult situation or how difficult it is to persuade those who smile when they should disagree. Overall, though, the lesson here is perhaps just a reinforcement of a simpler idea – as we age, we learn how to become nicer to others, and look back on our lives wising we’d learned how to do it a little sooner.
