If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Muriel Spark

There is a certain kind of teacher that pops up throughout popular culture: you know the one, Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society or Julia Roberts in Mona Lisa Smile, vague, earnest, sexless high-minded creatures, who appear like the angel Gabriel to impart some valuable news or life lesson to their innocent pupils before fading away good-humoredly into the distance once the lesson is learned. Jean Brodie, junior teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, “spinster,” “feminist,” “radical,” and self-described as in the “prime” of her life, at first appears to resemble closely this kind of teacher. "Hold up your books...prop them in your hands, in case of intruders," she tells her students, and then, instead of conducting a lesson on history or grammar or mathematics, Miss Brodie instructs them on her own love affairs, the proper way to clean the skin, her travels, poetry, elocution, or any number of small but twee things.

I have to admit, though I was intrigued by Miss Brodie’s crispness, in the first few pages of this book, I despaired of its ending, because I thought it would follow similar themes. Miss Brodie is embraced and beloved by her girls, teaches them about living, before she is betrayed, and torn away from her place. She treats the girls as her peers, not her pupils. And every one of the girls in her “set” is encouraged to develop her own special and unique talents. She shows them pictures of far off lands and makes them weep with the tragic tale of her dead fiance, killed on Flanders Fields. Doesn’t it just sound like they are all on the verge of sounding their barbaric yawps above the rooftops of the world?

But the book takes a different tack from these heart-inspiring films, because Miss Brodie’s betrayal happens by the hand of one of her own, and it is not spoiling you to tell you so, because Muriel Spark makes no bones about attempting to hide Miss Brodie’s usurpation from the reader. Within the first chapter we are looking at a Last Supper kind of setting, scanning the faces of the Brodie set to find the betrayer. Which one of her set will it be? Will it be pretty Rose, famous for sex appeal? Imaginative Sandy? Put-upon, lumpish Mary? That is all the reveal we need to wait for, the who. The why of the act is not disputed. If Miss Brodie had been with her girls for just a year perhaps she would have been that archetypal teacher for them, and the girls of the Brodie set would be standing on chairs and proclaiming ‘O Captain, My Captain’ as she is led away by a disapproving headmistress. But because of the structure of the British educational system, she is with her girls for their long and stormy adolescences, and “her nature [is] growing under their eyes, as the girls themselves [are] under formation.” Miss Brodie is not a stock character, cut from cardboard. She is evolving, and changing, and not always for the better. In short, her lengthy involvement in her students’ lives gives them ample time to grow away from her, to become disillusioned with her, for them to learn the lesson we all learn: the things we love in childhood are seldom the things we love as adults.

Our understanding of Jean Brodie echoes her students' dawning understanding of her. At the beginning we are charmed, and enthralled by her stories, but there does come a moment when we wonder why Miss Brodie turns to the girls of her immature set rather than to the women of her own age. Her desire to talk about her life experiences becomes a way for her to relive past glories, instead of teachable moments meant to inspire the girls in their own lives. Her encouragement of each girls’ special talents seem devised less and less for her own benefit but more and more for Miss Brodie’s own fleeting amusement. And there is something perverse, perversely wrong, about the amount of detail about her personal life, her sexual and romantic life, she reveals to these girls. Why does she treat them like her peers? Because she respects them--or because she oversteps her boundaries? Miss Brodie, for all her aplomb, is a shoddy teacher. And she draws her girls into a world she should be preparing them for, yes—but she should be protecting them from it, too.

Miss Brodie is such an overbearing presence in her students' lives and while it makes sense that younger girls would like that, it also makes sense that older girls would resent her continual efforts to shape them in her mold, and her dominance over them, the delight she gets at their adoration of her. In short, these students have no chance of becoming the master, as long as the master is around. It makes sense that at least one of them should want to usurp her. And yet--Miss Brodie, for all her faults, might not deserve that. Because it's heartbreaking, what happens to her, and it's shocking, and she suffers, and she's really not a bad person because Spark is a truly nuanced writer and there are no "good" or "bad" people in her books.

Then why'd you try to fuck her like a bitch, Brett?

Muriel Spark is also a genius. She covers seven years in seven characters’ lives in 160 pages. That’s fewer then twenty-five pages a year, and even less than that when you consider the flash-forwards to the later lives of her students. And it has to be done subtly to be effective, the showing of this change in the students’ reactions of the teacher, as they age. And yet in this book it is never rushed, the pacing is perfect. And Spark does manage to show not only this widening rift, but that, in the end, Miss Brodie did affect her students deeply and profoundly, for their whole lives, even if it is not in the way she intended.

And another thing that I marveled at in this book was how thoroughly Spark had conceived her characters. They never act contrary to their established personas, but their growth and change is surprising. And still: it is never contrived. Spark manages to capture the feelings of childhood so pitch perfectly, and tenderly, and funnily.

I've owned this book for about ten years. I bought it for a college class, but ended up dropping the class, and never bothering with the book. I'm glad I finally picked it up, but I am also glad that I didn't try to read it before now. I feel like I wouldn't have appreciated it. I think I would have been too young. If you read this book too young, you'll side with the girls, and you'll miss out on feeling sorry and pathetic for Miss Brodie. If you read it too old, you may have forgotten what it was like to be the age of the girls in Brodie's set, and you'll think them cruel and callous. But if you read this book at just the right time in your life, I think you'll never forget it's humor, sadness, and especially it's authenticity. I know I won't.

Rating: 5 of 5 stars.