The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Muriel Spark

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782117698
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Clásicos

'Muriel Spark's most celebrated novel... This ruthlessly and destructively romantic school ma'am is one of the giants of post-war fiction' Independent'A brilliantly psychological fugue' ObserverThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Muriel Spark's most significant and celebrated novel, and remains as dazzling as when it was first published in 1961.Miss Jean Brodie is a teacher unlike any other, proud and cultured, enigmatic and freethinking; a romantic, with progressive, sometimes shocking ideas and aspirations for the girls in her charge. At the Marcia Blaine Academy she takes a select group of girls under her wing. Spellbound by Miss Brodie's unconventional teaching, these devoted pupils form the Brodie set. But as the girls enter their teenage years and they become increasingly drawn in by Miss Brodie's personal life, her ambitions for them take a startling and dark turn with devastating consequences.

III

THE DAYS PASSED AND the wind blew from the Forth.

It is not to be supposed that Miss Brodie was unique at this point of her prime; or that (since such things are relative) she was in any way off her head. She was alone, merely, in that she taught in a school like Marcia Blaine’s. There were legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties, women from the age of thirty and upward, who crowded their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas and energetic practices in art or social welfare, education or religion. The progressive spinsters of Edinburgh did not teach in schools, especially in schools of traditional character like Marcia Blaine’s School for Girls. It was in this that Miss Brodie was, as the rest of the staff spinsterhood put it, a trifle out of place. But she was not out of place amongst her own kind, the vigorous daughters of dead or enfeebled merchants, of ministers of religion, University professors, doctors, big warehouse owners of the past, or the owners of fisheries who had endowed these daughters with shrewd wits, high-coloured cheeks, constitutions like horses, logical educations, hearty spirits and private means. They could be seen leaning over the democratic counters of Edinburgh grocers’ shops arguing with the Manager at three in the afternoon on every subject from the authenticity of the Scriptures to the question what the word “guaranteed” on a jam-jar really meant. They went to lectures, tried living on honey and nuts, took lessons in German and then went walking in Germany; they bought caravans and went off with them into the hills among the lochs; they played the guitar, they supported all the new little theatre companies; they took lodgings in the slums and, distributing pots of paint, taught their neighbours the arts of simple interior decoration; they preached the inventions of Marie Stopes; they attended the meetings of the Oxford Group and put Spiritualism to their hawk-eyed test. Some assisted in the Scottish Nationalist Movement; others, like Miss Brodie, called themselves Europeans and Edinburgh a European capital, the city of Hume and Boswell.

They were not, however, committee women. They were not school-teachers. The committee spinsters were less enterprising and not at all rebellious, they were sober churchgoers and quiet workers. The school-mistresses were of a still more orderly type, earning their keep, living with aged parents and taking walks on the hills and holidays at North Berwick.

But those of Miss Brodie’s kind were great talkers and feminists and, like most feminists, talked to men as man-to-man.

“I tell you this, Mr Geddes, birth control is the only answer to the problem of the working class. A free issue to every household ...”

And often in the thriving grocers’ shops at three in the afternoon:

“Mr Logan, Elder though you are, I am a woman in my prime of life, so you can take it from me that you get a sight more religion out of Professor Tovey’s Sunday concerts than you do out of your kirk services.”

And so, seen in this light, there was nothing outwardly odd about Miss Brodie. Inwardly was a different matter, and it remained to be seen, towards what extremities her nature worked her. Outwardly she differed from the rest of the teaching staff in that she was still in a state of fluctuating development, whereas they had only too understandably not trusted themselves to change their minds, particularly on ethical questions, after the age of twenty. There was nothing Miss Brodie could not yet learn, she boasted of it. And it was not a static Miss Brodie who told her girls, “These are the years of my prime. You are benefiting by my prime,” but one whose nature was growing under their eyes, as the girls themselves were under formation. It extended, this prime of Miss Brodie’s, still in the making when the girls were well on in their teens. And the principles governing the end of her prime would have astonished herself at the beginning of it.

The summer holidays of nineteen-thirty-one marked the first anniversary of the launching of Miss Brodie’s prime. The year to come was in many ways the most sexual year of the Brodie set, who were not turned eleven and twelve; it was a crowded year of stirring revelations. In later years, sex was only one of the things in life. That year it was everything.

The term opened vigorously as usual. Miss Brodie stood bronzed before her class and said, “I have spent most of my summer holidays in Italy once more, and a week in London, and I have brought back a great many pictures which we can pin on the wall. Here is a Cimabue. Here is a larger formation of Mussolini’s fascisti, it is a better view of them than that of last year’s picture. They are doing splendid things as I shall tell you later. I went with my friends for an audience with the Pope. My friends kissed his ring but I thought it proper only to bend over it. I wore a long black gown with a lace mantilla, and looked magnificent. In London my friends who are well-to-do—their small girl has two nurses, or nannies as they say in England—took me to visit A. A. Milne. In the hall was hung a reproduction of Botticelli’s Primavera which means The Birth of Spring. I wore my silk dress with the large red poppies which is just right for my colouring. Mussolini is one of the greatest men in the world, far more so than Ramsay MacDonald, and his fascisti—”

“Good morning, Miss Brodie. Good morning, sit down, girls,” said the headmistress who had entered in a hurry, leaving the door wide open.

Miss Brodie passed behind her with her head up, up, and shut the door with the utmost meaning.

“I have only just looked in,” said Miss Mackay, “and I have to be off. Well, girls, this is the first day of the new session. Are we downhearted? No. You girls must work hard this year at every subject and pass your qualifying examination with flying colours. Next year you will be in the Senior school, remember. I hope you’ve all had a nice summer holiday, you all look nice and brown. I hope in due course of time to read your essays on how you spent them.”

When she had gone Miss Brodie looked hard at the door for a long time. A girl, not of her set, called Judith, giggled. Miss Brodie said to Judith, “That will do.” She turned to the blackboard and rubbed out with her duster the long division sum she always kept on the blackboard in case of intrusions from outside during any arithmetic period when Miss Brodie should happen not to be teaching arithmetic. When she had done this she turned back to the class and said, “Are we downhearted no, are we downhearted no. As I was saying, Mussolini has performed feats of magnitude and unemployment is even farther abolished under him than it was last year. I shall be able to tell you a great deal this term. As you know, I don’t believe in talking down to children, you are capable of grasping more than is generally appreciated by your elders. Education means a leading out, from e, out and duco, I lead. Qualifying examination or no qualifying examination, you will have the benefit of my experiences in Italy. In Rome I saw the Forum and I saw the Colosseum where the gladiators died and the slaves were thrown to the lions. A vulgar American remarked to me, ‘It looks like a mighty fine quarry.’ They talk nasally. Mary, what does to talk nasally mean?”

Mary did not know.

“Stupid as ever,” said Miss Brodie. “Eunice?”

“Through your nose,” said Eunice.

“Answer in a complete sentence, please,” said Miss Brodie. “This year I think you should all start answering in complete sentences, I must try to remember this rule. Your correct answer is ‘To talk nasally means to talk through one’s nose.’ The American said, ‘It looks like a mighty fine quarry.’ Ah! It was there the gladiators fought. ‘Hail Caesar!’ they cried. ‘These about to die salute thee!’”

Miss Brodie stood in her brown dress like a gladiator with raised arm and eyes flashing like a sword. “Hail Caesar!” she cried again, turning radiantly to the window light, as if Caesar sat there. “Who opened the window?” said Miss Brodie dropping her arm.

Nobody answered.

“Whoever has opened the window has opened it too wide,” said Miss Brodie. “Six inches is perfectly adequate. More is vulgar. One should have an innate sense of these things. We ought to be doing history at the moment according to the time-table. Get out your history books and prop them up in your hands. I shall tell you a little more about Italy. I met a young poet by a fountain. Here is a picture of Dante meeting Beatrice—it is pronounced Beatrichay in Italian which makes the name very beautiful—on the Ponte Vecchio. He fell in love with her at that moment. Mary, sit up and don’t slouch. It was a sublime moment in a sublime love. By whom was the picture painted?”

Nobody knew.

“It was painted by Rossetti. Who was Rossetti, Jenny?”

“A painter,” said Jenny.

Miss Brodie looked suspicious.

“And a genius,” said Sandy, to come to Jenny’s rescue.

“A friend of—?” said Miss Brodie.

“Swinburne,” said a girl.

Miss Brodie smiled. “You have not forgotten,” she said, looking round the class. “Holidays or no holidays. Keep your history books propped up in case we have any further intruders.” She looked disapprovingly towards the door and lifted her fine dark Roman head with dignity. She had often told the girls that her dead Hugh had admired her head for its Roman appearance. “Next year,” she said, “you will have the specialists to teach you history and mathematics and languages, a teacher for this and a teacher for that, a period of forty-five minutes for this and another for that. But in this your last year with me you will receive the fruits of my prime. They will remain with you all your days. First, however, I must mark the register for today before we forget. There are two new girls. Stand up the two new girls.”

They stood up with wide eyes while Miss Brodie sat down at her desk.

“You will get used to our ways. What religions are you?” said Miss Brodie with her pen poised on the page while, outside in the sky, the gulls from the Firth of Forth wheeled over the school and the green and golden tree-tops swayed towards the windows.

“Come autumn sae pensive, in yellow and gray,

And soothe me wi’ tidings o’ nature’s decay

—Robert Burns,” said Miss Brodie when she had closed the register. “We are now well into the nineteen-thirties. I have four pounds of rosy apples in my desk, a gift from Mr Lowther’s orchard, let us eat them now while the coast is clear—not but what the apples do not come under my own jurisdiction, but discretion is … discretion is … Sandy?”

“The better part of valour, Miss Brodie.” Her little eyes looked at Miss Brodie in a slightly smaller way.

Even before the official opening of her prime Miss Brodie’s colleagues in the Junior school had been gradually turning against her. The teaching staff of the Senior school was indifferent or mildly amused, for they had not yet felt the impact of the Brodie set; that was to come the following year, and even then these Senior mistresses were not unduly irritated by the effects of what they called Miss Brodie’s experimental methods. It was in the Junior school, among the lesser paid and lesser qualified women, with whom Miss Brodie had daily dealings, that indignation seethed. There were two exceptions on the staff, who felt neither resentment nor indifference towards Miss Brodie, but were, on the contrary, her supporters on every count. One of these was Mr Gordon Lowther, the singing master for the whole school, Junior and Senior. The other was Mr Teddy Lloyd, the Senior girls’ art master. They were the only men on the staff. Both were already a little in love with Miss Brodie, for they found in her the only sex-bestirred object in their daily environment, and although they did not realise it, both were already beginning to act as rivals for her attention. But so far, they had not engaged her attention as men, she knew them only as supporters, and was proudly grateful. It was the Brodie set who discerned, before she did, and certainly these men did, that Mr Lowther and Mr Lloyd were at pains to appear well, each in his exclusive right before Miss Brodie.

To the Brodie set Gordon Lowther and Teddy Lloyd looked rather like each other until habitual acquaintance proved that they looked very different. Both were red-gold in colouring. Teddy Lloyd, the art master, was by far the better-shaped, the better-featured and the more sophisticated. He was said to be half Welsh, half English. He spoke with a hoarse voice as if he had bronchitis all the time. A golden forelock of his hair fell over his forehead into his eyes. Most wonderful of all, he had only one arm, the right, with which he painted. The other was a sleeve tucked into his pocket. He had lost the contents of the sleeve in the Great War.

Miss Brodie’s class had only once had an opportunity to size him up closely, and then it was in a dimmed light, for the blinds of the art room had been drawn to allow Mr Lloyd to show his lantern slides. They had been marched into the art room by Miss Brodie, who was going to sit with the girls on the end of a bench, when the art master came forward with a chair for her held in his one hand and presented in a special way with a tiny inflection of the knees, like a flunkey. Miss Brodie seated herself nobly like Britannia with her legs apart under her loose brown skirt which came well over her knees. Mr Lloyd showed his pictures from an exhibition of Italian art in London. He had a pointer with which he indicated the design of the picture in accompaniment to his hoarse voice. ‘ He said nothing of what the pictures represented, only followed each curve and line as the artist had left it off—perhaps at the point of an elbow, and picked it up—perhaps at the edge of a cloud or the back of a chair. The ladies of the Primavera, in their netball-playing postures, provided Mr Lloyd with much pointer work. He kept on passing the pointer along the lines of their bottoms which showed through the drapery. The third time he did this a collective quiver of mirth ran along the front row of girls, then spread to the back rows. They kept their mouths shut tight against these convulsions, but the tighter their lips, the more did the little gusts of humour escape through their noses. Mr Lloyd looked round with offended exasperation.

“It is obvious,” said Miss Brodie, “that these girls are not of cultured homes and heritage. The Philistines are upon us, Mr Lloyd.”

The girls, anxious to be of cultured and sexless antecedents, were instantly composed by the shock of this remark. But immediately Mr Lloyd resumed his demonstration of artistic form, and again dragged his pointer all round the draped private parts of one of Botticelli’s female subjects, Sandy af...