Papers > English > Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
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Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
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Miss Jean Brodie was a charismatic middle-class Edinburgh school mistress teaching in the 1930s. ... Our first impression of Brodie is that of a creative misunderstood educationalist persecuted by those around her because of their envy. None of her persecutors – Miss Mackay for example - were sympathetic, so Brodie appeared to be likeable. ... There was nothing contrite about Miss Brodie’s character. In some ways Miss Brodie can be described as a ‘tragic heroine’, and in others she cannot.
Our perception of Miss Brodie as a ‘tragic heroine’ is assisted by the novel’s interesting structure, in which Spark has deployed a ‘flash forward’ technique. To begin with we are presented with different estimations of Brodie, and we have to decide whether to take these at face value or not - for example, we are told by Eunice, “…she wasn’t mad, she was sane as anything. ... ” However, we are also told that twenty-eight years later Brodie is dead, was forced to retire and betrayed by one of her girls. ...
Miss Brodie appeals at first because of the entertaining way in which she throws aside the authorised school curriculum, “Art and Religion first; then Philosophy; lastly Science and Maths”. ... ” The word “serviceable” is an inherent criticism of Miss Mackay and all that she stands for. ...
We begin to see an unhealthy side to Brodie’s character as she makes herself out to be a heroine in front of the girls in her class. She manipulates the ‘Brodie set’, a group of six girls: Sandy, Jenny, Rose, Eunice, Mary and Monica. Throughout their adolescent years they remained famously ‘Brodie’, “held in suspicion and not much liking”, and were “vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the authorised curriculum”. ... Miss Brodie used French to impress the girls. ... Miss Brodie was in love with Teddy Lloyd, the Art master in the senior school. ... Even though Lloyd thought that she was “quite ridiculous”, he was infatuated by her physically - every portrait of the Brodie girls seemed to resemble Brodie’s features. He was dominating, self-confident and far more informed about Art with which Brodie associated herself.
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Paper Information
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Title: Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Words: 1752
Rating: None
Pages: 7
submitted by: mairijo
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