The Crème de la Crème

Muriel Spark’s most famous novel was published in 1961. It is set in 1930s Edinburgh, and the characters include schoolgirls at Marcia Blaine’s High School for Girls, the dull headmistress Miss Mackay, the singing teacher, the art master and, of course, the unforgettable Miss Brodie, the mainspring of the action. The so-called Brodie set of girls are what she calls the crème de la crème, the elite, the elect, the chosen few, chosen by Miss Brodie herself, their presiding deity.

The novel opens in 1936 when the girls are 16, flashes back to 1930 when they are in the Junior School, in Miss Brodie’s sole charge, and ends in 1938, with a final flash forward to the unexpected death of Miss Brodie, aged 56, in 1946: a span of sixteen years. At the start the flamboyantly dogmatic Miss Brodie, having reached the age of 39, is in her prime, as she puts it, and has chosen to share it with those chosen few, specifically six girls of her set: Monica Douglas, Rose Stanley, Eunice Gardner, Sandy Stranger, Jenny Gray and Mary Macgregor. A seventh and late arrival is Joyce Emily Hammond. Miss Brodie herself is a mass of contradictions. She distrusts the Catholic Church and the school’s team-spirit, exemplified by the Girl Guides, but adores Italian religious art and admires Mussolini and his fascists. She proclaims the glory of passionate romantic love but rejects her own true love, the art master Teddy Lloyd, because he’s a married man and a Catholic, and settles for a more subdued affair with the singing teacher, the respectably dreary Gordon Lowther. She is also rigidly dogmatic: although she professes to be an inspiring bringer-out of her charges’ innate abilities, as opposed to a mere mechanical putter-in of facts and principles, she rides rough-shod over the girls’ minds, and brooks no opposition to her ideas and her whims. Sandy sees this eventually, understanding that the girls of her set are mere surrogates whose purpose is to satisfy their teacher’s frustrations. Finally she betrays her to the headmistress, revealing that she has taught fascism and influenced the last of her set, Joyce Emily, to go and fight for Franco in Spain, where she is subsequently killed. In later life Sandy converts to Roman Catholicism, writes a treatise entitled The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, which brings her fame, and withdraws from the world to become a nun, Sister Helen of the Transfiguration. When asked by a visitor what has been the primary influence on her, she grips the bars of her grille desperately and answers quite simply, ‘There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.’ A great teacher may not always get it right, may even hopelessly distort and mislead. But in the end such a teacher does transform the commonplace and, like art itself, heightens experience. These teachers never leave us. We are always in their classrooms. That is partly what the novel is about. But it’s also about many other things. It’s about sex, seen through the eyes of schoolgirls. Miss Brodie plays on their sexual awareness and this provides some of the hilarity, when they imagine her having sex with Mr Lowther on the top of Arthur’s Seat in a howling storm – a banal bed would not be good enough for Miss Brodie; and in the concocted correspondence between the two teachers, written by Sandy and Jenny, the last letter in the series ending with Miss Brodie’s final flourish: ‘Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing!’ You can just hear Miss Brodie’s formal accents beneath the girls’ immature fantasies. More seriously, it’s about betrayal. The teacher is the prophet, the girls are her disciples, and one of them betrays her. When Peter faced up to his betrayal of Jesus he went out and wept. Judas went out and hanged himself. Sandy withdraws from the world but does not find peace as a nun. Her betrayed teacher haunts her from the grave. It’s about religion, too, specifically about the Calvinism on which Muriel Spark herself turned her back when she left Presbyterian Edinburgh and converted to Catholicism. The Brodie set are the elect, and their teacher is free to direct their fates as she sees fit. It’s about manipulation and control by an unchallengeable idol – except it doesn’t work out for her that way. It’s about duality, the theme of double identity or split personality reinforced by the Edinburgh setting, the poverty and decay of the Old Town and the wealthy respectability of the New Town, which hadn’t changed much since the death of Robert Louis Stevenson – think of his Dr Jekyll – only three decades earlier. The city is therefore the perfect setting for the dangerously divided Miss Brodie, whose ancestor, Deacon Brodie, also led a double life, town councillor by day and criminal by night. He too came to a sticky end, hanged on a gallows of his own devising. So it’s also about incongruities, and about the nasty surprises God has in store for you. And the split mentality rubs off on Sandy, who leads a double life of her own, sleeping with Teddy Lloyd while entering into imaginary relationships with fictitious figures such as Stevenson’s Alan Breck, Charlotte Brontë’s Mr Rochester and others, including the Lady of Shalott, deliberately used by the author as a frustrated figure who sees life not directly but through a mirror, and weaves her own version of reality into a tapestry. As soon as she does encounter reality she is destroyed. Sandy’s identification with this doomed figure foreshadows her future existence as a nun, embowered by four grey walls and four grey towers. The difference is that Sandy understands what is happening to her, whereas Miss Brodie remains divided and deluded. But above all else it’s about Sandy’s transformation of the commonplace, which she has learnt from her teacher, flawed though she is. This takes me back to the end of the 1960s, when I enrolled at an Edinburgh teacher-training college. It was a staid establishment, but one moment stood out, when a young lecturer announced to us: ‘Teaching is a branch of show business!’ I never forgot those words, and went on to smuggle through instruction in the guise of entertainment, performing antics for which nowadays I’d be locked up: leaping from a cupboard to stab Claudius (a Sixth Form boy) with a blackboard pointer; passing round glasses of claret to let the class taste Keats’s draught of vintage; not to mention declaiming Gray’s Elegy in Edinburgh graveyards with the pupils recumbent on tabletop tombstones – which were probably unsafe. All no longer possible, not today, not since schools became bureaucratized, and teaching became an education industry where individuality is unsafe. Still, I feel there should be room for the Miss Brodies of this world. We need teachers who can turn the commonplace into magic. My daughter Jenny, reading English at Edinburgh University, recently wrote a comparative essay on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Tempest. The classroom is the island. Miss Brodie is Prospero, the all-powerful magician, the controller, masterminding and manipulating her pupils. Prospero has also been betrayed but like Miss Brodie he can still put on a great show – the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, ‘a most majestic vision’, even as it dissolves and melts into thin air, just as with Miss Brodie whose name and memory after her death ‘flitted from mouth to mouth like swallows in summer, and in winter they were gone’. In his Epilogue, Prospero tells the audience that his project or purpose has been to please, in other words to entertain. The educator who fails to teach Caliban nevertheless bows out as the entertainer, the wizard who transfigures the trite and makes the mundane marvellous. As Miss Brodie surely knew, teaching is indeed a branch of show business.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 75 © Christopher Rush 2022