Milena Kostic

University of Nis, Serbia

Faculty of Philosophy

Education as Manipulation in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Abstract. The paper explores the difference between the public and private aspects of
Miss Jean Brodie’s teaching techniques: whereas according to the general public opinion
she seems to be a free thinker and a radical rebel against the dominant patriarchal norms,
in her private classes the readers recognize the repetition of the identical pattern of
destructive patriarchal authorities ultimately resulting in the manipulation of her pupils.
The theoretical framework of the paper relies on the critical discussion of the concepts of
Louis Althusser’s “interpellation” (1971), Alice Miller’s “poisonous pedagogy” (1980)
and Judith Butler’s “appropriation of the male identity by women” (1990).
Key words: poisonous pedagogy, interpellation, public/private, male/female identity.

1. “Authentic Sense of the Self” Crushed by “Poisonous Pedagogy”

Coined in 1977 by German psychologist Katharina Rutschky, the concept of

“poisonous pedagogy” refers to a set of repressive and abusive child-raising methods that
ultimately damage the emotional development of a child. Although not originally defined
by Alice Miller, a renowned Swiss psychologist, a detailed clarification of this term was
offered by her in the influential study For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-
Rearing and the Roots of Violence (the book was first published in 1980 and afterwards
witnessed its fourth edition in 2002, which only testifies to its ceaseless relevance
regarding the process of child-rearing). Another proof of the previous statement is the
fact that Miller was constantly preoccupied with this concept in her work; it could even
be added, with no exaggeration, that the revelation of the harmful consequences of
“poisonous pedagogy” became a sort of a life-long professional quest that she embarked
on at the beginning of her writing career. For example, in 2009, just a year before she
passed away, while writing her blog entitled Concerning Forgiveness: the Liberating
Experience of Painful Truth, Miller defined this notion once again, thus summarizing all
its aspects in a most condensed and coherent manner:
 Poisonous pedagogy is a phrase I use to refer to the kind of parenting and
education aimed at breaking a child's will and making that child into an obedient
subject by means of overt or covert coercion, manipulation, and emotional
blackmail. The mistreated and neglected child is completely alone in the darkness
of confusion and fear. Surrounded by arrogance and hatred, robbed of its rights
and its speech, deceived in its love and its trust, disregarded, humiliated, mocked
in its pain, such a child is blind, lost, and pitilessly exposed to the power of
ignorant adults. It is without orientation and completely defenseless. (Miller,
2009: 1)

Miller further elaborates on different ways that the rearing authorities (particularly
parents and teachers) use for the sake of establishing complete and unquestioning
obedience on the part of a child (physical punishment, psychological means or a
combination of these two just being its most conspicuous variants). These are all
obstacles to fostering an “authentic sense of the self”: since children are completely
dependent on these authorities, it goes without saying that they would not question “the
good intentions” of their parents or teachers. In other words, in cases when children are
punished (in whatever way), they generally tend to think that they are the guilty party,
thus consequently reassuring the idealization of the authority figure:
In this manner, the child is prevented from developing a genuine, authentic sense
of the self. As he grows older, this deadening of his soul desensitizes the child to
the pain of others. Eventually, the maturing adult will seek to express his
repressed anger on external targets, since he has never been allowed to experience
and express it in ways that would not be destructive. By such means, the cycle of
violence is continued into another generation (using “violence” in the broadest
sense). One of the additional consequences is that the adult, who has never
developed an authentic self, can easily transfer his idealization of his parents to a
new authority figure (Miller, 2009: 1).

Miller’s conclusion is that the only way to grasp “the new, honest and truly
humane behaviour” (2009: 1) is from a child who was never injured, a child that still has
the ability to wonder and doubt and does not take for granted the pedagogic reasoning to
which s/he was exposed, a child that raises problematic questions, demands valid answers
and is ready to stand up for her/himself and articulate her/his desires.
However, in everyday life, claims Miller (Miller, 2002: 65), we have become
immensely accustomed to the suppression of vitality, creativity and any feeling
whatsoever in the child, apart from scorn and abuse, typical reactions of adults in their
relationship with children in general, so that it is rather difficult to notice this horrible
practice, let alone criticize it. This method of child-rearing, enforced by various coercive
measures, in order “to rid ourselves of the child within us – i.e. the weak, helpless,
dependent creature – in order to become an independent, competent adult, deserving of
respect” (Miller, 2002: 66) is being endlessly repeated from generations of parents to
generations of children. Thus, within this vicious, never-ending circle, the practice of
child-rearing loses its dignified and respectable function, and becomes a sort of training,
a drilled exercise in successfully losing one’s individuality.
In the same vein, another contemporary thinker, famous novelist William
Golding, in his essay On the Crest of the Way (1974) uncovers the present purpose of
education in the modern society by emphasizing the irretrievable loss of dignity in this
sphere:
Education still points to a glorious dawn, officially at any rate, but has been
brought to see that what we really want is the technicians and civil servants and
soldiers and airman and that only education can supply them. She still calls what
she is doing ‘education’ because it is a proper, dignified word – but she should
call it training, as with dogs. (Golding, 1974: 128)

Furthermore, Miller also reveals the complex psychodynamic mechanism that

underlies these harmful “child-rearing” processes and describes them as splitting off and
projection of parts of the self. The ideological background that Miller mostly refers to is
Fascism, particularly in the previously mentioned study For Your Own Good: Hidden
Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (1980), although she honestly claims
that this mechanism could be detected, more or less openly, in other ideologies as well
and thus represents the subject of her continuous research in this field. The crucial
question that Miller raised in her writing was the comprehension of the reasons for the
German nation to comply with Hitler’s abusive regime. “The Good Germans”, so-called
Aryans, were being trained (schooled!) to become insensitive and senseless by
suppressing any sign of potential weakness in oneself (tears, pity, sympathy,
helplessness, fear, despair, etc.) “without mercy” and “for their own good” (Miller, 2002:
78). Thus, the last remnant of their genuine humanity was severely split off, and, in order
to make the struggle against these humane impulses easier, all these abhorred irrational,
uncontrollable qualities were projected on the object offered by the unquestioning
authority of the Führer himself – the Jewish people:
Freed from their “bad” (i.e., weak and uncontrolled) feelings, so-called Aryans
could feel pure, strong, hard, clean, good, unambivalent, and morally right if
everything they had feared in themselves since childhood could be attributed to
the Jews and if, together with their fellow Germans, these “Aryans” were not only
permitted but required to combat it relentlessly and ever anew among members of
this “inferior race” (Miller, 2002: 79).

In other words, in the guiding principles of the Fascist ideology, Miller recognizes
the identical methods persistently used in modern society’s techniques of child-rearing
whose ultimate aim is to suppress the “vital spontaneity in the child”: “laying traps, lying,
duplicity, subterfuge, manipulation, “scare” tactics, withdrawal of love, isolation, distrust,
humiliating and disgracing the child, scorn, ridicule, and coercion even to the point of
torture” (Miller, 2002: 69). The concept of “poisonous pedagogy” is thus employed by
Miller in the broad context in order to pinpoint the tragic error that our humanity suffers
from, as well as a slight ray of hope that, once this destructive practice is finally
recognized and severely criticized, it would ultimately be discarded for good.

In Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) one can easily
detect the main postulates of Miller’s “poisonous pedagogy”. Miss Jean Brodie, a
schoolteacher in her prime, as she declares herself to the world, is a rather impressive and
influential figure, and at first sight, seems to be in stark contrast to all the traditional,
uninspiring and unimaginative teacher-figures, who are deeply suspicious of Miss
Brodies’s educational intentions and teaching results. Spark purposefully creates a binary
opposition between the avant-garde and conservative form of education in the novel
through the characters of Miss Brodie and Miss Mackay, the headmistress of Marcia
Blaine School for Girls. It seems that in this relationship Miss Brodie is a problematic
pupil: she is summoned by her headmistress over and over again, each time with the sole
purpose of questioning her alternative methods of instruction. The rebellious teacher in
her prime is quite aware of these ‘attacks’ on the validity of her teaching strategy;
furthermore, she is assured that they will frequently be repeated, but seems determined
not to step away from her own principles of education. Miss Brodie’s definition of
education is of vital importance for further analysis, so it will be quoted in full here:

The word “education” comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It
means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in
the pupil’s soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there,
and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion, from the Latin root prefix
in meaning in and the stem trudo, I thrust. Miss Mackay’s method is to thrust a lot
of information into the pupil’s head; mine is a leading out of knowledge, and that
is true education as is proved by the root meaning. Now Miss Mackay has
accused me of putting ideas into my girls’ heads, but in fact that is her practice
and mine is quite the opposite. Never let it be said that I put ideas into your heads.
(Spark, 2000: 36)

Unlike Miss Mackay, who gives primacy to the principles of Safety in her vision
of the schooling system, Miss Brodie is seemingly devoted to the principles of Goodness,
Truth and Beauty that would definitely not limit children’s creative potentials (“Safety
does not come first. Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first” (2000: 10)) 1. However,
although utterly dazzled by Brodie’s seductive powers, just like her set of schoolgirls, the
1
In the aforementioned essay On the Crest of the Wave (1974) by William Golding, the author comments
on the picture by H. G. Wells portraying two radiantly beautiful children, a boy and a girl, looking into the
dawn. A lovely woman is kneeling by them, with her arm around their shoulders and is pointing into the
light. She represents both Wells’ and Golding’s idealistic vision of education – she is an emanation of the
true, the beautiful and the good, qualities that Miss Brodie also finds vital in her definition of education.
However, Golding also describes the change that this ideal has undergone in the modern society which
becomes apparent in the woman’s physical appearance and the children’s reaction towards her: her face is
fretted with the lines of worry and exasperation; she holds a pair of dividers and a pair of scales in her
hands in order to emphasize that modern education is based on rational calculations and impartial
measurements; although she still points to the dawn, the little girl is yawning and the boy is looking at his
feet.
“For the worry and exasperation in Education’s face are because she has learnt something herself: that the
supply of teachable material is as limited as the supply of people who can teach; that neither can be
manufactured or bought anywhere; and lastly, most important of all – a thought that turns her exasperation
into panic – she is pointing the children in one direction and being moved, herself, in another” (Golding,
1974: 128).
Thus, Miss Brodie’s definition of education allegedly takes us back to its original, genuine, long-forgotten
humanistic values. However, this definition of the humanistic concept of education represents just a
successful mask that conceals her true intentions – the ultimate abuse and manipulation of her pupils as will
be seen from the further interpretation of the novel – which makes her teaching influence even more
destructive and harmful than the influence of the conservative Miss Mackay that she constantly disparages.
readers soon realize that this schoolteacher represents a powerful projection of the
authoritative arrogant dominance and obscene manipulation, seemingly strongly
criticized by Brodie herself. For instance, she approves of dictatorship, as long as she is a
dictator, and the role models she openly praises in her classroom are Hitler, Franco and
Mussolini. Miss Brodie admires their radical ideas concerning global politics and
fervently follows their Machiavellian tactics that “the end justifies the means”
(Machiavelli, 1953: 59), as far as her own private agenda is concerned. In the sense of
leadership in the classroom, Brodie represents a rather successful projection of her fascist
heroes by using the identical techniques they employ in governing their nations – her
teaching is based on numerous preposterous certainties, which should be taken for
granted and not allowed to be questioned by anybody, since the teacher (leader!) can
never be wrong; certain ambivalent thoughts are placed into the minds of her pupils, and
ultimately, an amount of fear from severe punishment is induced into the girls thus
demanding strict discipline and retaining order in the classroom. In this way, she
practically ensures the realization of another of Machiavelli’s famous mottos – “it is
much better to be fear’d, than to be lov’d” (Machiavelli, 1953: 59) – though we might
claim that she even exceeds her literary idol’s prescriptions in the sphere of the
manipulation and abuse of her followers (pupils!) since they both adore and fear her.
Ironically enough, the disciple has surpassed the teacher.2

2
Men, according to Machiavelli (1953: 58-59), are greedy, deceitful, self-interested and concerned
primarily with preserving or achieving power at any cost. An ideal ruler, therefore, is one who does not
hesitate to use any repressive means at his disposal to control his subjects. He must use force to create an
‘ideal’ society reflected in the government that could protect man from himself. In other words, the ideal
ruler is cruel and vicious towards his subjects “for their own good”, as Alice Miller would say (2002:78).
This is the practice Spark openly portrays in Miss Brodie’s treatment of her pupils. Thus, the literary
character of Miss Brodie can rightfully be interpreted as the emanation of Machiavelli’s concept of the
ideal ruler: Machiavelli’s heroes (Miss Brodie included) are heroic not because of their goodness, but
because of their strength, cunning and success. In an imperfect world, a prince cannot be morally perfect
without effecting his own destruction. Although it would be preferable for a prince to appear to be virtuous
and good in the eyes of his followers, history shows that he must compromise with the standards of
goodness and virtue whenever necessary. This Machiavellian practice can be easily detected in Miss
Brodie’s teaching techniques and will be further exemplified in the paper.
 Examples of the previous claim are numerous and quite conspicuous in the novel.
They range from seemingly innocent to rather serious and utterly perilous. For instance,
when Miss Brodie questions her pupils about the greatest Italian painter, she simply
discards the answer she is personally not satisfied with (Leonardo da Vinci) and offers a
new one, not based on a complex scientific or, for that matter, artistic methodology, but
one based on her personal preference. The correct answer should be Giotto, because he is
Miss Brodie’s favourite (Spark, 2000: 11) and this personal statement becomes a fact that
should never be questioned, let alone further analyzed.

Leaving aside this rather comic and humorous account of the greatest Italian
painters, Miss Brodie is also fond of serious plotting and manipulation with her students.
Absolutely aware of a constant threat from the headmistress regarding her controversial
teaching tactics, she is shrewd enough to choose those students whose parents are
sufficiently open-minded so as to never complain about her educational strategies. In
other words, Miss Brodie is rather successful at creating the public image of an
independent, free-thinking authority whose students would only benefit from and,
allegedly, be granted the gift of difference, originality, and ultimately, popularity, in the
wide, uniformed mass of their peers. This is one of the possible reasons for Miss Brodie’s
constant disapproval of any form of teamwork (“Phrases like “team spirit” are always
employed to cut across individualism, love and personal loyalties” (78)). However, the
most important personal loyalty Miss Brodie demands from her girls is towards herself,
and not towards the girls’ own private aspirations.

Perhaps the most serious example of Miss Brodie’s harmful meddling in the
private lives of her students is given in the episode with a new student, a delinquent,
Joyce Emily, which will eventually lead to Miss Brodie’s personal downfall and
professional exclusion from the educational system. Consciously abusing the young girl’s
genuine need to be accepted and embraced by a group of her peers as well as the teacher
that she perceives as a warm and caring mother figure (a sort of an external, desirable
substitute for the parental affection she is in need of, since the wealthy parents have
shown no interest in her rearing), Miss Brodie encourages her pupil’s misguided and
rebellious inclinations to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Although initially anti-Franco,
like the rest of her schoolmates, Joyce Emily is successfully converted into becoming one
of Franco’s devout followers by her guardian Miss Brodie. After Joyce Emily’s six-week
absence from school, word spread that she had run away to Spain and got killed in an
accident when the train she was travelling in was attacked. The destructive process of re-
educating the naïve child is not described directly in the novel; the readers, however, can
deduce with no difficulty that Miss Brodie managed to make the poor schoolgirl believe
that all her attitudes concerning Franco were incorrect and invalid, or at least
misconceived. Furthermore, Miss Brodie encouraged Joyce Emily’s childish attempts to
go to Spain and fight in their Civil War as one of Franco’s followers and thus directly
contributed to her premature death.

2. Colonization of the Mind through Interpellation (Ideology in Action)

Apart from the elements of Miller’s “poisonous pedagogy”, the key notions of
Althusser’s influential theory on ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses are also
rather visible in Spark’s novel. Unlike the repressive structures of the state (e.g. Heads of
State, police, army, courts, Government) whose function is to intervene and act in favour
of the ruling class and repress the ruled class by violent and coercive means, the main
function of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) has literally been the colonization of the
mind through the process of “interpellation” (see Althusser 2001: 121-176). Althusser
uses the term “interpellation” to describe ideology in action: the process by which
individuals are shaped into obedient subjects. Althusser basically divides citizens into
good and bad subjects. The good ones give confirmation to the dominant ideology,
without the need to penetrate deeper into its meaning and to foresee the personal
consequences it can entail. Hence, they prioritize any form of authority to free will,
individual contemplation and creativity. In this manner, individuality is successfully
suppressed and successful mind control over the population is finally achieved by the
Ideological State Apparatuses – the family, the media, religious organizations and the
educational system (that is, by the discourses they propagate).

Furthermore, Althusser denies any possibility of the existence of self-conscious,

independent individuals and believes that a person’s capacity to perceive her/himself in
this way is definitely not innate or given. In his view, all seemingly personal desires,
inclinations and aspirations are inserted into an individual by ideological practices that
define it as their subject – a daughter, wife, schoolchild, teacher, etc. In fact, individuals
cannot recognize themselves outside of ideology, claims Althusser, since their identities
are acquired by seeing themselves mirrored in ideologies (Althusser, 2001: 168). Thus,
his distinction between good and bad ideological subjects, those who comply with
repressive authorities and those who offer individual, courageous resistance to them,
ultimately boils down to an identical phenomenon: unfortunately, they are both caught in
a tight ideological grip, with no possibility to change the functioning of the
overwhelming, omnipresent ideological mechanism and no hope, whatsoever, to find a
way out of it.

In the case of Spark’s Miss Brodie, the overall ideological manipulation is

brought to perfection: as a teacher, Miss Brodie represents one of the dominant pillars of
Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses, that of the educational system. However, at
the beginning of the novel it appears that the discourse Miss Brodie propagates to her
pupils is a far cry from the official, manipulative, repressive teaching strategies;
furthermore, the undisciplined Miss Brodie can be easily interpreted as one of Althusser’s
bad subjects, one of those rebellious individuals that offer creative resistance to any form
of ideological repression by giving primacy to their personal choices and private
aspirations. Thus, unlike the other teachers from Marcia Blaine School, portrayed as cogs
in the machine of official teaching practice, Miss Brodie is, at first sight, described as an
exception: she seemingly represents the popular rebel against all old-fashioned,
stupefying and uncreative teaching norms. Her teaching methods are highly popular
among the pupils – she does not stick to a definite school timetable (for instance, she
teaches history in the timeslot for mathematics and makes willing accomplices of her
schoolgirls in the conspiracy against the ideological officials by preparing them to change
the topic of their conversation to a mathematical problem the moment the headmistress
appears), she takes them to museums and galleries in order to make them perceive the
significance of the Classical education (since she herself despises the Modern subjects
with their scientific measurements and objective reasoning), and she even takes them to
her home and creates a sort of intimate relationship with her pupils, a practice highly
scorned by the traditional headmistress Mackay.3

However, in the course of the novel, Spark shows that Miss Brodie’s unique
teaching techniques are actually not at all different from the manipulative practice that
the other schoolchildren at Marcia Blaine School for Girls are exposed to. Furthermore,
Spark unveils Miss Brodie’s genuine reasons for the alleged difference – the greatest
manipulator in the book, she literally colonizes the minds of her pupils, or interpellates
them, as Althusser would say (2001: 121-176), into becoming obedient subjects not of
the dominant ideology of the School (State!), but of her own vision of superiority,
domination and mastery. Thus, Miss Brodie’s true intentions are not at all different from
those that are originally perceived as Althusser’s good ideological subjects (the other
teachers from Marcia Blaine School, the headmistress) – both of them give primacy to
authority and obedience, and not to creativity, free will and individual contemplation. As
a result of the teaching efforts of both fractions, the children are supposed to be
constructed into obedient subjects by inserting a powerful mind control which would,
ultimately, suppress any attempt at personal vitality and spontaneity. So, although the
discourse that Miss Brodie propagates at first includes her into the category of
Althusser’s bad subjects, the course of the novel shows that this is just an illusion and
that her influence is much more destructive and harmful than that offered by the good

3
This is an illustration of just one among numerous satirical accounts of Miss Mackay’s disapproval of
Miss Brodie’s teaching methods (an intentionally contradictory statement, filled with smugness and menace
at the same time):
“You are very fortunate in Miss Brodie. I could wish your arithmetic papers had been better. I am always
impressed by Miss Brodie’s girls in one way or another. You will have to work hard at ordinary humble
subjects for the qualifying examination. Miss Brodie is giving you an excellent preparation for the Senior
School. Culture cannot compensate for the lack of hard knowledge. I am happy to see you are devoted to
Miss Brodie. Your loyalty is due to the school rather than loyalty to any one individual” (Spark, 2000: 66).
subjects of the headmistress and other teachers whom she constantly repudiates. In fact,
whereas the manipulation strategies of the good subjects are quite visible and easy to
trace, Miss Brodie’s craving for manipulation is skillfully disguised, more difficult to
notice, and hence, more dangerous.

By following Althusser’s rather pessimistic line of thought, a conclusion can be

drawn that there is no escape from ideology: both good and bad ideological subjects are
engaged in the same abusive mission of mind control, which is perfectly demonstrated in
Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. However, regarding Miller’s optimistic
vision of the necessity for a definite change in the child-rearing process discussed in the
first part of this paper, one of the questions that will be further investigated here is
whether the optimistic escape from the omnipresent ideology in the novel is possible, and
if it is, then the validity of the options that Spark suggests will be discussed.

3. “Gender Trouble”: Appropriation of Male Identity by Women

One of the possible ways to approach this issue is to place it within Judith
Butler’s gender theory and discuss it from this perspective. In her influential study
Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, Butler claims that “we are taught
particular roles according to our sex and these roles become our gender” (Butler, 1993:
12). In other words, the male and female roles have actively been imposed on the subjects
by a well-calculated system of socialization that, on the one hand, praises and rewards the
socially accepted and allegedly appropriate gender conduct and, on the other, punishes
any sort of deviant behaviour, or, better to say, breaking away from the norm. Miss
Brodie’s seemingly avant-garde teaching techniques and her public expressions of
rebellion against the inflexible norms of the conventional society, as well as her morally-
questionable private life (especially regarding the aspect of her love life – wavering
between two generally socially prohibited options: Mr. Lloyd, a married Catholic art
teacher, and Mr. Lowther, an unmarried music teacher; Miss Brodie’s affairs with both of
them represent a severe conflict of interest and the forbidden meddling of the personal
and professional sphere) from the perspective of the aforementioned conventional
society, contribute to her image as a fearless challenger of gender stereotypes and their
specified associated roles.

The issue of attacking one of the central assumptions of feminist literary theory,
the common belief that the notion of female identity exists and that it requires
representation in language and politics, is severely criticized in another remarkable study
by Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). Here,
Butler again highlights the potent danger of the universality of the terms ‘woman’ and
‘feminine’, i.e. the issues of female gender and identity, mostly taken for granted
nowadays, which ultimately result in the calculated lack of attention to other significant
aspects related to women (class, ethnicity, sexual preference, as well as the historical
oppression of women in the patriarchal Western society).
The framework of Butler’s study is based on the criticism of generally accepted
assumptions about the distinction between sex and gender, according to which, as
previously stated, sex is perceived as a biological construct, while gender is
culturally constructed. Butler argues that both sex and gender represent cultural
constructs:
…this distinction introduces a split into the supposedly unified subject of
feminism, and in the second place, the distinction proves false. Sexed bodies
cannot signify without gender, and the apparent existence of sex prior to
discourse and cultural imposition is merely an effect of the functioning of gender.
(Butler, 1990: 70)4

4
Butler’s argument about culturally imposed notions of sex and gender is not isolated in the contemporary
domain of feminist criticism. Thus, Sona Snircova writes that “according to the feminist positions,
differences in gender identities, understood as “the social and psychological differences between men and
women”, are not caused by physical differences between male and female bodies, but are perceived as
cultural constructs produced by social norms and institutions (Friedman 4)” and further claims that the
focus of feminist criticism nowadays represents the notion that female social and natural roles are defined
in relation to male standards:
 In her study, Butler next explores the relationship between power and notions of
sex and gender and develops the idea that gender is performative; the socially imposed
acts that are supposed to construct gender identity represent a mere illusion and
falsification of the dominant patriarchal culture. Gender can never be fixed or universal;
it is mainly constructed through the cultural practices of performance: “constituted
through the practice of performance, the gender woman (like the gender man) remains
contingent and open to interpretation and resignification” (Butler, 1990: 95). In this way,
Butler provides an opening for subversive action. She calls for gender trouble, for people
to trouble the categories of gender through performance.5

In other words, Butler gives primacy to psychological identity, rather than

emphasizing physical or biological differences between men and women. She claims that
women can appropriate male identity, while men might embrace culturally imposed ideas
of masculine conduct due to their obedience to the dominant patriarchal order. Spark’s
novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie potently exemplifies Butler’s notion of women
appropriating ‘male’ roles in the traditional society that unquestioningly embraces the
cultural codes of male dominance. Although an unconscious product of the dominant
patriarchal culture herself, Miss Brodie does not take them for granted; she willingly
accepts the rules in the harsh game of masculine superiority and, ultimately, becomes
“In feminist discourse the term “patriarchal” generally refers to “power relations in which women’s
interests are subordinated to the interests of men” (2). These power relations take many forms, including
“the internalized norms of femininity” (2). Feminine subjectivity is “constituted in various ways by images
of how one is expected to look and behave, by rules of behaviour to which one should conform, reinforced
by approval or punishment, through particular definitions of pleasure which are offered as natural and
imply ways of being a girl or woman” (99) (Snircova, 2012: 21).
5
In her reading of Butler’s idea of the performative character of gender in the study Feminist Aspects of
Angela Carter's Grotesque (2012), Sona Snircova emphasizes the fact that “Butler derives the idea of the
performative nature of gender from the sphere of linguistics (the performative acts of the speech acts
theory) rather than seeing gender in terms of theatrical performances of gender roles consciously adopted
by an “actor”, which is an idea implied by Carter’s image of a male actor who turns himself into a
“woman”. Still, what Carter’s narrative shares with Butler’s theoretical texts is a focus on the important
role that the drag figure plays in the uncovering of the constructed nature of gender identity” (Snircova,
2012: 68). This conclusion offers a valid insight into the interpretation of Spark’s Miss Brodie, with the
exception that the uncovering of the constructed nature of gender identity in her novel is presented through
a female character who literally turns herself into a “man”, that is, willingly appropriates male identity.
triumphant in it. It is certain that Muriel Spark did not consider the concept of “gender
trouble” when writing The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, bearing in mind that the novel was
written thirty years before Butler published her valuable research. However, the mere fact
that the novel can be interpreted from the perspective of the necessity for the change of
the uniformed female gender stereotype includes the possibility of subverting the existing
categories of gender and causing some “gender trouble” (1990), as Butler suggests.
Whether this “gender trouble” in Spark’s novel is a valid option for the resistance to
patriarchal domination is a rather problematic issue, open for debate.

Within the first pages of the book, the readers get accustomed to Spark’s proleptic
use of time – namely, in the first chapter, the plot of the novel moves from 1936 to 1930,
and then forward again. This constant wavering between the present and the future, “with
sickening glimpses of the uncertainty of the past” (McWilliam, 2000: vii), as Mc William
suggests, represents a daring writing strategy by which we discover the fate of Miss
Brodie’s girls even before the moment they reach maturity in the novel. It can be argued
that Spark’s use of the proleptic time technique is rather complementary to Butler’s
concept of “gender trouble”. The prevalent time frame of the novel, the last decade before
World War II, testifies to the underprivileged and inferior position of women in the
conservative Scottish society in relation to allegedly privileged and superior men. In the
period when any sort of discussion on women’s rights was an inconceivable mission,
Miss Brodie was not afraid of publicly declaring her controversial attitudes concerning
global politics and economy, as well as the relationship between the sexes. She openly
called herself a European and perceived her home town of Edinburgh as a European
capital, the city of Hume and Boswell, unlike the majority of her female peers, self-
proclaimed enlightened women who followed the popular trend of joining the Scottish
National Movement. Unlike, on the one hand, “the committee spinsters” who were not of
rebellious nature, but “sober church-goers, and quiet workers”, and on the other, “the
school mistresses”, who were of a “more orderly type, earning their keep, living with
their aged parents” (Spark, 2000: 43), both of whom embody Snircova’s critical remark
that “woman can form her subjectivity only by adopting various subject positions in the
discourses that are patriarchal” (Snircova, 2012: 77), Miss Brodie was a daring precursor
of the feminist movement in patriarchal and conventional Scotland on the eve of World
War II, causing gender trouble both in her private and public sphere of existence: “but
those of Miss Brodie’s kind were great talkers and feminists and, like most feminists,
talked to men as man-to-man” (Spark, 2000: 43).

It is not surprising then that Miss Brodie is a fervent spokeswoman of those

problematic issues that her colleagues would generally find unsuitable for class
discussions: for instance, birth control as the only possible solution to the problems of the
working class or admiration for Mussolini’s economic strategies for cutting down the
level of unemployment. Being a teacher, she is directly in charge of creating the
supposedly new generations of freethinkers (which ultimately turned out to be a pure
manipulation, as previously discussed in the paper). This position gives her power that
was generally denied to the women in Scotland of the first half of the previous century,
so once she realizes this, Miss Brodie also becomes aware of a similar moral dilemma to
the one Shakespeare’s Hamlet experienced: to be or not to be, to suffer the injustice of
the dominant system of values or to oppose it (see Shakespeare, 2012: Act III, scene I). In
Spark’s vision of the Shakespearean story of suffering and resistance, this dualism boils
down to Miss Brodie’s options of the acceptance of the unjust and underprivileged status
of women in the traditional Scottish society or her refusal to take it for granted.
Ultimately, Miss Brodie makes the identical mistake that William Shakespeare portrayed
through the character of Hamlet five centuries ago: she opposes the unjust patriarchal
system by using its own tools and means of domination, and thus, inevitably,
contaminates herself. In other words, Miss Brodie completely “appropriates male
identity”, to borrow Butler’s phrase (1990), and surpasses the patriarchal authorities that
she seemingly opposes in her classroom power games. However, although she causes a
remarkable amount of “gender trouble” in this process, her option of resistance to the
masculine domination is highly questionable – it basically represents the repetition of an
identical pattern of destructive patriarchal dominance, with the sole difference that it is
created not by allegedly superior men, but by an intelligent woman in her prime.6

This is the basic reason why McWilliam perceives the Brodie set as “being limbs
of a body whose head is Miss Brodie, a body integrated by carefully regulated use of
power and cruelty, like a corps of Fascist or a state” (McWilliam, 2000: x). Although
each of the girls from the Brodie set is “famous” for something (Sandy Stranger for her
small eyes, through which we witness a considerable amount of the action of the novel
and gradually perceive the reasons for the ultimate, inevitable betrayal of her favourite
teacher, Monica Douglas for her mathematical skills and low anger management, Rose
Stanley for sex, Eunice Gardiner for gymnastics and swimming, Jenny Gray for wishing
to become an actress and Mary Macgregor for being a nobody everybody could blame),
they actually represent a skilful projection of Miss Brodie’s absurd designs about life.
She successfully manages to saturate the consciousness of her set the way she saturates
the life of the art teacher, Teddy Lloyd, whose portraits are, no matter whom they depict,
all of Miss Brodie.

4. From Innocence to Experience: The Prime of the Brodie Set?

6
In line with Althusser’s ideas, in his introduction to Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Greenblatt
claims that all subjects are ideologically determined: religion, education, law, the family are the institutions
that shape all individuals. Their subjectivities, including the artist’s, are constructed in accord with the
cultural codes that suppress and control them. Greenblatt openly criticizes the Western ideology of power,
but he also claims that neither the artist nor his work can go beyond it. According to him, the only way of
escape from cultural omnipotence is “the will to play” – to embrace the destructive practices of the
dominant culture (in Miss Brodie’s case – to appropriate the all-powerful male identity) and to glorify them
as a form of self-destructive, anarchical, subversive resistance to it (Greenblatt, 1980: 220). However, the
belief in the personal and social transformation, the belief in a more positive resistance than a mere self-
destructive play to any kind of repressive ideology is an idea that Spark ultimately perceives as not only
possible, but necessary in her novel. Spark’s Miss Brodie does not exemplify this creative resistance to
culture; on the contrary, she belongs to the group of characters that embody the worst tendencies of the
dominant ideology. However, the mere fact that Muriel Spark pointed to this problem and warned us about
the consequences of the overall failure to attend to it properly, testifies to her own, personal, creative
attempt of subversion of the prevalent system of values.
 The popular definitions of the Bildungsroman genre include the process of
growing up or reaching maturity of a young and inexperienced person, mostly
represented in terms of the potent conflict between the individual’s private aspirations
and the external conventions of society and its institutions, whereby a certain sort of
compromise is inevitably due to happen, ultimately resulting in the rebelling individual’s
more or less successful integration into the society, as Engel points out:

The Bildungsroman is inseparably linked to the idea of modern individuality and to

the awareness that the structures of modern society tend to threaten or even thwart
the development of a harmonious personality...It does imply an interaction, a
dialectic interplay between character and environment, individualisation and
socialisation; and therefore some sort of compromise or even synthesis between
mere self-realisation, subjectivity, and a mere adaptation to reality, objectivity.
Ideally, the Bildungsroman will end with the hero’s integration into society (Engel
2008: 266).
If we take into consideration this definition of the Bildungsroman and apply it to
our interpretation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a logical question arises: do the girls
who form the Brodie set manage to successfully integrate into the society? In other
words, will any of them have their “prime” and when?

By using a rather flexible flashing-forward writing technique, Spark, an omniscient

author, does inform us about the particularities of the girls comprising the Brodie set and
their life choices once they reach their maturity. Regretfully, it turns out that all of them
(with the arguable exception of Sandy) seem to have had their primes at school, while
being, as McWilliam notes, “limbs of a body whose head is Miss Brodie” (McWilliam,
2000: x).

Mary Macgregor, the one usually picked on for her clumsiness and stupidity, has
gone to be a shorthand typist. A year after the outbreak of the Second World War she
joined the Wrens, as Spark informs us, and there, as in the Marcia Blaine School for girls,
she was generally perceived to be incompetent and out of place, and much blamed. Only
one occasion from Mary’s rather uneventful life has been described in the book – when
her first and last boyfriend, a corporal she had known for two weeks, did not show up at
an appointed place and declined to see her again – in order to emphasize Mary’s
simplistic point of view that the first years of Miss Brodie’s teaching, sitting and listening
to her interesting stories that had “nothing to do with the ordinary world, had been the
happiest time of her life” (Spark, 2000: 15). Her premature death, at the age of twenty-
four, in a hotel fire, and the description of her desperate running back and forth through
the thickening smoke at the hotel, represents the author’s genuinely dismal comment on
the obscene manipulation and utter waste of a young life.

Although Miss Brodie certainly had a different life vision for her set of girls, one
that would to a point defy the prescribed moulds of the patriarchal ideology, Rose
Stanley, Jenny Gray, Monica Douglas and Eunice Gardiner did not step out from the
traditional patterns of the female role in the society. Furthermore, Spark informs us that
the four of them got married solidly, so that their initial affinities and talents eventually
vanished in the uniformed mass of the dominant system of values. Rose, utterly unaware
of her feminine charms and beauty and the powerful impact she had on men around her,
became a model for artists and dress designers and made a good marriage soon after she
finished school and, as Spark notices, “she shook off Miss Brodie’s influence as a dog
shakes pond-water from its coat” (Spark, 2000: 119). Jenny went to a school of dramatic
art, but could not manage to initiate her career as an actress; Monica, with her curious
analytical brain, destined for highly advanced science by her teacher, ultimately became
infamous for her anger fits in her marriage that was constantly on the verge of divorce;
Eunice eventually lost her interest in sports, married a professional man and become a
plain nurse. Thus, the prominent lack of an extraordinary and extravagant life style from
the Brodie set, typical of their pedagogical role model, serves as a good illustration of
Engel’s statement regarding young individuals’ final integration into the society on their
path to maturity as one of the characteristics of the Bildungsroman (2008: 266).

Another aspect of the coming-of-age story present in Engel’s definition is rather

conspicuous in Spark’s novel. Namely, Engel claims that “formation can but does not
have to be modeled on the idea of organic growth” (2008:266), which is in The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie illustrated through the fact that ultimately none of the girls manage to
realize their genuine potentials. Spark represents this fact most potently on the example
of Sandy Stranger. Unlike the other girls from the Brodie set, Sandy is the one who offers
resistance, not to the patriarchal system of values as instructed by her teacher, but to Miss
Brodie herself. Sandy subverts both Brodie’s and the readers’ expectations when she
rebels against the perilous influence of her teacher and ultimately betrays her fascist
tendencies to Miss Mackay. Quite surprisingly, Sandy converts to Roman Catholicism
and becomes a nun, thus willingly renouncing the secular advantages of “the deep
psychological insight” (Spark, 2000: 106) that Miss Brodie highly appreciates in her.

Furthermore, it seems that Sandy is not guilt-ridden at all about the act of betrayal,
but rather wistfully regretful, since her perception of Miss Brodie was not based on her
teacher’s alleged wickedness, but on her dangerous innocence. Thus, in a conversation
with Jenny during her visit to the convent, Sandy dubiously admits that Miss Brodie was
“quite innocent in her way” (Spark, 2000: 96), which potently evokes the dominant
image Frank Kermode noticed in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, that of “the justified
Miss Brodie presiding calmly over a lost innocence” (Kermode, 1968: 206). As a young
girl, Sandy develops an interest in the puzzling psychology of her teacher that never
abates. On her path to maturity, her strange and persistent fascination with Miss Brodie
becomes gradually replaced with the feeling of utmost moral obligation towards the other
girls that Miss Brodie would gradually influence, ultimately corrupt and severely
damage.

Thus Sandy willingly plays the role of Miss Brodie’s confidante in the bizarre affair
of an attempted seduction of the art master Teddy Lloyd by his model from the Brodie
set, Rose Stanley, who shared her teacher’s secret desires to find a proper way to
accomplish and materialize their forbidden love, at least through an unsuspicious
mediator close to both of them. However, being totally fascinated with the exceptional
way Miss Brodie’s mind functions, as well as Lloyd’s desperate life-long infatuation with
her tutor, Sandy shows her complex intelligence and cunning capability to rebel against
Miss Brodie by ultimately becoming her art teacher’s lover. It is precisely here that we
can apply Engel’s concept of formation that can but does not need to be modelled on the
idea of organic growth (2008: 266). Although Sandy’s conduct is presumably governed
by ethical principles, the moral growth of her character is rather difficult to be perceived
in the novel. The mere fact that she becomes a nun and thus integrates into the society
according to certain approved communal standards still does not make her free from Miss
Brodie’s influence (quite the opposite, in fact, because Sandy chooses the religion that
Miss Brodie finds most constrictive and limiting, thus unconvincingly illustrating the
alleged sharp difference in life visions between her role model and herself). Instead of
adopting the stance of a true devout Catholic who would feel remorse and guilt for the act
of betrayal and would finally confess her sins, Sandy subconsciously considers herself to
be a justified sinner, in the manner of her deeply repudiated pedagogical idol, and adopts
Miss Brodie’s egotistical and double-standard attitudes by feeling the supposed moral
obligation to betray her and remove her from school. Therefore, although throughout her
mature life Sandy fervently tries to get rid of Miss Brodie’s influence, Spark potently
demonstrates that she utterly fails in these attempts. This fact is ultimately acknowledged
in the very last sentence of the novel, in Sandy’s sincere confession about the sole role
model that shaped her personality: “There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime” (Spark,
2000: 128).

5. Concluding Remarks

Concerning the issue of female development towards maturity, the focus of

attention in this novel of the Bildungsroman genre is unsurprisingly placed on Miss
Brodie herself, and not on her pupils whom the readers literally follow through their
paths from childhood to maturity. The only exception among the Brodie girls is Sandy,
who is guilty of betraying her first role model’s fascist tendencies to Althusser’s good
subjects (the headmistress, to be precise) and manages to conceal this fact from Miss
Brodie, thus sentencing her teacher to a life filled with doubts, suspicions and
uncertainties about the identity of the ungrateful traitor. However, if we apply the
theoretical framework provided by Alice Miller to Sandy’s example, particularly her idea
that the person who has never developed an authentic self can easily transfer her/his
idealization of parents/teachers to a new authority figure (Miller, 2009: 1), then we
discover that in spite of the young girl’s initial idea to break free from the repressive
authority of her teacher, she basically transfers her loyalty, obedience and service to
another dominant authority figure (that of the Virgin Mary by unexpectedly becoming a
nun, Sister Helena of Transfiguration). Although the new authority figure (the Virgin
Mary or the Catholic Church itself) is conspicuously different from the old one, it
represents the law-abiding authority nevertheless: “By now she had entered the Catholic
Church, in whose ranks she had found quite a number of Fascists, much less agreeable
than Miss Brodie” (Spark, 200: 125). Furthermore, Sandy Stranger’s ecclesiastical name,
Sister Helena of Transfiguration, contains a powerful ironical touch in itself: she is
definitely not transfigured or altered in any way whatsoever, she still remains a stranger
to herself as her secular surname revealingly suggests. Thus, Miller’s idea about the
repetition of identical destructive rearing patterns becomes rather conspicuous in Sandy’s
impossibility to finally escape from the inferior position in the relationship of dominance
since she was trained (schooled!) in this way from her earliest childhood.

On the other hand, it is quite evident that Miss Brodie does not experience any
sort of personal transformation, let alone admits the existence of mistakes in her vision of
the schooling process. The moment closest to an elusive hint at personal change is when
she confides in Sandy after the war saying that “Hitler was rather naughty” (Spark, 2000:
122) by the end of the novel. However, this attempt at revealing the truth about her
favourite political leader is soon disguised by her unconvincing small talk. Unfortunately,
till the end of her life, Miss Brodie is dedicated to the rather insignificant quest of finding
out the girl who betrayed her, instead of focusing on the proper reasons for, or, better to
say, symptoms of the rebellious betrayal.

Sona Snircova claims that “the twentieth-century developments of the female

Bildungsroman have brought … new types of heroines whose self-realization could be
searched for in ways unthinkable for their eighteenth-century predecessors (equal access
to formal education, active involvement in the public world of work and politics,
exploration of female sexuality)…” (Snircova, 2013: 113). In a sense, Spark’s Miss
Brodie represents a perfect embodiment of the twentieth-century female Bildungsroman
heroine. However, her integration into the society has been interpreted here as rather
flawed, since, in her opposition to the dominant system of values, she does not hesitate to
sacrifice her inexperienced disciples’ childish aspirations, or “authentic selves”, as Miller
would say (2009:1), thus ultimately reinforcing the power of the patriarchal ideology she
unilaterally claims to resist. This is exactly the point from which a new variant of female
Bildungsroman should originate: bearing in mind Miller’s, Althusser’s and Butler’s
valuable insights, the future female heroines should be devoted to the quest of reaching
for their authentic selves, avoiding the purposefully, socially constructed traps of the
colonization of the mind and appropriation of male identity.

Works Cited:

Althusser, Louis.  “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”. Lenin and Philosophy

and other Essays. London: Verso Press. pp. 121–176, 2001.

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex’’. New York:
Routledge, 1993.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge, 1990.

Golding, William. “On the Crest of the Wave”. The Hot Gates. London: Faber and Faber,
1974.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Engel, Manfred. “Variants of the Romantic “Bildungsroman” (with a short note on the
“artist novel”)”. Romantic Prose Fiction. Gerald Ernest Paul Gillespie, Manfred Engel,
Bernard Dieterle (Eds.). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company,
263-295, 2008.

Kermode, Frank. Continuities. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968.

Machiavelli, Niccollo. “The Prince” in Three Renaissance Classics. (Burton A. Milligan,

ed.). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953.

McWilliam, Candia. Introduction to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. London: Penguin
Books Ltd., 2000.

Miller, Alice. For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of
Violence. New York: Farrar-Strauss-Giroux, Fourth Edition 2002.

Miller, Alice. Concerning Forgiveness: The Liberating Experience of Painful Truth.

(2009). http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2009/03/alice-miller-
poisonous-pedagogy.html, retrieved in June 2014.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2012.

Snircova, Sona. Feminist Aspects of Angela Carter’s Grotesque. Košice: Pavol Jozef
Šafárik University in Košice, 2012.

Snircova, Sona. “Coming of Age in Jane Gardam’s Bilgewater and Helen Walsh’s
Brass”. In Gender in Literature. (Nieves Pascual Soler and Jan Gbur, eds.). Košice: Pavol
Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, 2013.

Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2000.