Politics, not sex and drugs, will bring her down, unlike most male narcissists, who get away with both fascism and unconventional sex. Politics, a mere side interest, will be her downfall, and her Judas will differ from the traditional one in the fact that she does not really feel guilt - one can only betray where loyalty is due, she thinks, and once you look underneath the shiny surface, all narcissists - even those in their prime - look ridiculous.Īs stories go, this one sparkles just as much as a glass of vintage champagne.įor the record, though: don't try to achieve Miss Brodie's downfall by checking her drinking habits, she barely shares a half-bottle of sherry with her set of six girls on her birthday. She sneaks into the portraits of one man while taking possession of the eating and sleeping habits of another, but it won't be possible for the desperate Headmistress to get rid of her relying on a sex scandal. Give her a girl at an impressionable age, and she will form out of that malleable clay the kind of portrait her heroes Mussolini and Hitler would have burned.
She is a Natural Fascist in the 1930s, a Scottish schoolmistress by trade but a girl shaper by profession. She is both modern and traditional, radical and conservative, openminded and protectionist. Miss Brodie's prime is as strange a phenomenon as they come. The narrative then jumps forward to 1959 and then returns to 1931. She then returns to 1939 and then back to 1931.
And that is a strange truth indeed considering the amount of strange things Muriel Spark manages to fit into her slim fiction. In The prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the narrator begins in 1936 but soon jumps back to 1930, and then forward again to 1943, the year of Mary Macgregor’s death.
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