“Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life. ” This line is told early in the book of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. One may not truly understand the importance of this one line until the book is complete. How can one person change and mold a group of girls alone? Is it brain washing? Or is it something much more dangerous? Miss Jean Brodie was an educator, someone that was in a profession to be trusted and help children gain knowledge and grow into individuals who could make a difference in the world. However, Miss Jean Brodie was a different type of teacher.
She was eccentric and viewed education not as a doctrine to teach someone what they did not know; instead it was to pull out what they already knew. This method was a very different way of teaching. It was a different way of thinking; however it was what made Miss Jean Brodie very different. Did that mean she could take a child at 10 years old and mold them for life even though she would only be there teacher for two years? This paper will demonstrate how Calvinism and fascism influenced Miss Jean Brodie which allowed her to create her Brodie set which consisted of 6 girls all of the age of ten.
Miss Jean Brodie according to one of the girls, Sandy, believed that she was the God of Calvinism. The system of Calvinism states that God is able and willing by virtue of his omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence to do whatever he desires with his creation”. (Slick,). Miss Jean Brodie believed that she could mold these girls into her liking and create them to be whatever she wanted. In her mind she created these six girls and they would become what she wanted them to be.
She would tell the girls what they would be and how they would ehave as they got older and in some ways convinced herself and the girls that this image was true. One example of this is that she tells Rose who is only eleven at the time that she would be famous for sex. Rose becomes famous for sex but not because that is what her calling should have been, instead because that is the calling Miss Brodie set for her. Miss Jean Brodie created a sense of loyalty but also leadership in a very fascist way. She was very much infatuated with the life of Mussolini and she often brags about him being one of the vrags about him being one of the greatest men in the world.
She admires the way he has troops that follow him and listen to his every command. When Miss Jean Brodie takes her girls on outings she tries to immolate this fascisti. She makes them walk with their heads held high. She teaches them in a way that she wants them to learn. She makes them behave the way she wants them to behave. Each of the six girls in some sense loses their individuality and become one with Miss Brodie. Early on one can see that Miss Brodie does not believe in traditional education and argues that what is taught by others at this school is not the correct way to teach.
The young ladies that she is teaching are in awe of her defiance and are eager to learn under her methods. However, this also creates a sense of loyalty and trust between Miss Brodie and her Brodie girls as they can never tell others of her creative teaching methods. A bond is formed. Once this bond is formed and Miss Brodie feels satisfied that she has gained the trust and protection from the girls she continues to control and manipulate them. This type of control can been seen by authoritarian leaders much like in the Fascist community.
Miss Brodie begins to abuse her power when she plots to have Rose Stanley have an affair with the art teacher, Mr. Lloyd, who Miss Brodie herself is in love with and him as well with her. However, Mr. Lloyd is married and Miss Brodie refuses to have an affair with a married man, instead she sets one of her students up with him so she can fantasize about the romance. Mr. Lloyd spends years painting portraits of this young girl, Rose, but all the portraits come back looking like Miss Brodie.
Miss. Brodie sets it up so that Sandy becomes the informant telling Miss Brodie all of the stories of Rose and Mr. Lloyd which really ends up being nothing. However, Sandy realizes this set up and later instead of pushing Rose to have the affair she has it instead. These two girls were set up by Miss Brodie to take part in such sinful acts just so that she could live out a fantasy through the girls. Another role that Miss Jean Brodie plays in that proves to be sinful and very authoritarian is that she convinces one of the girls, Joyce, to go fight in the Spanish Civil War.
Joyce, wanting to be obedient to Miss Brodie leaves to go off to war and was later found killed. Miss Brodie never takes any blame for the actions that these girls partake in to please her. Miss Brodie had such romantic notions towards the fascist movement that she wanted to behave as such. Yet, she never realized the damage or horror that these leaders inflicted on others. Instead she felt it was perfectly fine to manipulate others to get your way and also control them. Miss Brodie’s abuse of her power created confusion and turmoil on these young girls’ lives.
Their lives centered on Miss Brodie and what she wanted and needed and regardless of how hard they tried to walk away they could not. They would always be pulled back in. Towards the end of the book the reader can see that Sandy, who had been bullied and controlled by Miss Brodie for years, had enough. When she realized that Miss Brodie was the one that influenced Joyce to go fight in the war she had decided she had protected this women long enough and she had to be stopped. Sandy was Ms. Brodie’s favorite and would never have expected her to turn on her, however she did.
She went to the headmistress of the school who had been trying to get rid of Miss Brodie for years and explained to her she was a fascist. This was all the information that was needed to have her fired, and she was. Sandy explains to Miss Brodie that she was only betrayed by one of her girls because of the betrayal from her to them by setting them up to be puppets in her fantasy. In fact in a letter that Sandy wrote to Miss Brodie she states, “If you did not betray us it is impossible that you could have been betrayed by us” (Page 136).
Sandy had realized long ago of the control and manipulation. The game was over and she would make sure that the leader lost so that in some way the rest of the Brodie set could move on. However, could they really even move on after being controlled and manipulated for so many years? At the end of the book Sandy, who is now a nun and gets visits from people who need advice asks her, “what are the main influences of your school days? Were they literary, or political, or personal? Was it Calvinism? ” Sandy’s answer, “There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime” (page 137).