‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ and The Assimilation of the Traditional Body

By Darcy McBrinn

Published in 1961 and spanning the interwar period, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie follows the titular eccentric educator, her penchant for fascism and her complete universality amongst the lives of her handpicked protégés, the self-styled Brodie set. Judy Suh has written on how Brodie’s “class content emphasizes the cultivation of aesthetic taste”, it is in this synthesise of aesthetics and fascist ideology that her tutelage lingers. One particular area of Brodie’s fascination is upon the traditional body, her sculptural ‘Roman profile’ – carrying its own fascistic connotations – being a recurrent image of her so-called ‘prime’. Julie Gottlieb has discussed this fusion of the fascistic and bodily, defining ‘body fascism’ in the common zeitgeist as “an infatuation with the body beautiful at the expense of substance […] and slavishness to style to the detriment of intellect and spiritual self-awareness”. She goes on to suggest that “To be a ‘body fascist’ is to be a man or woman pre-occupied with outward appearance and aesthetic self-perfection”, and within the artistic iconography of the novel, is where Brodie’s all-consuming body fascism manifests.

Before delving specifically into the artistic, it is Brodie’s sense of ‘prime’ that characterises her subsuming relationship with the bodily and fascistic. Her vaunted prime stands largely undefined by the teacher, yet remains titularly key and narratively omnipresent, seemingly distilled purely within Brodie herself and that which she anoints. Patrick J. Whiteley has commented on Brodie’s prime specifically as “a condition which sets her apart from others […] By virtue of being in her prime [..] she is the exclusive agent of the powers that she wields, the only one who can impart the knowledge that she holds”. Whiteley’s language is one of deep internality and exclusivity, despite Brodie’s incessant commentary on the hypothetical primes of others, it is only within Brodie that a ‘prime’ can be found. Thus, this prime begins to take on a meaning of Brodie’s very selfhood, her ipseity, her own sense of individualism. “Brodie’s preoccupation with self holds centre stage”, Judy Sproxton has commented, and it is this centrality of selfhood that drives Brodie’s artistic and fascistic presence throughout the text. 

With that in mind, it is within the field of pictorial art that this phenomenon is most apparent, Brodie’s self-proclaimed “passion”, with the first artwork encountered in the text being the “Mona Lisa in her prime” upon Brodie’s classroom wall. Da Vinci’s piece and Brodie have become eponymously linked, the portrait being imbued with this sense of Brodie’s selfhood, and it is within this selfhood that she bestows it value, instructing that her class “must learn to cultivate an expression of composure” through this Mona Lisan exemplar. Such an explicit infusion of Brodian self into the Mona Lisa is initially surprising given her earlier comic dismissal of its painter – Brodie asks, “Who is the greatest Italian painter?”, and in response to Leonardo da Vinci Brodie states “That is incorrect. The answer is Giotto, he is my favourite” – but it is in the artwork’s status as a “reproduction” that its value becomes realised to Brodie. Unoriginal and reproduced, it is her replication that has infused her primed selfhood within, whilst divorcing it from da Vinci’s own. As Gerard Carruthers has suggested, “Brodie utilizes the word "prime" to describe her abstract state of maturity and so performs the same act of transmutation”, her concept of prime becomes an instrument of fascistic bodily reconstruction. Through this parasitic self-duplication Brodie has amalgamated the art into Brodie, only now carrying her own ‘prime’ and thus is imperatively used to further morph onto her students. 

Beyond simply this false Mona Lisa, artistic reproductions and Brodie photography line the walls of her classroom. Having returned from her Italian holiday, Brodie produces her mementos to the class, “I have brought back a great many pictures […] Here is a Cimabue. Here is a larger formation of Mussolini’s fascisti”. In this whiplashing juxtaposition, the themes of art and fascism are directly placed together by Brodie herself, as if the figures of Cimabue, Giotto, and da Vinci are themselves forming Brodie’s own decorative fascisti, coopted and morphed into her prime just as the Mona Lisa was. The scope of this collection is emphasised through her comment that the Blackshirt image “is a better view of them than that of last year’s picture”. Here lies a cyclical and continuous nature to Brodie’s replication process, and even within the pictures she collects there are duplications, as with the Blackshirts. There is a definite scale and ubiquity to Brodie’s amalgamation of these artistic and photographic bodies, and a clear, active process of consuming her environment within it. 

The third key episode concerning art materialises through the school art master, Teddy Lloyd. During his supplementary lesson with Brodie’s class, “Lloyd showed his pictures from an exhibition of Italian art”, the possessive pronoun ‘his’ gesturing towards a similar process of personal artistic reproduction as Brodie partakes in. Her affinity for ‘Italian art’ is seemingly also reproduced in Lloyd. Of his lecture, “[Lloyd] said nothing of what the pictures represented, only followed each curve and line as the artist had left it off”, described as a “methodical tracing of lines”. The artistic terminology in ‘tracing’ further evokes images of copying and reproducing, carrying with it an insinuation of Lloyd’s own lack of creativity. Further, it stresses a clinical disregard for the very artistic analysis of art, surgically approaching art as a subject to dissect and define, a means to an end. The narrator dubs the scene “his demonstration of artistic form”, the artistic terminology of ‘form’ here also emphasises the futility of Lloyd’s approach. Conjuring bodily characteristics of shape, it becomes an exercise purely in the aesthetics of bodily art. In this initial characterisation, Lloyd begins to be defined as a Brodian figure, their aestheticising and objectivising approach to art is in alignment, “We have everything in common, the artistic nature”, she even later says of the art master.

Thus, the motif of Brodian replication permeates throughout the novel, as Brodie’s prime and visage fascistically metastasises through all art within her orbit, most notably in that Llyod’s own original artistry. Unlike the Mona Lisa, whose new body merely carries the idealised countenance of the educator, the bodily supplantation by Brodie within Lloyd’s artwork is in its totality – and rather than being retroactively duplicated onto historical subjects, it is bleeding into contemporary figures, her Brodie set. Upon seeing the Brodie set’s portraiture, Sandy, alongside the narrator, perpetually stress their ‘resemblance’ to Brodie, with the specific phrase “like Miss Brodie” dominating the chapter. The repetition of this simile exposes the portraits’ synonymity with Brodie, any sense of other equivocations is lost. This collectivising of the subject has been deconstructed by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, “Fascism’s totalitarian goal of creating a world anew relied on the power of collective representations to colonize the fascist subject through a totalitarian intrusion into the body politic”, whilst interpersonally detached from Brodie, Lloyd’s artwork succeeds in strengthening her fascistic infection into the bodies of her set, real and imagined. The body of Brodie is absolute within Lloyd’s art, with “canvas after canvas” replicating her, the very same language of clinical reproduction used, “Teddy Lloyd continued reproducing Jean Brodie”, to such an extent that the bodily representations of his family begin moulding around Brodie too, “all his portraits, even that of the littlest Lloyd baby, were now turning out to be likeness of Miss Brodie”. 

This effect becomes multitudinal when compounded across the whole set, within their group painting “wearing their panama hats each in a different way, each hat adorning, in a magical transfiguration, a different Jean Brodie under the forms of Rose, Sandy Jenny, Mary, Monica, and Eunice”. Here the established similative relationship is twisted, no longer do the subjects resemble Brodie, but now it is Brodie’s form that in part resembles the respective girl. Artistically, her prime has supplanted them and homogenised each of their individualities into her sole collective body, as Benilde Montgomery has suggested, Lloyd’s “transfiguring art captures both the realistic likeness of the Brodie girls and at the same time the face of Jean Brodie, that absent presence beneath and beyond them that makes them one”. This sense of bodily oneness under Brodie is highlighted by Sandy herself, saying of the group painting, "We'd look like one big Miss Brodie". The simplistic language is plain and direct. Evoking their fusion into some offensive chimeric entity, the art has surreally and wholly eroded the set’s sense of individualism. Phenomenologically, for Lloyd and the Brodie set, their bodily reality is of Brodie, whether tangible or otherwise. Lloyd’s work “leads to fascism”, Bryan Cheyette has written, “which is an extreme account of a single body with the head of a redemptive leader”. Lloyd’s art serves as an agent of Brodie’s prime. 

But ultimately this composite form of Brodie and set is not confined to portraiture, “Sandy looked back at her companions, and she understood them as a body with Miss Brodie for the head. She perceived herself, the absent Jenny, the ever-blamed Mary, Rose, Eunice and Monica […] in unified compliance to the destiny of Miss Brodie”. “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”, Oscar Wilde has penned, and consequentially this conceptualised existence of the Brodie set’s fascistic and artistic construction has spilt and spread beyond the canvas into the realm of the physical. The same motif of listing the Brodie set’s name, only to be usurped by Brodie’s own structural syntactic significance, as in their group artwork, is echoed here. So too is the very same Brodian oneness that grew to define Lloyd’s artwork. Falasca-Zamponi has gone on to assert that a key aspect of fascist realisation “depended on the totalitarian erasure of individual voices”, as seen throughout Llyod’s art studio. The result of which is “the transformation of the individual into an object of creation for the artist-politician”. Here, Lloyd assumes the role of ‘artist’, Brodie of ‘politician’, fused – naturally under Brodie – into the collectivist ‘artist-politician’, transmuter of tangible and conceptual bodies alike, realised in the world beyond the artistically phenomenological. 

Also present within Sandy’s elucidation is the militarised language used to characterise Brodie’s relationship with her composite reproduction, of ‘unified compliance’. Just as the fascisti adorn Brodie’s galleried classroom walls, so too do they appear to occupy her classroom chairs, as Sandy also has the realisation “that the Brodie set was Miss Brodie’s fascisti”. In line with Brodie’s commands, the ‘expression of composure’ has been cultivated within their nature, the aestheticised fascisti have been made manifest. Their artistic genesis is woven into this paramilitaristic appropriation of the set, with Sandy going onto suggest that as fascisti they are “all knit together for [Brodie’s] need”. It is a metaphor of art that defines their status as fascisti and corresponding relationship with Brodie, one that highlights their amalgam condition as the artistic bodily sphere is fully transgressed and absorbed within the realm of corporeal physicality.

To close, within his evaluation of liberalism, John Dunne posited that “To be individual is to be distinctive”, and it is through the manifestation of her prime and Gottlieb’s initial conceptualisation of body fascism that Brodie both denigrates this distinction of individuality in others – namely her set – whilst uplifting her own as leader. She collectively subsumes under her enveloping sense of selfhood, and in the process realises the fascist goal of the “rejection of the […] individualistic”. Brodie, by both passive influence and active intrusion, actualises this process through the artistic, as the bodies of both the imaginative and empirical begin to phenomenologically exchange between one another, until the traditional bodies of all become a unified form of Jean Brodie in her prime.