<doc.id=0219.b4>
<title> THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark </title>
"Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life..." (p.9 in the Penguin edition). This is one of the most important quotations from the novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and I will try to explain why it is so important. My aims are also to summarize the text, to find the themes of the book and also to try to evaluate it and point out strengths and weaknesses of it.

Miss Jean Brodie, who according to herself is a woman in her prime, is teaching a group of six "special" girls at the Marcia Blaine School in Edinburgh in the 1930's. These girls are all famous for something - Monica for mathematics, Eunice for gymnastics, Rose for sex, Sandy for her vowels, Jenny for being the prettiest and for her pronunciation and Mary for being a nobody. Miss Brodie teaches her students everything she knows except the subjects in the authorized curriculum. This pedagogy results in that the girls know a lot about the Italian Renaissance painters, the advantages to the skin of cleansing cream, the love lives of Charlotte Brontė and Miss Brodie herself and nothing about maths, history and other essential subjects. At one point she also uses her students, when the man she loves, Mr Lloyd (the Art teacher), turns out to be married, she sends her students to visit him and to spy on him. Miss Brodie's pedagogy is of course not liked by the school board and they try to dismiss her several times, but they cannot prove that she is using unconventional teaching methods. "If anyone comes along in the course of the following lesson, remember that it is the hour for English grammar..." (p. 12). Each lesson Miss Brodie tells her students to look in their books so that it looks as though they are having a real lesson, when they are really taught about some of Miss Brodie's lovers. At the end though one of her students, Sandy, does not like her methods any longer and understands that children should be taught something more relevant than about some lady's love life, so she helps the board to find proof against her and she is finally dismissed.

I think that that is the main theme in this novel and precisely what Muriel Sparks is trying to teach us too that one should criticise one's education and think about the big part that teachers play in the lives of their students. The opinion of the teacher is many times more important than the parents' and often children do not understand that all that the teacher says is not true, which is very dangerous when a teacher like Miss Brodie whose idols are Hitler and Mussolini comes along. Miss Brodie manipulates her students and teaches them whatever she wants and that is why the sentence at the very beginning is so important for this theme. I believe that the structure as well as the tone and characterization in the book are very important for this theme. The structure is relevant, because we know at an early stage that Sandy will betray Miss Brodie later, but on the last page we learn that she was as influenced by Miss Brodie, as the other girls. "'What were your main influences of your school days...?' Sandy said: 'There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime'" (p.128). 

The tone is significant for this theme, because throughout the novel Miss Brodie is pictured as a beautiful gracious lady in her prime, but by interpreting the tone that Spark uses one understands that it is not Spark's intention at all to glorify Miss Brodie. We can know that, because when reading the book we or at least I do not like Miss Brodie very much, because she is manipulating her students and teaching them about her own interests. My opinion is that it is also the tone of irony in the book that makes us dislike Miss Brodie.

There is also irony in the characterization of the persons in the book. "Sandy looked at it with her tiny eyes which it was astonishing that anyone could trust" (p.100). Sandy is for example very often described as being an unreliable person, which makes her the "Judas" of the group, who betrays her "Jesus" (Miss Brodie). She could also be interpreted as the saviour herself, because through her "betrayal" she saves all the innocent girls, who otherwise would have been put in Miss Brodie's "special" class 

As I am going to be a teacher myself I learnt a great lesson by reading this book, because it really shows how important it is not to teach too much of one's own opinions. I think that that is one of the most important strengths of this novel that it has such an important message to it's the readers. Sometimes though I got the feeling that there should have been more information about certain events and characters. For example we do not get very much information about Miss Brodie's love affairs with the different teachers and how that all began. Suddenly she is just Mr Lowther's(the music teacher) girlfriend and we do not really know how or why that happened.

I have given a short summary of the text, found a main theme about the important role of the teacher and finally I have also evaluated the book. My conclusion is that even if the story has weaknesses, but mostly strengths, it teaches us a lot about teaching, if we do not interpret it wrongly thinking that it is a book about how one should teach.
</doc>