The heyday of Miss Jean Brodie

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The heyday of Miss Jean Brodie or The Teacher (original title: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ) is a novel by the British writer Muriel Spark , which was initially published in 1960 in New Yorkhas been published. Spark was the first British author to have the prestigious magazine devoted an entire issue. The publication in the USA led to widespread public awareness there, after previously having had few readers in that country. The novel was published in Great Britain on October 14, 1961, without initially benefiting from its success in the USA. However, the short novel ultimately represented the breakthrough as an author for Muriel Spark. She herself described the novel, which found a wide reading audience, especially after the 1969 film adaptation with Maggie Smith in the lead role, as her "dairy cow" because of its role as a reliable source of income .

The non-chronological novel, set in Edinburgh in the 1930s and whose protagonist is the eccentric, fascist- inclined teacher Miss Brodie, is Spark's best-known work and is considered a 20th century classic. Time included the novel in its list of the Top One Hundred English-Language Novels Since 1923 . In 2015, 82 international literary critics and scholars voted the novel one of the most important British novels . The German translation of the novel by Peter Naujack was first published in 1962 under the title Die Lehrerin by Diogenes Verlag in Zurich .

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Six ten-year-old students at the Marcia Blaine Girls' School, namely Sandy, Rose, Mary, Jenny, Monica and Eunice, are described by their teacher Miss Jean Brodie as the elite of their students. Brodie is determined to give them an education that will lead them out in the original sense of the word "educere" and thus prepare them for life. The emphasis is on leadership, because one of Miss Brody's idols is Benito Mussolini . She tells the girls about their personal love life and their travels and teaches them art history, the history of antiquity and fascism. The six students are increasingly separating themselves from the rest of the school and are referred to as the Brodie troupe. However, in one of the fade-ins of the novel, the reader learns that one of them will one day betray Brodie and end her teaching career. However, Jean Brodie will never know who this was.

In the following school year, the girls, Gordon Lowther, received the handsome, one-armed war veteran Teddy Lloyd, a married Catholic with six children, as a singing teacher and an art teacher. Both teachers are drawn to Jean Brodie, but she only shows feelings for Teddy Lloyd. However, there is only one kiss between Jean Brodie and Teddy Lloyd, which Monica happens to observe. During a two-week absence from school, Jean Brodie begins an affair with Gordon Lowther on the grounds that a bachelor would make a more respectable lover. During this period, a man exposes himself to Jenny. The police investigation into the incident leads Sandy to see himself as part of a fictional police force seeking incriminating evidence of Brodie's and Lowther's relationship.

The girls are transferred to secondary school together at around the age of twelve. Jean Brodie stays in contact with them and invites them to his home, just like before. The school principal Miss Mackay tries to break up the group and get incriminating information about Jean Brodie from them in order to be able to release them. On several occasions, Miss Mackay has unsuccessfully suggested to Jean Brodie to apply to a more progressive school.

When two teachers, the Kerr sisters, start looking after Mr. Lowthers household together, Brodie tries to outdo them with her extravagant kitchen. The girls now visit them in twos at Gordon Lowther's house, where Brodie frequently questions them about Teddy Lloyd in his presence. They say that Lloyd occasionally makes them sit as a model, but that the faces in his paintings always resemble Miss Brodie's face. Even Lloyd, however, cannot escape the girls' charm and one day kisses Sandy.

Before the girls of the Brodie troupe turn sixteen, Jean Brodie decides to test their loyalty; Sandy passes this test. Miss Brodie also plots to get Rose to have an affair with Teddy Lloyd. She neglects Gordon Lowther, who eventually marries Miss Lockhart, the science teacher. Another student, Joyce Emily, who tries unsuccessfully to join the group, nevertheless finds access to Jean Brodie, who advises her to run away from home and fight on the side of the nationalists in the Spanish Civil War . She dies when the train she is traveling on is attacked.

The girls of the Brodie troupe, who are now all seventeen years old, are in their final year of school and each start to go their own way. Mary and Jenny leave school before their final exams. Mary becomes a typist and Jenny becomes an actress. Eunice begins training as a nurse and Monica becomes a scientist. Rose is getting married.

Sandy is increasingly fascinated by Teddy Lloyd's tenacious love and religiosity; she sees through the scheming pressure on the naive Rose and at the age of 18 begins a relationship with Lloyd that lasts for five weeks in the summer. But then she loses interest in this man, who still feels a lot for Jean Brodie; she leaves him, converts to Catholicism and becomes a nun. In order to drive Jean Brodie from the school, she informs the headmistress about their tendency towards fascism. The plan succeeds, and until her death a year after the end of the Second World War, Jean Brodie had no idea which of her students had betrayed her.

As a nun, Sandy publishes a widely acclaimed psychological treatise on the nature of moral knowledge and advocates the belief that cheating is only possible where loyalty is owed. When a young man visits her in the monastery and wants to know how she was able to write such a work, she explains this with the influence of Jean Brody in her heyday.

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Jean Brodie : At the end of the novel, Sandy Stranger describes her as a born fascist. During the time she was working as a teacher, fascism gained increasing influence in Europe. Brodie, whose only true love allegedly fell in World War I, is an admirer of Benito Mussolini and she repeatedly highlights him as an admirable personality among her class. She travels to Italy several times and returns enthusiastically because she believes that she has experienced Utopia . With the rise of Adolf Hitler, Germany becomes their travel destination. Hitler's brown shirts are, in their opinion, more reliable than Mussolini's black shirts. When Sandy meets with Jean Brodie after the end of the Second World War, Brodie simply describes Hitler as naughty (in the original: Hitler was rather naughty ). Brody's susceptibility to fascist ideas leads to the death of Joyce Emily, who, encouraged by Brodie, travels to Spain to fight in the civil war. In his biography of Muriel Spark, Martin Stannard describes Jean Brodie as a fool who, through egomaniacal irresponsibility, forces her unrealized fantasies on her students.

Sandy Stranger : The girl, described as physically unattractive, belongs to the Brodie troupe and becomes Jean Brody's confidante in the course of the plot. At the same time, however, she is the one who arranged for Jean Brodie's dismissal in 1939 because she came to the conclusion that a person like Jean Brodie should be limited. Sandy Stranger converted to Catholicism at the end of the novel and lives as a nun in a convent. Martin Standard also points out that the surname is very appropriate, as Sandy is in many ways alienated from her surroundings and in this respect resembles her creator Sparks.

Rose Stanley : Jean Brodie values ​​Rose as an attractive blonde. Although not entirely true, Rose is said to have had an active sexual life among the girls in the Brodie troupe. When Teddy Lloyd asks her to model him, however, it quickly becomes clear that he has no sexual interest in her. For him she is just a patient model. Sandy and Rose are the two girls for whom Jean Brodie has the most hopes that they will one day be crème de la crème . Unlike Sandy, however, Rose is able to break free of Brody's influence quickly after finishing school. She shakes Brodie off like a "dog shaking water from its fur."

Mary Macgregor : The mentally clumsy Mary is Brody's scapegoat and whipping boy, who calmly takes the blame for everything that goes wrong. She dies in a hotel fire at the age of 23 because she cannot find the exit.

Miss Mackay : The principal's job is to find a reason to fire Miss Jean Brodie. From her point of view, it is Brody's fault that the girls she influences do not fit into the spirit of the school.

Miss Lockhart : The chemistry teacher who supposedly has enough resources to blow up the whole school.

Miss Gaunt : The teacher whose skirts look like they're made of horse blankets.

Adaptations

Based on the novel, Jay Presson Allen wrote a play that was performed in London in 1966 with Vanessa Redgrave in the lead role. It premiered on Broadway in 1968, starring Zoe Caldwell , who won a Tony Award for it. In 1969 the novel by Ronald Neame was made into a film under the title Miss Jean Brodie's prime with Maggie Smith in the lead role. Smith received an Oscar for it. In 1978 a seven-part television series was shot with Geraldine McEwan in the lead role.

Trivia

  • The Marcia Blaine School is based on Edinburgh's James Gillespie's School for Girls, where the young Muriel Sparks herself attended school in the early 1930s.
  • The model for the protagonist Jean Brodie was Spark's teacher Christina Kay, who taught her for two years. Spark later wrote of this teacher that she and her classmates remembered this teacher so clearly because of the drama and poetry that hung over everything that happened in the classroom. Miss Kay, like Jean Brodie, put up pictures of Renaissance paintings in the classroom next to posters showing marching Italian black shirts .
  • Sandy, who takes care of the release of Jean Brodie before entering the convent, is called Stranger. It is Muriel Spark's hidden reminiscence of the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus , whose most famous novel is The Stranger .
  • The novel made Muriel Spark a great figure in the Scottish literary world. The memories of the literary critic John Sutherland give an impression of this: There was hardly a dinner party in Edinburgh in the 1970s at which one did not talk to others about particularly successful passages of the novel, scenes from the theater performance with Vanessa Redgrave or the film with Maggie Smith exchanged.

literature

  • Margaret Drabble (Editor): The Oxford Companion to English Literature , Oxford University Press, Oxford 1985.
  • Martin Stannard: Muriel Spark: the biography , London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009, ISBN 978-0-297-81592-1
  • John Sutherland: How to be well read: A Guide to 500 great novels and a Handful of Literary Curiosities. Entry to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . Random House Books, London 2014, ISBN 9780099552963

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Stannard: Muriel Spark; The Biography , p. 253.
  2. ↑ a b 100 best novels - The prime of Miss Jean Brodie
  3. ↑ a b c d e John Sutherland: How to be well read: A Guide to 500 great novels and a Handful of Literary Curiosities. Entry to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . Random House Books, London 2014, ISBN 9780099552963
  4. ^ The Guardian: The best British novel of all times - have international critics found it? , accessed on January 2, 2016
  5. ↑ Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, p. 125.
  6. ↑ Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, p. 97.
  7. ↑ Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, p. 122.
  8. ↑ Stannard: Muriel Spark; The Biography , p. 248
  9. ↑ Stannard: Muriel Spark; The Biography , p. 249.
  10. ↑ Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, p. 118. The original quote is: She shook off Miss Brodie's influence as a dog shakes pond-water from its coat. She marries shortly after graduating from school.