56 pages • 1 hour read
Muriel SparkThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1961A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaSymbols & Motifs
Panama Hats
Panama hats are a required component of the girls’ uniforms at the Marcia Blaine School, but each girl in Miss Brodie’s set alters her hat slightly so that it expresses her personality. The hats thus symbolize the attempt to distinguish oneself within a larger group that otherwise demands uniformity. The school expects students to turn the hat’s brim up at the back and down at the front. However, it allows them to make slight changes to their hats as long as they do not wear them at an angle. The novel’s opening scene, in which the girls are 16, describes how each wears her hat and drops hints about what those choices might say about them. Monica, for example, wears her hat higher on her head than is typically done, “perched as if it were too small and as if she knew she looked grotesque in any case” (3). Here, Monica is depicted as cynical, as if she knows that no alteration to her hat will make her look or feel better. Eunice wears hers the exact opposite of how the school expects students to wear their hats: the brim is turned up at the front and down at the back. Eunice is the only one in the Brodie set who will later choose to attend the Modern side of the school rather than the Classical side; in other words, she makes the exact opposite choice the rest of them will make.
St. Giles’ Cathedral
St. Giles’ Cathedral, a church consecrated in 1243, symbolizes the darkest elements of Sandy’s spiritual and psychological journey. The Brodie set visits St. Giles’ early in the novel, during their walk to Edinburgh’s Old Town. Sandy is the only member of the group who has never been inside the church, and she does not want to go, as “[the] outsides of old Edinburgh churches frightened her” (35). However, in her later teen years, she becomes fascinated with the parts of her culture and history that have been withheld from her, particularly Scotland’s Calvinist tradition and John Knox’s founding of the Presbyterian Church. She begins standing outside St. Giles’ and thinking about Calvinism, which had always been presented to her as a joke. She finds Calvin’s notions of predestination and damnation particularly cruel and starts feeling her own “stabs of new and exciting Calvinistic guilt” upon seeing Edinburgh’s poor residents on walks around the city (116). She will later connect Calvinist traditions with Miss Brodie, realizing that Miss Brodie, in her delusions, “thinks she is Providence […] she thinks she is the God of Cavin, she sees the beginning and the end” (129). Sandy finally rejects Calvinism in favor of Catholicism, becoming a nun and joining a Catholic convent. Ultimately, in the same way she forces herself to stand outside St. Giles’ and contemplate things that frighten her, she forces herself to look clearly at Miss Brodie, who thinks she has godlike powers. In the end, rejecting one means rejecting the other and choosing her own path.
Acts of Looking
The novel is full of scenes in which characters look meaningfully at each other, or, in the case of Teddy Lloyd’s portraits, representations of each other. This motif supports two of the novel’s major themes: The Interplay of Imagination and Reality and the artist’s omnipotence. These repeated acts of looking suggest that certain elements of a person’s character can be determined by looking at their face. For example, when the girls advance to senior school, Miss Lockhart realizes that Mary is not very smart, and this realization is reflected through an act of looking: “Miss Lockhart […] had already learnt the exasperation of looking at Mary’s face, its two eyes, nose and mouth” (81). Sandy realizes that Miss Brodie is secretly heartbroken about Mr. Lowther and Miss Lockhart’s engagement as she looks at Miss Brodie looking out the window, her “brown eyes fixed on the clouds” (121). Mr. Lloyd tries to determine if Miss Brodie approves of him by shyly making eye contact with her, and he reveals his own obsession with her by making every portrait resemble her. Even the portraits themselves engage in acts of looking as they stare out from the canvas. The novel’s repeated emphasis on Sandy’s small eyes adds a twist of irony to this motif: Miss Brodie assumes that the size of Sandy’s eyes means she cannot see as well as other people, when actually Sandy understands far more about Miss Brodie than any other character. In other words, while acts of looking are crucial to perception, there is no straightforward, correlative relationship between looking and comprehending.
