Sandy’s Narrativization of Miss Brodie

and the Narrator’s Collusion:

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as
an Anti-Fascist Text
Yunah Kae

I. Introduction

The title of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is perhaps a
misleading one. The reader naturally assumes that the main protagonist
of the work will be Jean Brodie. While Prime does revolve around Miss
Brodie and her years at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh,
a closer examination reveals that Miss Brodie functions as the main object
of narrativization within the work rather than as a narrating subject. Miss
Brodie’s story is conveyed mostly through Sandy Stranger’s perception, and
Miss Brodie’s “name and memory” flits “from mouth to mouth like swallows
in the summer” (136) throughout the work. Although the main narrative
of Prime is of Miss Brodie’s abuse of authority and her consequent betrayal
by “one of her own girls” (134), the power of her “irresponsible egotism”
(Lodge 248) is paradoxically undermined as she herself does not have control
over how her story is told. By utilizing a narrator that authorizes Sandy’s
perception of Miss Brodie, Spark aims to expose how a narrative that
dismantles abusive authority can in fact be oppressive.
Judy Suh argues that Prime exposes “fascism’s revolutionary appearance
within a modern liberal democratic context ” (94). She argues against
“emphasizing Miss Brodie’s culpability in abusing her authoritative position”
and instead focuses on the fascist tendency to bind the “deterritorializing
desires” of modern women that sought escape from patriarchal society
to “reterritorializing forces” (92) that claimed could create “new modes of
114  Yunah Kae

autonomy for women” (99) within “large-scale institutions such as the state,
nation, and Empire” (95). Theodor Adorno points out that “fascist agitation is
centered in the idea of the leader,” a “psychological image” (124) that allows
the fascist community to idealize and identify itself with the “superman”
(127) demagogue. According to Adorno, fascist masses take on the irrational
and often violent aspect of the “primal herd” (122) despite its irrationality
because the fascist leader manipulates and gratifies the followers’ narcissistic
wishes to simultaneously “submit to authority and to be the authority
himself” (127). Both Suh and Adorno thus emphasize that the relationship
between the fascist demagogue and the fascist follower is not a binary one
in which the authority figure wields absolute control, but is reciprocal in
that the follower participates in creating the “modern leader image” (Adorno
125) through his own desires. If, as Suh argues, the Brodie set can be seen
as a site of “microfascism,” (91) it becomes possible to read Prime as an anti-
fascist narrative as the text simultaneously works toward a narrative of
the consequences of abusing authority over a community, and against this
narrative by exposing the desires and participation of the follower through
the distancing of the narrator and authorial intent.
Although Suh also reads Prime as an anti-fascist narrative, she focuses on
the character of Miss Brodie and her desires to “deterritorialize” from the
stifling authoritative and conservative school system and “reterritorialize”
herself and her set on modes of feminist empowerment and progressive
educational policies. However, perceiving Miss Brodie as a “storyteller” who
“recklessly orchestrates the girls’ beginnings and endings” (88) fails to take
into full consideration that Miss Brodie does not have an authorial voice
within the text. Miss Brodie is instead narrativized mainly through Sandy’s
gaze, and it is because the narrator relies heavily on Sandy’s perspective and
colludes with her narrativization through narrative techniques that Sandy
appears as a the “moral reference point for the reader” (Pullin 85). However,
despite her own assertions of her “insight” and the narrator’s collusion,
Sandy’s narrativization of Miss Brodie becomes unreliable when the reader is
able to detect an ironic distance between Spark, the author, and the narrator.
Many critics have pointed out the difficulty in defining the narrator in Prime,
 Sandy’s Narrativization of Miss Brodie and the Narrator’s Collusion  115

and Robert Peter Brown in particular illuminates the questionable ethical

orientations of the narrator that indicate an ironic distance between author
and narrator. Although both Sandy and the narrator strive to confine Miss
Brodie as the authority figure within a narrative of abusive authority, their
efforts ultimately fail as the irony employed by the author reveals not only
the occluded desires and participation of the follower, but also the narrative
techniques used by the narrator to collude with the follower’s narrativization.
This paper will focus on Sandy’s gaze and the narrator’s collusion, and the
dismantling effects of authorial irony in an attempt to read the work as an
anti-fascist text.

II. S
 andy’s Authoritative Gaze and her Narrativization of Miss
Brodie

Miss Brodie is a central figure of glamour and controversy within the

Marcia Blaine School for Girls, yet the reader soon perceives that Miss Brodie
appears within the text only in the form of a surface representation. David
Lodge refers to Miss Brodie as “a puzzle, an enigma” (243), and Hope Howell
Hodgkins observes that Miss Brodie functions as a “perceived object” (528).
It is virtually impossible to grasp her interior thoughts, and as Hodgkins
accurately explicates, Miss Brodie is represented via her exterior “style” (525),
in other words, through her speech, clothes and appearance, and details of
her mannerisms. Representation through external appearances indicate
an observing subject, and it is Sandy Stranger, the girl notorious for her
“small, almost nonexistent, eyes” (3) who functions within the work as the
main observer. Lodge points out that as Sandy “is the only character who
is interiorized to any significant extent” (242), she naturally becomes the
reader’s “point of reference” (243) in assessing Miss Brodie. The narrator of
Prime rarely provides narration of the teacher separate from Sandy’s external
observations, and this is the main reason as to why the reader is continuously
aware of a distance between himself and Miss Brodie’s interiority.
Miss Brodie then, is presented in the work as an object of observation,
the object that Prime revolves around, but who herself does not narrate. The
116  Yunah Kae

narrator’s general reticence to provide an alternate perspective into Miss

Brodie’s interior reinforces the narrator’s privileging of Sandy’s gaze and her
objectification of Miss Brodie. It is Sandy who constantly watches Miss Brodie,
as readers become well aware through the repetition of paragraphs ending
with sentences such as “[h]er [Sandy’s] little eyes looked at Miss Brodie in
a slightly smaller way” (49), “. . . said Sandy, photographing this new Miss
Brodie with her little eyes” (55), or “Sandy took her eyes from the hills” (59).
Sandy is later praised by Miss Brodie as having “insight,” and Teddy Lloyd,
the art master, also remarks on her “unnatural” (131) penchant to analyze
minds. Sandy’s developed powers of observation and analysis serve her well in
her narrativization of Miss Brodie, and she proceeds throughout her childhood
to observe her teacher and her actions and create stories pertaining to her
observations.
Sandy is in fact a master “author,” even as a child she composes fictions
based on real-life characters and events, as well as fictional characters
borrowed from novels such as Jane Eyre and Kidnapped. Her earliest story
introduced in Prime titled “The Mountain Eyrie” is co-authored with Jenny
Gray, also a member of the Brodie set, and traces the conflicted interactions
between the two girls and Hugh Carruthers, Miss Brodie’s ex-lover who had
been killed in the Great War. More stories follow, in which Sandy successively
appears as heroine opposite both fictional and real-life characters such as
the Lady of Shalott, Mr. Rochester, Anna Pavlova, and a local policewoman.
Her stories culminates in a final letter “written” by Miss Brodie in a series of
love correspondence between Miss Brodie and Gordon Lowther, the singing
master, in which Sandy and Jenny take pains to “present Miss Brodie in both
a favourable and an unfavourable light” (76) in regards to her affair with
Lowther. Most of Sandy’s fictions in fact, revolve around Miss Brodie and
her love life, and it is important to note that while Sandy’s stories concerning
Miss Brodie are indeed “fictions,” they have their basis in Sandy’s watchful
observations of her teacher. The love letter that the girls write is illuminating
not only because it “combines the language of high romance with the sexual
terminology of newspaper court reports” (Lodge 247), but because both the
material and language of the fantasy derive from what the girls, and Sandy
 Sandy’s Narrativization of Miss Brodie and the Narrator’s Collusion  117

in particular, has observed about Miss Brodie. References to Anna Pavlova,

one of Miss Brodie’s idols, a visible disdain of “ignorance of culture and the
Italian scene” (77), and even a direct quote of Miss Brodie when she declares
that were she to “receive a proposal of marriage tomorrow from the Lord Lyon
King of Arms I [Miss Brodie] would decline it” (78) within the letter imply
that Sandy’s “fiction” is a restructuring of what she has seen and heard into
a coherent narrative. Ironically, this “method of making patterns with facts”
(76) is a technique that Sandy has picked up from Miss Brodie herself, a
habit that has been developed and cultivated through Sandy’s emulation and
consequent mimesis of her teacher.
Although Sandy’s fictions of Miss Brodie cease with the final letter that the
girls bury in a cave by the sea, she continues to objectify and narrativize Miss
Brodie. Sandy’s perception of Miss Brodie undergoes changes as the girls grow
into adolescence, from a Miss Brodie “hardly of flesh and blood” (55) who is
“above” (18) the realm of sexual intercourse, to a Miss Brodie “capable of being
kissed and of kissing” (55), and moves on to “ imagine Miss Brodie sleeping
with Mr. Lowther” (64). Sandy at thirteen wonders if Miss Brodie “might be
physically beautiful and desirable to men” (91) and concludes at the age of
seventeen “at last, without doubt, that she was really an exciting woman as
a woman” (124). Even when taking into account the narrator’s assertion that
Miss Brodie was “still in a state of fluctuating development” (45), the fact
that Sandy’s perception of Miss Brodie changes according to her own growing
knowledge of sex indicates that Sandy’s narrativization has more to do with
Sandy’s own desires to perceive Miss Brodie than what Miss Brodie is actually
like.
Sandy’s objectification of Miss Brodie is particularly illuminated in her
metaphorical allusions to her teacher. Through their walk across the Old
Town of Edinburgh, Sandy “looks back” at Miss Brodie and the girls of her
set and “understood them as a body with Miss Brodie for the head” (30).
Lodge points out that the passage conceals a “religious metaphor” (250) in
which Miss Brodie represents Christ. Because the narrator relies mostly on
Sandy’s perceptions in the girls’ walk through the Old Town, readers are also
forced to rely on Sandy’s gaze in order to follow through the unraveling scene.
118  Yunah Kae

The reader also perceives of Miss Brodie in terms of metaphors, and she is
reduced and contained within Sandy’s metaphorical language of Calvinism
as the authority figure of the group, in which Sandy and her companions,
including the physically absent Jenny, are in “unified compliance to the
destiny of Miss Brodie, as if God had willed them to birth for that purpose”
(30). Sandy continues to contain Miss Brodie in her linguistic prison; when
the girls encounter a group of Girl Guides Sandy recalls her teacher’s picture
of Mussolini’s troops and her admiration of the “straightest of files,” and
immediately imagines that “the Brodie set was Miss Brodie’s fascisti . . . all
knit together for her need in another way” (31). The narrator closely details
Sandy’s metaphoric impressions, and readers are accordingly invited to
perceive of Miss Brodie in turn as a Calvinistic God and a leader of fascisti
who wields control over the destiny of her group of girls.
Even as Sandy grows into her ability for “insight” she continues to term
Miss Brodie in metaphorical phrases such as “Providence” and “the God of
Calvin” (129). Sandy’s penchant for metaphors in her perception of her teacher
is intertwined with her desires to objectify and narrativize Miss Brodie as
a powerful figure of authority, one that greatly influences the destinies of
the girls of her set. It is telling that in the moments of Sandy’s metaphorical
allusions to Miss Brodie during their trek across the Old Town, Sandy
perceives of these moments as a sort of frightening revelation, in which she
is seized with “group-fright” (31) and becomes frightened of the consequences
of going against Miss Brodie’s authority. There is a paradox here, as the
allusions to a Calvinistic God and fascisti are metaphors of Sandy’ creation,
yet she takes fright at the authority that she herself has invested in Miss
Brodie. Once we understand this paradox, we are able to see more clearly into
the desires of Sandy; namely, that she desires to narrativize Miss Brodie as
an all-powerful authority figure and herself as the frightened and powerless
follower of Miss Brodie’s group.
Because readers are led to rely mostly on Sandy’s gaze throughout the
work, it is not difficult for readers to readily accept Sandy’s narrativization
of Miss Brodie. Miss Brodie undoubtedly tries to manipulate the Brodie set
according to her own motivations, and her abuse of authority over her girls
 Sandy’s Narrativization of Miss Brodie and the Narrator’s Collusion  119

culminates disastrously in the death of Joyce Emily when she encourages the
girl to participate in the Spanish Civil War. However, one must remember
that this manipulation is perceived through the lens of Sandy’s gaze and
buttressed by the narrator. While Miss Brodie’s charismatic and destructive
power must also be closely examined to fully understand the complex
mechanisms working in a fascist community, I intend to focus more on
Sandy’s narrativization of Miss Brodie that places herself as the follower and
also the victim of Miss Brodie’s abusive authority.

III. The Binary Leader-Follower Ideology of the Fascist Follower

Paul Morrison argues that fascism “provides the illusion of collective

experience through aesthetic means” (6-7) and that the “fascist aestheticization
of the political involves a compensatory access to representation or expression”
(7) for the fascist follower. He points to the aesthetics of the mass rally,
sabato fascista, as examples of the representation of an imagined collective,
an “alternative to the alienation and fragmentation” (9) of modern society.
Morrision’s analysis of fascism’s aestheticization of the political highlights the
representational aspect of fascism. Adorno remarks that the basic tenet of the
fascist follower’s psychology is the “formation of the imagery of an omnipotent
and unbridled father figure…apt to be enlarged into a ‘group ego’” (124). There
is a similarity between Morrison’s and Adorno’s argument in that both critics
focus on modes of representation utilized by fascist followers. In this light,
Sandy’s representation of Miss Brodie may be perceived as Sandy’s exercising
of her “right to representation” (Morrison 8) guaranteed in fascism. Hodgkins
has explicated in length concerning the aesthetic objectification of Miss Brodie
in the descriptions of the teacher’s apparel and style in Prime. Not only is
Miss Brodie presented as an object of aesthetic viewing and consumption for
the girls of her set and her lovers, she is also presented throughout the text
as emblems or images of authority; even as Sandy misleads her teacher in
her ideas of Rose Miss Brodie is still referred to in succession as “the leader
of the set,” “a Roman matron,” and “an educational reformer” (118). The
representation of Miss Brodie in Prime is thus not only aesthetic but also
120  Yunah Kae

reductive and containing; this fascist aspect shows through most clearly in
Lloyd’s portraits of Miss Brodie’s girls, in which Sandy is unable to “obliterate
her [Miss Brodie ’s] image ” (129) from the individual images the girls.
Sandy thus describes Miss Brodie in terms of aesthetic representation, an
overbearing image that must be erased from Lloyd’s canvases in order for the
girls to gain their respective individualism. As Sandy visits Lloyd’s studio for
the last time after she has betrayed Miss Brodie, she again studies the girls’
portraits and reflects that “she had failed to put a stop to Miss Brodie” (134).
If we are able to understand that Sandy utilizes methods of representation
that bear a strong resemblance to a fascist follower’s modes of representation
of the fascist leader and community, then we are able to logically assume that
Sandy’s narrativization of Miss Brodie may also be perceived in the light of
fascism. Sandy’s desire to perceive Miss Brodie as authoritarian leads her
to employ modes of aesthetic and linguistic/metaphoric representation that
contain Miss Brodie and herself in a binary logic of the fascist demagogue
and follower. This divide that confines Miss Brodie into a static emblem of
authority automatically guarantees Sandy the place of the follower. The
narrativization of Sandy then, is based on a binary ideology that clearly
segregates the role of the authoritarian leader and follower within the group.
Even moments in which Sandy perceives of Miss Brodie as “fragile” and
“silly” (118) work towards an overall process of narrativizing Miss Brodie as
an authoritarian figure. Adorno points out that “the fascist leader’s startling
symptoms of inferiority” are paradoxically necessary for the fascist follower’s
“narcissistic identification ” (127) with the leader. Musing on how Miss
Brodie is being misled in her ideas of Rose, Sandy compares Miss Brodie’s
transfigured features to a “dark heavy Edinburgh” that suddenly changes into
“a floating city when the light was a special pearly white and fell upon one of
the gracefully fashioned streets” (118). The moment in which Miss Brodie’s
mistake concerning Rose is most starkly revealed is contained within Sandy’s
metaphor of Edinburgh, and it is when Miss Brodie appears “ridiculous”
(131) that Sandy finds her teacher invested with a kind of pure and naïve
beauty. As I have discussed in the above, modes of aesthetic and metaphoric
representation is crucial for the fascist follower to perceive of, and identify
 Sandy’s Narrativization of Miss Brodie and the Narrator’s Collusion  121

with, the leader of the group as an all-powerful figure of authority. In this

light, Sandy’s use of metaphor even during Miss Brodie’s moments of human
fallibility reveals the subtle mechanism in which modes of representation is
appropriated by the fascist follower to paradoxically invest the leader with
authority just when that authoritarian figure appears most vulnerable.
What is tricky about Prime, however, is that it is not only Sandy who
narrativizes Miss Brodie in the context of a binary leader-follower ideology.
The narrator of the work colludes with Sandy through narrative techniques.
Susan Snaider Lanser argues that the reader must “not only read manifest
‘content’ but to read the content of manifest ‘form’” (13), emphasizing that
the form of the narrative is utilized to construct acceptable and unacceptable
ideologies within the novel. Lanser remarks that “ the ways in which
narrators represent themselves, the relationships they construct with
narratees, and the ideological and affective positions they take are dynamic
and interdependent elements” (13), thus, the narrative voice becomes “a site
of crisis, contradiction, or challenge” (7). Viewed in such a context, it becomes
imperative to examine the narrator and his techniques in order to understand
the ideology of the fascist follower that is privileged in Prime. And through
investigating the narrator can the reader perceive a distance between the
author herself and the authoritative narrator.

IV. The Narrator and his Collusion in Sandy’s Narrativization

Brown convincingly argues that the narrator of Prime possesses limited

“epistemic authority ” (231) and can be “characterized as fallible, even
unreliable” (233). His argument goes against traditional criticism of Prime
that usually classified the narrator of the work as omniscient, such as in the
analyses of Lodge and Ruth Whittaker. His detailed classification of Prime’s
narrator as “heterodiegetic” and “extradiegetic” (232) allows us to take
into consideration not only moments of qualified knowledge on part of the
narrator, but also the narrator’s ethical and moral orientations. According to
Brown, it is moments when Mary Macgregor, the scapegoat of the Brodie set,
is described within the work that the narrator betrays his ethical leanings.
122  Yunah Kae

The narrator’s attitude towards Mary is in fact very similar to Sandy’s and
those of the Brodie set who perceive of Mary as “a nobody whom everyone
can blame” (4). Sandy’s perception of Mary as “officially the faulty one” (30)
within the group is not unrelated to how the narrator frames Mary’s death
as a consequence of her own stupidity by implying a parallel between the
scene of her death when she “ran one way; then, turning, the other way; and
at either end the blast furnace of the fire met her” (14), and a scene in the
science room in which Mary is reprimanded for her stupidity when she “ran
along a single lane between two benches, met with a white flame, and ran
back to meet another brilliant tongue of fire” (81). The narrator participates
in the “victimization” (Brown 240) of Mary through narrative techniques, and
this reduction by the narrator of Mary’s character as the stupid scapegoat is
a reflection of how the Brodie set reduces Mary to a “function” (Brown 241)
within the group.
Brown points out that the narrator’s treatment of Mary indicates that
the distance between the narrator and the characters of the work is not
as distant as it first appears (234). It becomes possible then, to surmise
that there is an ironic distance between the author and the “fallible” (233)
narrator. Lanser remarks that an “authorial” (16) narrator does not imply “an
ontological equivalence between narrator and author” (16). If the reader is
able to apprehend that the author is indeed ironic in her attitude toward the
narrator, not only is the narrative authority of the narrator in Prime, but also
Sandy’s narrativization of Brodie, undermined. And as I have discussed above,
Sandy’s narrativization premises a binary divide between the authoritarian
leader and follower, an ideological premise that the narrator accepts and
disseminates within Prime in his collusion with Sandy. Undermining Sandy’s
narrativization and the narrator ’s collusion ultimately dismantles the
binary schematic of leader and follower, and further reveals the complicated
relationship within fascist communities, in which not only the leader exercises
authority over the group, but also the follower invests authority in the leader
and participates in the leader’s power.
 Sandy’s Narrativization of Miss Brodie and the Narrator’s Collusion  123

V. Reading Narrative Techniques as Irony

Paul De Man defines the concept of irony as “the permanent parabasis

of the allegory of tropes” (179). Parabasis is “the interruption of a discourse
by a shift in the rhetorical register” (178), in other words, coherent meaning
created and conveyed to the reader by the narrative, and further, the concept
of coherent meaning, or “allegory,” within a narrative is interrupted through
an intrusion of different temporal and narrative dimensions. Irony then,
as Brown indicates, does not simply imply a distance between subjects via
different levels of knowledge, with the reader in on the know through his
superior position as one who may “read” the author’s intent. Rather, irony
undoes this assumption of the reader’s superiority because it works as an
infinitely deferred interruption that unsettles “the basis of any narration”
(181). It is an “absolute infinite negativity” (166), because in the end it is
impossible to “know,” without a doubt, when the text is being ironic, and these
doubts unravel meanings constructed by the narrative. Questions of whether
or not a character, narrator, or author is being ironic inevitably call forth
another question, in an “infinite chain of solvents” (166). Irony is thus “always
the irony of understanding” (166), an unraveling of knowledge and narrative.
De Man’s theory of irony is especially illuminating in reading Prime. Spark’s
work is unsettling because the reader’s understanding of the author’s irony
is always deferred; a scene continues after pages of digression, often picking
up the thread of narrative with a repetition of the same scene, in which
the reader has been armed with new knowledge of the scenes through the
preceding temporal and spatial digressions, only to receive new information
later in the narrative that dismantles or adds to the reader’s previous
knowledge. The first scene of Prime of when the girls are sixteen years old,
in fact, picks up almost towards the end of the novel, in which Miss Brodie’s
claim of “[t]hese years are still the years of my prime,” and the narrator’s
remark, “[t]he Brodie set smiled in understanding of various kinds” (6) at the
start of the work have taken on new dimensions of meaning. The last scene of
Prime sums up this infinite deferral of understanding. The story reverts to a
124  Yunah Kae

scene that has already “taken place” in Prime, when Sandy, now Sister Helena
of the Transfiguration, is visited by a nameless young man at her convent. To
his question of what her biggest influence was during her adolescence, Sandy
enigmatically answers, “[b]ut there was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime”
(35), and this scene is again repeated at the very end of the novel. The work
ends with the repetition of Sandy’s answer, and her words have acquired a
wealth of meaning that had not been apparent to readers during the novel’s
first portrayal of the scene. However, the reader by no means understands
fully the meaning of Sandy’s words even at the close of the work, as the
diverse speculation of critics concerning the issue attests. The repetition of the
scene renders no final, complete knowledge, even as it presents new levels of
meaning. Spark’s work is ironic not only due to disparate levels of knowledge
between characters, or between characters and narrator, but because the
narrative itself questions and undoes the validity of the reader’s complete
knowledge of the narrative.
Lodge remarks on the unsettling aspect of Prime, pointing out that the
flash-forward technique “unsettle[s], rather than confirm[s], the reader’s
ongoing interpretation of events, constantly readjusting the points of emphasis
and the principle of suspense in the narrative” (238). Although he focuses on
the specific narrative technique of flash-forwarding as the main reason behind
the work’s disturbing nature, his observation is nevertheless illuminating
because it allows us to read narrative techniques as irony. According to Lodge,
flash-forwards act as interruptions in the reader’s “interpretation” of the
narrative, and once the reader perceives of this technique as the parabasis
of narrative rather than a manifestation of the authority of an omniscient
narrator, it becomes possible to see narrative strategies within Prime in an
ironic light. De Man argues that irony demystifies the “total arbitrariness”
(181) and “performative” (176) aspect inherent in the structure of narration.
In other words, narrative techniques are exposed as a strategic system that
the narrator (or author-narrator) utilizes in order to construct the coherent
and meaningful world of the novel. Lanser argues that as “the reception
of a novel rests on an implicit set of principles by which textual events
are rendered plausible,” the narrator (or author-narrator) must construct
 Sandy’s Narrativization of Miss Brodie and the Narrator’s Collusion  125

“maxims” and “’maxim-ize’ their narratives” (17). Irony undermines this

structure of “maxims” because it reveals that ideologies posited within a text
are in fact an arbitrary construct built by the narrator through a strategic
system of narrative techniques. Although Lanser is mainly referring to
patriarchal and feminist ideologies embedded within works of literature,
her argument applies to any dominant or privileged ideologies in texts.
Narrative techniques in Prime, then, can be perceived as a strategy on the
part of the narrator to privilege the binary leader-follower ideology inherent
in Sandy’s narrativization of Miss Brodie. Reading the narrator’s narrative
strategy as irony exposes this fascist ideology as fundamentally arbitrary
and performative, rather than as a given truth. I have discussed earlier that
the narrator of Prime colludes in Sandy’s narrativization. I will now propose
to read the narrator’s narrative strategy as irony to expose in detail how the
narrator utilizes narrative techniques to collude with Sandy and legitimatize
the leader-follower ideology.
First, the narrator of Prime relies heavily on what Gerald Prince terms
as the “disnarrated” (299) throughout the work in order to collude with
Sandy. According to Prince, the disnarrated refers to “terms, phrases, and
passages that consider what did not or does not place” (229). He includes
“alethic expressions of impossibility or unrealized possibility,” “purely
imagined worlds, desired worlds, or intended worlds, unfulfilled expectations,
unwarranted beliefs, failed attempts” (299-300) in the category, all of which
to some extent plays a part in the narrative of Prime. It is not only Miss
Brodie, but also the narrator who is “obsessed” (Prime 128) with what does
not actually take place, and at the heart of the novel revolves around the
unfulfilled idea that Rose Stanley, who is “famous for sex” (3), becomes the
lover of Lloyd in replacement of Miss Brodie. The narrator repetitively refers
to Rose in terms of her supposed sex-instinct; whether she truly possesses
such an instinct is not of much importance to the narrator. At the age of
eleven Rose is referred as “who had not yet won her reputation for sex” (27 my
emphasis), and when it becomes clear that Rose actually “had no curiosity
about sex at all” (58), the narrator glosses over this fact by stating that “her
magnificently appealing qualities” (57) lay in her complete disinterest in
126  Yunah Kae

the subject. Prince argues that the disnarrated “insists upon the ability to
conceive and manipulate hypothetical worlds” (302). The “hypothetical world”
of Miss Brodie’s prophecy appears continuously throughout the text to possess
the potential of fulfillment, even when her predictions have already been
unraveled; the narrator remarks that Miss Brodie was “cultivating Rose” and
“questioning Sandy” in the “progress of the great love affair presently to take
place between Rose and the art master” (126). Through the disnarrated, the
narrator reinforces Miss Brodie’s authority to predict and create, in other
words, narrate, a false reality that deceptively appears prophetic—a world of
“unrealized possibility.” The reader is implicated by the narrator to perceive
of Miss Brodie’s disnarrated prediction of Rose’s future in the same way that
Sandy perceives the influence of her teacher, as a potentially threatening
force that may at any time bulldoze the nascent individualism of the girls into
“one big Miss Brodie” (109).
Second, the narrator goes against a linear time scheme, in which the
narrative builds up towards the climax of an action by presenting in a
consistent time frame the events that lead to the climax. In other words,
motivations are first presented in the narrative, then the climatic action.
However, the narrator of Prime works in reverse; first, establishing Miss
Brodie’s betrayal (26), then revealing the betrayer (63), finally implying, but
never revealing, the motivations behind Sandy’s action (100). Jonathan Culler
convincingly argues that narratology “posit[s] the priority of events to the
discourse which reports or presents them” which “the functioning narratives
often subverts by presenting events not as givens but as the products of
discursive forces or requirements” (119). According to Culler, the “crucial
event” is also the “product of demands of signification” (121) as well as the
effect of prior events, meaning, climatic action is imbued with meaning not
only because a character’s motivations led up to the event, but also because
the necessity of a “coherent, noncontradictory account of narrative” (122)
requires the reader to give meaning to the action. In other words, motivations
of a character may be reconstructed by the reader so that “events are justified
by their appropriateness to thematic structure” (124).
In light of Culler’s argument, we may perceive that the narrator’s reversal
 Sandy’s Narrativization of Miss Brodie and the Narrator’s Collusion  127

of the “priority of events to the discourse” in Prime functions to establish

Sandy’s betrayal as thematically inevitable. It is telling to note that Sandy’s
motivations for betraying Miss Brodie are never clearly explicated within
the work, but only alluded to; the narrator remarks Sandy “was moved by
various other considerations to betray Miss Brodie” (100). Although critics
such as Lodge and Faith Pullin have argued that Sandy betrays Miss Brodie
for “casting herself [Miss Brodie] as author and heroine of her own myth”
(Pullin 90-91), such arguments are based on “a structure of signification” (122)
in Prime that demands a meaningful and thematically coherent explanation
for Sandy’s action. In other words, the narrator structures the narrative so
that Sandy’s betrayal is perceived by the reader as an inevitable event, and
because it is inevitable, the reader is led to reconstruct Sandy’s motivations,
despite the fact that she herself never truly reveals as to what specifically
motivates her.
This narrative strategy of Prime’s narrator is in fact evocative of what
Suh refers to as “ fascism ’ s violations ” that “ attempt to usurp human
unpredictability in the quest to narrate beginnings and ends” (100-101). There
is an inherent inevitability in the narratives of fascism that seeks to foretell
and contain the destinies of the individuals of a fascist community, and this
aspect of fascism has also been pointed out by Julie Gottlieb in her explication
of the ideology of feminine fascism.1) The destinies of Miss Brodie and her set
have already been laid out from the beginning of the novel, and when, as the
narrator remarks, “the time came for her [Sandy] to betray Miss Brodie” (108),
the reader is implicated by the narrator to provide the thematically logical
answer as to why Sandy does so.
Reading narrative techniques in Prime as ironic thus demystifies the
“total arbitrariness” (De Man 181) of the narration, and exposes the strategic
structure of narrative designed to render the binary leader-follower ideology of
the fascist follower that premises Sandy’s narrativization as plausible within
the work. Not only is Sandy’s narrativizaton of Miss Brodie, but also the

1) In her work, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement: 1923-1945, Julie
Gottlieb explicates how the fascist movement in Britain appropriated and utilized
feminist ideology and its narrative structure for its own purposes.
128  Yunah Kae

narrator’s seeming authority undermined in his narrative collusion to Sandy.

And because the narrator implicates the reader in his narrative strategies,
Spark also exposes the reader’s participation in creating and fortifying the
leader-follower ideology.
As I have discussed in the above, a gap, or space appears within the
narrative when it comes to inscribing Sandy’s motivations for betrayal, a gap
that is filled in by “discursive forces” (Culler 119). If however, we take into
consideration Sandy’s desires to narrativize Miss Brodie, we are provided with
a means to re-inscribe this gap. Sandy receives a shock when she realizes “all
at once” that Miss Brodie “means” (128) her predictions of Rose and Lloyd to
come true, and proceeds to reflect on the its implications:

“From what you tell me I should think that Rose and Teddy Lloyd
will soon be lovers.” Sandy realized that Miss Brodie meant it. She
had told Miss Brodie how peculiarly all his portraits reflected her. She
had said so again and again, for Miss Brodie loved to hear it. She had
said that Teddy Lloyd wanted to give up teaching and was preparing
an exhibition, and was encouraged in this course by art critics and
discouraged by the thought of his large family. (129; my emphasis)

In this moment of revelation, it is revealed just how much Sandy has

participated in Miss Brodie’s process of transforming theory into future
reality. It is Sandy who has fed Miss Brodie with the information that she
wanted to hear, and her repetitive use of pronouns that refer to herself
indicate that it was Sandy, rather than Miss Brodie, who acted as the primary
agent in the narrativization of Rose and her imaginary love affair. However,
this momentary self-revealing of Sandy’s active collusion with Miss Brodie
is soon occluded. As Miss Brodie continues to predict Rose’s future, Sandy
proceeds to label Miss Brodie as “Providence” and the “God of Calvin” who
“sees the beginning and the end” (129). Sandy’s own participation in Miss
Brodie’s prophecies is glossed over by the representation of Miss Brodie as
an all-powerful “image” (129) of authority. In short, Sandy narrativizes Miss
Brodie in the context of leader-follower logic and occludes her participation in
Miss Brodie’s narratives of the girls of her set. It is in this moment we may
inscribe new motivations for Sandy; that she desires to erase her collusion
 Sandy’s Narrativization of Miss Brodie and the Narrator’s Collusion  129

with authority and divest herself of the responsibility that comes with
wielding power.
This re-inscription of Sandy ’ s motivations reveals the complicated
relationship between leader and follower in fascist communities. The
relationship is mutually reinforcing; it is not simply a story of abusive
authority, nor of a powerless follower forced to betrayal. It is the reciprocal
dynamics in fascism that Spark aimed to expose by undermining the violence
inherent in binary narrativization of the fascist follower.

VI. Conclusion

Spark reveals through Prime that a fascist follower’s narrativization of the

fascist leader in the context of a binary leader-follower ideology can be just
as dangerous as the narratives that a fascist demagogue employs in order to
unite a fascist community under the banner of a common destiny. It not only
contains both the leader and follower into roles that ignore the reciprocal
relationship of power within a fascist community, in which the follower
projects himself onto the demagogue and invests the leader with authority,
but also occludes the participation of the follower in creating narratives of
destiny for the community individuals. By dismantling the leader-follower
ideology that serves as the basis for Sandy’s narrativization of Miss Brodie
and the narrator’s collusion in imbedding this “maxim” into the work, Spark
aims to expose the complicated dynamics of the power relationship between
the authoritarian leader and follower.
It is important to note that the reader is easily led to participate in the
narrator’s collusion of Sandy precisely because it is so difficult to “know” just
when Spark is being ironic in her treatment of the narrator. The narrator
undoubtedly displays marks of omniscience within the work, making it
deceptively easy to equate the narrator with authorial authority. This is the
trap that Spark has set for the reader, a trap designed, once the reader has
successfully managed to avoid falling into it, to indicate just how easy it is
to fall into and participate in a binary ideology that absolves the “victim”
follower and justifies his/her actions as ethically correct. It is this sort of
130  Yunah Kae

reading that saves Miss Brodie from functioning merely as an object or

emblem of authority in Prime, and perhaps provide the fledgling means as to
“put a stop to Miss Brodie” (134) in the portraits of the Brodie girls.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda.”

The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. Ed. Andrew Arato and Eike
Gabhardt. New York: Continuum, 1982.
Brown, Peter Robert. “There’s Something About Mary: Narrative and Ethics
in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” Journal of Narrative Theory 36.2 (2006):
228-53.
Culler, Jonathan. “Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative.”
Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed.
Mieke Bal. Vol I. New York: Routledge, 2004. 117-31.
De Man, Paul. “The Concept of Irony.” Aesthetic Ideology. Ed. Andrzeh
Warminski. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.
Gottlieb, Julie. Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement: 1923-
1945. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000.
Hodgkins, Hope Howell. “Stylish Spinsters: Spark, Pym, and the Postwar
Comedy of the Object.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 54.3 (2008): 523-43.
Morrison, Paul. The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Paul de Man.
New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
Prince, Gerald. “The Disnarrated.” Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts in
Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Mieke Bal. Vol I. New York: Routledge,
2004. 297-305.
Pullin, Faith. “Autonomy and Fabulation in the Fiction of Muriel Spark.”
Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for Vision. Ed. Alan Bold. London: Vision,
1984. 71-93.
Lanser, Susan Snaider. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative
Voice. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.
Lodge, David. “The Uses and Abuses of Omniscience: Method and Meaning
in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” Critical Quarterly 12.3
 Sandy’s Narrativization of Miss Brodie and the Narrator’s Collusion  131

(1970): 235-57.
Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. New York: Harper Perennial
Modern Classics, 1962.
Suh, Judy. “The Familiar Attractions of Fascism in Muriel Spark’s The Prime
of Miss Jean Brodie.” Journal of Modern Literature 30.2 (2007): 86-102.
Whittaker, Ruth. The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark. London: MacMillan P,
1982.
132  Yunah Kae

ABSTRACT

Sandy’s Narrativization of Miss Brodie

and the Narrator’s Collusion:
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as
an Anti-Fascist Text
Yunah Kae

This paper attempts to read Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
as an anti-fascist narrative that reveals the consequences of abusing authority
while at the same time exposing the desires and participation of the fascist
follower. Spark maintains an ironic distance between herself and the novel’s
narrative voice; the highly problematic morality of the narrator betrays
his/her collusion with Sandy Stranger’s objectification of Jean Brodie as an
emblem of fascist authority. Reading the narrator’s narrative techniques
to aid and abet Sandy’s gaze as authorial irony exposes fascist strategies
of representation and narrative that the fascist follower deploys in order to
secure the position of the powerless victim and thus occlude his own active
participation within the fascist community.

Key Words The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark, fascism, fascist
representation, irony, authorial irony, narrator, narrative
technique