Hats as a feature of individuality
The book starts with the description of how the girls of the Brodie set had been wearing their hats. Hatlessness was an offence near school’s premises, but the girls who had been heavily influenced by Miss Jean Brodie’s sense of individuality, have their own styles of wearing their hats. This marked their rebellious nature inspired from Miss Brodie, who often flouted school rules and encouraged her pupils to do so and defended it in the name of individuality.
Mary’s futile attempts during fire in the hotel
Since the narrator travels in time while narrating the book, Mary Macgregor is mentioned often with the fact that she died when she was twenty-four in a hotel fire. She ran back and forth, without any bearings to her surroundings and died that way, running helter-skelter. This image of her being in constant bewilderment who couldn’t go anywhere without supervision forms the essence of her character. Mary is often blamed and chided by Miss Brodie, and yet Mary considered her days with Miss Brodie as her best days. This suggests dependence on Miss Brodie.
Sandy’s vision of science class
Sandy, who begins to question Miss Brodie’s methods, develops an awareness that Miss Brodie had been domineering. She develops a ruse to go to the science class of the senior class, and is impressed by Miss Lockhart. But, what really made an impression on her that all the girls of the senior class appeared to be working without supervision, without Miss Lockhart keeping a close eye and pressing her own ideas to them. She exclaims that the science class is ‘free’.
Miss Brodie’s description of her love life
Miss Brodie loved to discuss her own love life with her pupils while making the girls prop their books under the guise of lessons. Often her descriptions of these encounters have romantic but ambiguous details in them. She once compared her encounter with an Italian man to Dante meeting Beatrice. Later, as her love life got complicated due to her turmoil to choose either Mr. Lloyd or Mr. Lowther, her description of Hugh, her dead fiancé who died in a war wavers as a man who was sometimes musical and sometimes artistic. This imagery of Miss Brodie telling pre-teen girls highly intimate details is heavily suggestive of Miss Brodie not having any control of her life and thus she likes to build a make-believe life in front of students.
