It is not to be supposed that Miss Brodie was unique at this point of her prime; or that (since such things are relative) she was in any way off her head. She was alone, merely, in that she taught in a school like Marcia Blaine’s. There were legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties, women from the age of thirty and up- ward, who crowded their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas and energetic practices in art or social welfare, education or religion.
Spinsterhood is a very important aspect of the novel. Jean Brodie—it goes without saying that she is a Miss, of course—views herself as something of a rebellious figure who is not only in control of her own destiny but wields considerable influence over the fate of her girls. From another perspective, however, she is just an unmarried woman quickly moving past her prime as an object of interest for men.
“There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.”
This quote occurs twice in the narrative; once in the second chapter and then again much later. Miss Jean Brodie’s “set” of girls are the crème de la crème of the school (at least in Brodie’s eyes) and Sandy is the crème de la crème of the set. Sandy’s statement is a reply to a question about the strongest influences in her life. Specifically, she is asked if the religious doctrine of Calvinism (with its weighty tenet of predestination) was a great influence. Though it may seem her reply is evasive, it is in fact right to the point because Miss Jean Brodie’s philosophy of life is so antithetical to the concept of a predestined fate as to be almost a religion in itself.
“Teddy Lloyd was greatly in love with me, as you know, and I with him. It was a great love. One day in the art room he kissed me. We never became lovers, not even after you left Edinburgh, when the temptation was strongest.”
There is a problem, of course: Teddy Lloyd is married. This fact collides not only with Brodie’s sense of propriety and morality, but also her rejection of predestined fates and it is on the crux of this collision that the issue of spinsterhood takes a perverse turn. The temptation to have Mr. Lloyd for herself may have been easily enough overcome, but he is a virus that has infected Jean’s sense of being in her prime. And so she engages in machinations involving her students to create a sort of relationship-by-proxy which is inevitably destined to go horribly wrong.
“We differ at root, the headmistress and I, upon the question whether we are employed to educate the minds of girls or to intrude upon them.”
Brodie stands at odds with the rest of the faculty and pretty much the entire academic institution for that matter. At the heart of the debate over her way versus the highway is the issue of whether education should be an intrusion into a student’s mind or a process of extracting what is already formed there. She is a staunch opponent of the intrusive approach yet is ultimately revealed to be very hypocritical on the subject. This hypocrisy is most fundamentally demonstrated by way of the psychological games she plays with her students to get them to view her as a godlike creature and become willing participants in carrying out her most deviant plans to take on the mantle of a god doling out predestined fates for others.
