Character
In the novel, Miss Jean Brodie is a school teacher at a conservative girls' school in 1930s Edinburgh, Scotland. She is a charismatic spinster who appears to be out of place in her surroundings. In 1930, she declares that her prime has begun and sets out to make sure her class gets the full benefit of her Prime by making sure they are aware of drama, art and fascist beliefs. Out of her class she selects her favourite girls and attempts to mould them into the crème de la crème. In the novel, these are Sandy, Monica, Jenny, Eunice, Rose, and Mary MacGregor. There is also a tomboy, Joyce Emily, who attempts to force her way into the Brodie set, but she is summarily dismissed by Miss Brodie. Sandy eventually becomes a cloistered nun, Sister Helena; Mary MacGregor is killed in a hotel fire; and Joyce Emily enlists in the Spanish Civil War, where she is killed.
The other teachers and the headmistress, Miss Mackay, bemoan the fact that Miss Brodie's "special girls" are different from the rest, displaying none of the team spirit the school tries to encourage. Years after Sandy and the others have moved on to the Senior School (where Miss Brodie does not teach) and into the world, Miss Mackay has an appointment with Sandy in which she bemoans the fact that "it's still going on" — that is, that Miss Brodie is training up another round of young girls who will come to think they are better than the other girls. Sandy then betrays Miss Brodie by telling Miss Mackay of her penchant for fascist political indoctrination (previously, Miss Mackay had tried and failed to get rid of Miss Brodie by catching her in some kind of sex scandal) — which, at a school like this one, will not be tolerated by the parents. She is easily gotten rid of, and suspects that it was Mary who betrayed her, even though it was Sandy.
In the novel, Miss Brodie dies of cancer in 1946.
The play and film show marked departures from the novel. As adapted for stage and screen by Jay Presson Allen, the story is told in a largely linear fashion. It begins in 1932, after Miss Brodie has returned from her summer holidays in Italy, having realised her prime is upon her. The essentials of the character and the story are the same, though some characters are different and/or meet different ends. Mary MacGregor, for example, does not die in a hotel fire that happens years after graduation but she is killed while in her final year at Marcia Blaine (the name of the school), when she goes to join her brother who is fighting in the Spanish Civil War. She dies when the train in which she is travelling is blown up.
In the play we see a few scenes showing Sandy in later life as a nun. In the film we do not know what becomes of Sandy or any of the other girls after graduation, because that is where it ends. Whereas in the book Miss Brodie is betrayed by Sandy after she and the girls have all left school and gone out into the world, the play and film put the betrayal before graduation, some weeks before the end of the school year in 1936. Sandy does it in reaction to the death of Mary MacGregor.
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Famous quotes containing the word character:
“When one walks, one is brought into touch first of all with the essential relations between one’s physical powers and the character of the country; one is compelled to see it as its natives do. Then every man one meets is an individual. One is no longer regarded by the whole population as an unapproachable and uninteresting animal to be cheated and robbed.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“The man who pretends that the distribution of income in this country reflects the distribution of ability or character is an ignoramus. The man who says that it could by any possible political device be made to do so is an unpractical visionary. But the man who says that it ought to do so is something worse than an ignoramous and more disastrous than a visionary: he is, in the profoundest Scriptural sense of the word, a fool.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“A man with a so-called character is often a simple piece of mechanism; he has often only one point of view for the extremely complicated relationships of life.”
—J. August Strindberg (1849–1912)