The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, or the Dangerous Embodiment of a Flawed Teaching Ideal Give me a girl at an impressive age, and she is mine for life 1 . The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, probably the most well-known of Muriel Spark’s works, unfolds the story of a charismatic school teacher who establishes an unconventional and highly debatable relationship with a small group of chosen pupils. Allowing the reader only into the mind of one of the main characters, the third person, non-linear narrative unravels not only the influence of the teacher’s idiosyncratic behaviour on her students, but also the resultant dramatic, long-term consequences. The purpose of this work is to prove this novel, first published in, and never out of print since 1961, to be a paradigm of literature’s didactic importance as a unique tool to enhance a broader understanding of humanity. With this aim, we will try to point out the relevant contextual aspects, the characters’ main features and the outcome of their interaction, hopefully revealing the story’s verisimilitude and its undeniable potential to be read, and seriously taken as a lesson of life. We will focus on the false teaching ideal embodied by the protagonist, and in the dangers inherent in a profession affording privileged relationships that can, either intentionally or unintentionally, harm students’ moral, social and psychological development. This idea is clearly expressed and summarised in the quotation below: […] The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie [is] a novel that reveals the dangers of a powerful personality seeking to dominate the lives of young impressionable girls. It is also a novel that reveals how a lack of self-knowledge about one’s subconscious motivations and needs can lead to using one’s students inappropriately to meet those needs;[…] 2 In fact, the parallel between the
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