It strikes me that Miss Brodie is very much a romantic sort of personality. I think Dorothy and Danielle have got it that Miss Brodie had the affiar with Mr. Lowther so as not to ruin the fantasy of Mr. Lloyd. It is so much more romantic to declare “I am his Muse” about Mr. Lloyd and say “I have renounced his love in order to dedicate my prime to the young girls in my care.” Unconsummated love is the most romantic kind isn’t it?

Given Spark has said she based Miss Brodie on Miss Kay, a real life teacher she had as a girl and one whom she adored, how much can we read into the complexity and amibivalent feelings we have for Miss Brodie to equate to Spark’s feelings about Miss Kay? I know it is dangerous to try to make a 1-1 comparision, but I can’t help but wonder.

Unfortunately I had to return Curriculum Vitae but I don’t recall anything but positive feelings about Miss Kay (insofar as Spark expressed any feelings at all!). She does say that Miss Brodie is not Miss Kay, though they have many things in common. Miss Kay was actually a devout Christian, and taught her girls not to sing the violent, “un-Christian” lines in “Land of Hope and Glory.” (How she squared that with admiration for Mussolini is beyond me, though!) Brodie is probably an amplification of Miss Kay, or perhaps an amalgamation of the real Miss Kay with some other unbalanced person Spark knew (she knew many--she said the poetry world seemed to breed them!).

How interesting the way writers turn life into fiction!  It seems that Spark took a part of her experience with Miss Kay and transformed it, made it maybe more interesting, or at the least made it more suited to a novel.  But I don’t always like the biographical approach to understand novels—I’m fascinated by it, on the one hand, but on the other, there’s the danger of misunderstanding the fiction that way, and writers always transform their life experiences in one way or another when they write about them in novels.

Yes, I have to keep stopping myself from thinking that Spark’s novel tells me something about Spark just because it is built from real things that she observed or experienced. Indeed, any novel that can’t stand on its own is probably not worth reading as literature.

I don’t want to rush the end of the discussion, but it seems to be winding down so I thought I would propose the next book. How about The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells? Alberto Manguel said of it on re-reading it as an adult, “Though it has lost nothing of its wonderful horror, as I grow older it seems to have become a far more difficult and complex book, crowded with literary allusions.” I have not read it at all but it sounds intriguing. And, if we want to contiune including “extra credit” reading, Wells has plenty of books to choose from.

Cool! I was hoping for either sci-fi or poetry.

Awesome.  I haven’t read any Wells whatsoever, so I’m happy!

Should we plan discussion for August 30th?

Fine with me.

Where’d everyone go? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

August 30th works for me.  People must be gone because of holiday weekend, I guess.

The mass disappearance is rather unsettling.

Alien abduction? Or gone book-shopping? 

dtorres - 30 June 2006 04:11 PM

I think Brodie is a bit of a fixation for Sandy really.  Maybe it is a love hate sort of thing.  Brodie is too much for her, but she can’t quite walk away entirely.  Maybe she wants what Brodie can’t have?  But since she had the affair with the music teacher, why not with Mr. Lloyd?  Or maybe he was a substitute as mentioned for her lost soldier and she wanted to keep the fantasy pure?  I didn’t understand why she was pushing Rose into doing it.  There is a lot of psychological manuevering going on here, isn’t there. 
Danielle

I think you’re on to something with regard to the love/hate relationship.  Spark addresses it elsewhere.  From The Only Problem:  “If there’s anything I can’t stand it’s a love-hate relationship,’ Harvey said, turning back to Edward at last.  ‘The element of love in such a relationship simply isn’t worthy of the name.  It boils down to hatred pure and simple in the end.  Love comprises among other things a desire for the well-being and spiritual freedom of the one who is loved.  There’s an objective quality about love.  Love-hate is obsessive, it is possessive.  It can be evil in effect.’

I didn’t think about it when I read this, but doesn’t this summarize Brodie & Sandy’s relationship?  Neither of them are objective about the other—Brodie can’t see that Sandy was her betrayor; Sandy as an adult can only consider Brodie as ‘silly’.  Brodie possesses her girls, especially Sandy and Rose, and she is obsessive in knowing about their dealings with Mr. Lloyd.  She wants her girls to believe exactly as she does with regards to the world, art, and religion.  She does not allow them the freedom to disagree with her—whether it is the Girl Guides or Calvinism or Catholicism.  Likewise, Sandy loves/hates Miss Brodie.  She acknowledges that she was a shaping influence in her life, but she can’t stand Miss Brodie.  That is why she has the affair with Mr. Lloyd, why she tells the headmistress Brodie is a fascist, and perhaps why she joins the convent where she is more confined than free.  By repudiating Miss Brodie’s beliefs, she ‘trumps’ Brodie.  She “wins”.  It is both obsessive and possessive, and although Sandy claims that it took her years to recover from Miss Brodie, I don’t think that is an honest statement.  She has not forgiven Miss Brodie at the end and still seems just as obsessed with her years after her death.

Maybe Sandy has the affair because she wants to get into Brodie’s state of mind just a little bit. To be like her or to accumulate intelligence against her, I am not sure.

In several of the reviews and comments, as above, we have begun thoughts with “Maybe.” Spark seems to leave a lot up to the reader to figure out, which I suppose helps make her thin novels so interesting. Maybe I didn’t put enough effort into my reading to appreciate the writing enough.

After reading Cam’s review I am also struck by how varied Spark’s subjects seem to be. A lot of originality, and she incorporates a lot of different genre-types into each novel.

I like the selection of Wells.

Spark DOES leave a lot for us to figure out, which I think is part of the fun of the book, and what makes it so interesting.  Cam, I think you are right that Sandy can’t be objective about Brodie—what kind of victory is it when the victory involves continuing to think about Brodie and obsess about her?  I was more ready to believe her statement that she has recovered from Brodie, but this recovery came at such a huge cost.  Whatever she says or does, it really is Brodie that shaped her life.  I think when she was older she became better able to see the good things in Brodie, but this only came after a lot of work.  I’m curious about Sandy’s psychological book—The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.  What do you think thiis book is about?  How does it relate to the rest of the novel?