Maggie Smith’s Greatest Literary Role is Also Her Most Complex: Miss Jean Brodie

“Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.”

It was certainly true of me.

My sense of what life ought to feel like has long been colored by a streak of purple and scarlet across a landscape of gray—that is, by Maggie Smith’s 1969 depiction of Scottish novelist Muriel Spark’s most notorious protagonist, Miss Jean Brodie.

It has something to do with the fact life that life got grayer, and essentially less lifelike, for everyone else while it blazed for Miss Brodie. As a nine-year-old, I was drawn to her fieriness; now, as an adult schooled in the ways of how we give ourselves over to muted tones, I understand, admire, and even cling to it. It has everything to do with the unsettling seduction of a character who is at her most magnificent and most destructive in the same moments—and even in the same words.

Dame Maggie Smith’s recent death brought me back to a literary role from her repertoire that, until the end of last month, didn’t occur to those of us born after 1990 when we think of her. Like most millennials, I grew up watching Smith in versions of the same role: Mrs. Medlock in The Secret Garden, Betsey Trotwood in the BBC’s David Copperfield, the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey, and Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter films. The type was recognizable: stern, no-nonsense older women with a tinder-dry wit and an occasional soft side—and, of course, the “Maggie Smith type” emanated from Smith’s own ability to shoot any line given her like a barb, sharp and ironic.

But her performance as the title character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), based on Spark’s novel of the same name (1961), ignited something in me from an impressionable age because it was far more complex than this type. Both the novel and film adaptation chart the downfall of the eponymous, egoistic, passionate Scottish school teacher, who works at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls, and the unwittingly destructive effects she wreaks upon the lives of her pupils.

This is one of those rare instances in which a film adaptation isn’t measured by how well it adheres to the novel, but the ways in which it illuminates the original work even further. As a piece of cinema, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is an articulation of the entanglement of interior ideals and an unaccommodating external environment—the protagonist at once heroically and damningly grappling with the web of what is, armed with her flawed vision of what it ought to be. This ethically fraught combination is at the foundation of the novel as a genre.

Like many people both inside Spark’s fiction and out of it, I have always been a little in love with Jean Brodie—and more than a little aware of how problematic it is to be in love with her. Smith performs Jean Brodie as a creature of opposites, and as magnetic as she is complex.

On one hand, she is a fiery rebel, a force sweeping through the film in bold colors. She has a heady, infectious sense of her own powers—her “prime” is a drug of which the audience also partakes and feels the intoxicating effects. This effect is somewhat evident in the 1962 New York Times review of the novel, which ambivalently acknowledges the imaginative reality of Brodie’s romantic energy even as it tries to take a step back and classify the character as an absurd, familiar, even slightly biddy-ish brand of eccentric:

Most of us have known someone like Miss Jean Brodie. She may have been a teacher… a somewhat disreputable aunt or an unspeakable cousin, perhaps the mother of one’s best friend… She seizes upon docile little girls… She spins tales of her dead lover; she tells them about Giotto, she introduces them to the secrets of cosmetics; she tries to make them Europeans instead of dowdy little provincials… Miss Brodie’s hectic and undisciplined enthusiasms include fascism as well as Tennyson; each is an approach to the Absolute she seeks. For Miss Brodie has triumphantly entered her “prime.” She speaks of it with such conviction that it becomes a visible presence to her girls, like a splendid garment. And yet, ridiculous as it is, Miss Brodie’s prime is a vitality of spirit that is just as real as the girls imagined.

The Times reviewer was caught between the poles of Brodie’s “vitality” and “ridiculousness.” Smith’s performance foregrounds a dichotomy internal to the character—but not this one. On the surface of things, she depicts Brodie’s “vitality” as a self-conscious heroism—a warrior on a crusade.

In one famous scene making the rounds on social media since Smith’s death, Brodie defies Marcia Blaine’s conservative headmistress, who attempts to use a love letter to the music teacher, penned by two of Brodie’s students in Brodie’s voice, as a basis for firing her. This, paradoxically, is Brodie’s high tide of strength in the film as she declares first to the headmistress, “I will not resign and you will not dismiss me,” followed by an impassioned assertion that “I am a teacher first, last, always. Do you imagine for one moment that I will let that be taken from me without a fight?”

There is nothing ridiculous about Jean Brodie at this moment, and everything to be admired. This is, in Georg Lukacs’s terms in his Theory of the Novel (1916), the novel protagonist as epic hero. Brodie is at her most magnificent when she has something to resist—paradoxically strongest when at risk of being defeated—and everyone knows it.

Sandy, the former student who eventually brings about Miss Brodie’s downfall, played by Pamela Franklin, remarks in the film’s climactic scene how quickly she rebounds from the rubble of her own destruction, telling her, “I knew you would rise like a phoenix.” And even when film-Sandy tells her, in a moment of vengeful spite, “You really are a ridiculous woman,” her unwitting echo of the Times’ review doesn’t quite hit the mark. Smith’s interpretation of Brodie isn’t ridiculous—but something else instead.

That “something else” is made up of several ingredients: Brodie is narcissistic, destructive, reckless, and frequently mean even to her favorite students… not to mention a Mussolini fangirl. Whether there is one cohesive term for this bucket of ills is doubtful, but their sum has a decided effect: counterbalancing Brodie’s heroism is something ominous, observable in the effects she has on people’s lives. She sees her students as proxies for herself, lives vicariously through them.

All aspects of Jean Brodie, all the expressions of her prime, are personified in her favorite students, whom the film condenses into four girls: Jenny embodies her sexuality, Sandy her cunning, Monica her performativity, and the timid Mary, ironically, her bold, activist spirit. The so-called “Brodie set” is also a set of Brodies, partial duplicates whose identities are dissolved into hers. These are the moments in Smith’s performance when Brodie’s ideals crack. She tries to set her lover, the art teacher, up romantically with Jenny by suggesting that he paint her and telling him that Jenny is “elevated above the ordinary run of lovers”; when he confronts her with the reality of what she is trying to do, the languid tone and cadence of her romantic idealism fall away, and she spits out instead the most direct line that Brodie speaks in the film, “Don’t be disgusting!”

The dipole of Brodie’s character as Smith depicts her is thus not between the vital and the ridiculous, but between the powerful and the destructive, the ideal and its implosion. In this way, Smith’s performance is evocative of Lukacs’s theorization about another aspect of the novel as a genre: its essentially biographical form.

The contingent world and the problematic individual are realities which mutually determine one another. If the individual is unproblematic, then his aims are given to him with immediate obviousness, and the realization of the world constructed by these given aims…never [involve] any serious threat to his interior life. Such a threat arises only when the outside world is no longer adapted to the individual’s ideas and the ideas become subjective facts—ideals—in his soul.

The novel, in Lukacs’s theory, is a genre that is always “becoming,” a form whose life is paradoxically generated by an “unfulfillable, sentimental striving” for being—a reaching, as Brodie does, for a unity between life and ideals. Smith’s Oscar-winning performance embodies this striving to singular effects: Brodie is ethically uncategorizable, perennially alluring, and therefore always incomplete. So, we keep coming back to her.

The credit for the film’s depiction of the suspension between the unaccommodated individual and the world around her goes also to the screenwriter, Jacqueline (“Jay”) Presson Allen, who chose to end the film at a point of narrative suspension. While Spark’s novel includes Brodie’s eventual death and the children’s adult lives, the film cuts off abruptly after Sandy, in Brodie’s words “assassinates” her—that is, turns her in to the headmistress for promoting fascism, resulting in her dismissal. This cataclysmic scene showcases the final clash between Brodie’s ideals and Sandy, who has evolved into the personification of their opposite.

The novel does not include such a scene at all—indeed, in the book, Miss Brodie withers and fades into a fragile, confused creature, pathetically fixated on the unanswered question of which of her girls betrayed her: “The whine in her voice—’…betrayed me, betrayed me’—bored and afflicted Sandy. It is seven years, thought Sandy, since I betrayed this tiresome woman.” Spark’s Miss Brodie is a diminished woman, past her prime, who never rises like a phoenix—and dies without discovering that Sandy was the agent of her downfall.

By contrast, the last shot of Smith in the film is striking and gives us a sense of the character’s world coming violently undone. She is sinking even as she thrashes against the tide pulling her under. She stands outside her classroom, the silent air rent by her shrieks of “Assassin!”, hurled at Sandy’s impassive back as she walks away.

In the film, we don’t know what happens to Miss Brodie after this—does she rise like a phoenix? Does the not-quite epic hero keep striving against the world that keeps shutting out her ideals? Do the Brodie set take those ideals into adulthood, evening the balance between Brodian ideals and the universe? This adaptation cuts the narrative off in medias res: we are suspended by the character’s unresolved relationship to the universe and the disruptive break in the narrative—so we keep coming back to the film in search of resolutions that we are never to be given.

The film illustrates how the unresolved conflict between individual and world becomes a source of the novel’s striving for being. Anna Karenina, Wuthering Heights, and The Return of the Native (and, as the film but not the book reminds us, pretty much anything by D.H. Lawrence) are novels that enact similar strivings—and of which Miss Brodie, funnily enough, would probably approve. We return to Jean Brodie, and to great novels, to feel ourselves caught in the crossfire between battling truths—in the dissonance between what we idealize and what we cannot bring ourselves to accept that we idealize. In Lukacs’s words, “Art always says ‘And yet!’ to life.”

Miss Brodie’s example makes me, too, want to drink life like cherry wine—and I have probably found life more intoxicating these last two decades, thrown myself into it more intensely and powerfully than I would have without this character.

And yet, Miss Brodie’s narcissism subsumes everyone in her orbit into a project of destructive self-replication.

And yet, Miss Brodie teaches that “goodness, truth, and beauty” transcend the status quo.

And yet…