Passage from the book
Plot Diagram
Analysis of style
Muriel Spark tends to have a style that involves repetition. The most prominent example is when Spark describes Brodie’s posture, she always says “ She held her head up, up” (56). First one must look at the events and circumstances surrounding the moment when Brodie is described as holding her head “up,up”. Whenever Ms. Spark uses repetition of the word up it is because Miss Brodie has some need to conduct herself as if she was above those around her, the tilt in her head is a form of condescension. For example, on page 56 Brodie is being subjected to sneering tones from her colleagues because of an indiscretion she had with a married man but she “flattens their scorn beneath the chariot wheels of her superiority” by “deviating her head towards them no more than an insulting half- inch…(holding) her head up, up.” This passage specifically characterizes Miss Brodie as a very proud and fearless woman who will not back down or go back on what she has done; the disapproval of those she considers to be beneath her seems to even drive her more because she has not given in to their influences and is above their sphere approval. The repetition also serves to characterize her teaching style, more specifically. Miss Brodie’s whole objective throughout the book is to teach the girls of her “set” and imprint her own ideas to be facts in their minds. Spark uses subliminal messages in hand with repetition to show Miss Brodie’s other, darker and hidden, nature. When Brodie imparts knowledge onto her students she quickly turns it into a question where the only correct answer is repeating what she has just said. This causes the girls to take what Brodie says as a matter of fact not opinion. Spark also mentions Brodie’s affinity for Benito Mussolini and his teachings of fascism. Throughout the book the Miss Brodie praises Mussolini and his fasciti and at one point it is even said that “the Brodie set was Miss Brodie’s fasciti…marching along” (31). Directly after this thought is presented Brodie takes the girls for a stroll through the parts of the city where unemployment and violence are high simply to talk about how that is no longer an issue in Italy because “Mussolini has performed feats of magnitude and unemployment is even farther abolished”(45). Both repetition and Miss Brodie’s hidden imposition of opinion relate back to the book’s major theme of individuality, or lack thereof. The repetition outlines Brodie’s strongly developed character whereas Spark’s hidden messages show the lack of freedom for the girls to develop the same for themselves.