Tess Of Durbervilles Essays - Novellas, , Term Papers

Tess of Durbervilles Annonymous Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie depicts the coming of age of six adolescent girls in Edinburgh, Scotland during the 1930's. The story brings us into the classroom of Miss Jean Brodie, a fascist school teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, and gives close encounter with the social and political climate in Europe during the era surrounding the second World War. Spark's novel is a narrative relating to us the complexities of politics and of social conformity, as well as of non- conformity. Through looking at the Brodie set and the reciprocities between these students and their teacher, the writer, in this novel, reviews the essence of group dynamics and brings in to focus the adverse effects that the power of authority over the masses can produce. Sparks, in so doing projects her skepticism toward the teacher's ideologies. This skepticism is played out through the persona of Sandy Stranger, who becomes the central character in a class of Marcia Blaine school girls. Sandy's character is even more focally sculpted than the teacher's favored disciples who came to be known as the Brodie Set; a small group of girls favored by Miss Jean Brodie in her Prime. The Brodie Set is a social system and a enigmatic network of social relations that acts to draw the behavior of its members toward the core values of the clique. The teacher Miss Jean Brodie projects upon this impressionable set, her strong fascist opinions. She controls this group on the basis that she is in her prime. Her prime being the point in life when she is at the height of wisdom and insight. Sandy pejoratively uses the personality traits and ideology of Brodie to overthrow her, by unveiling them. Sparks is clearly opposed to the kind of authoritarian power and control that is exercised over the impressionable adolescents by a conniving school teacher. The writer thus uses the pitfalls of social conformity found in classical studies, in order to make specific points. For example, research done by social psychologists Muzafer, Carolyn Sherif and Solomon Asch treated social conformity as an aspect of group dynamics (Coon, 560). This is present in Spark's novel, as seen by the dynamics of the group formed by a teacher named Miss Brodie. Brodie's students, like the subjects of the said psychological studies, conform to a set of beliefs under the pressure and power of suggestion despite what could be better judgement. This is shown in the passage when Sandy expresses the desire to be nice to Mary, but decides not to because she knew that such an action would not be in accordance with the Brodie Set's system of behavior (Spark, 46). The narrator says about Sandy: She was even more frightened then, by her temptation to be nice to Mary Macgregor, since by this action she would separate herself, and be lonely, and blameable in a more dreadful way than Mary who, although officially the faulty one, was at least inside Miss Brodie's category of heroines in the making. Theorists would say that an individual tends to conform to a unanimous group judgment even when that judgment is obviously in error (Coon, 561). The more eager an individual is to become a member of a group, the more that person tends to orient his or her behavior to the norms of the group (Coon, 561). This eagerness is true of Sandy Stranger. Miss Brodie often makes reference to Sandy overdoing things, or trying to hard. If the Brodie Set must hold their heads high, Sandy held her head the highest (Spark, 35). Miss Brodie warned that One day, Sandy, you will go too far. Also, the more ambiguous the situation, the greater the group's influence on the individual (Coon, 562). When the group's judgment reflects personal or aesthetic preference, however, the individual feels little pressure to conform as is the case with Spark's character, Sandy Stranger. Brodie's fascism, born of an authoritarian political movement that developed in Italy and other European countries after 1919 as a reaction against the political and social changes brought about by World War I, is projected in this novel as the unsettling proliferation of socialism and communism in Europe during the 1930's and 1940's. The early Fascist program was a mixture of left and right wing ideas that emphasized intense nationalism, productivism, antisocialism, elitism, and the need for a strong authoritarian leadership (Homans, 451). This was the Brodie ideology. With the postwar economic crisis, a widespread lack of confidence in the traditional political system, and a growing fear of socialism, Fascist ideology