Book Rec: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Betrayal is one of the themes in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. Set in Edinburgh during the 1930s, the novel centers on a bold, unusual schoolteacher (Miss Brodie) and a small group of girls she takes under her wing. From about the time they're 10 to when they leave school at 17, they're called the "Brodie set," as if they're part of an exclusive club.

Miss Brodie's mission is ostensibly to give the girls a much broader education than they'd receive through the school's ordinary curriculum. But over time it seems that she's trying to mold them to her own liking or fix them in place with her own labels or judgments. I think that's one of the betrayals in the book – when students begin to seem less like students and more like acolytes, or like attendants in the court of a queen. To what extent can Miss Brodie fix their path in life, given her influence over them?

And how empty is her own life, that she needs such a degree of influence over her students? In what ways has she betrayed herself?

At different points in the book, the narrative flashes forward to show the girls as adults. It's revealed that one of them betrays Miss Brodie to the headmistress of the school by revealing the teacher's fascist sympathies. Miss Brodie's admiration of fascism seems like it's based on puffed-up fantasies (also, it's interesting how the nonconformity of Miss Brodie, who refuses to be like other teachers, co-exists with her fondness for the Blackshirts and with her own desire to mold her students and their paths in life).

When the student informs on her, to what extent is it an act of betrayal? You're left to wonder at all of the motives at play. If Miss Brodie violated the trust and responsibility of her position as teacher, informing on her may be seen as a necessary act, even if her misdeeds have less to do with her misguided admiration of Mussolini and more to do with how she attempts to influence the girls. The student in question may also have been trying to gain some control over Miss Brodie; she may have been struggling with the profound influence Miss Brodie has had on her life. It may be that the student Miss Brodie influences most – the one who becomes most psychologically enmeshed with the errant teacher – is also the one who turns on her.

Nine Short Stories With Major Betrayals

Title: Dosas
Author: Edwidge Danticat
Where I read it: Tales of Two Americas

Elsie, a Haitian immigrant who works in the U.S. providing home health care, gets an urgent call from her ex-husband. Apparently, his girlfriend has been kidnapped in Port-Au-Prince. Elsie has already been betrayed by her husband and his girlfriend before, so she could just hang up on him. Instead, she hears him out and agrees to help.

As an immigrant, Elsie would have hoped to find a community she can rely on, with people she can trust. But she's pretty much on her own. In the course of her job, she helps another Haitian immigrant suffering from renal failure, but he's wealthy, and any sympathy he or his daughter feel for her is limited. Already, she has suffered profound betrayal in her personal life. Maybe she's willing to risk a lot to stay connected to people, because the alternative, a life of mistrust and loneliness, isn't bearable to her; she's already profoundly lonely. By the end of the story, she seems like someone baring her neck to vampires. And there are true vampires in this story, draining her.

Title: Family Man
Author: Annie Proulx
Where I read it: Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3

What's the legacy you've been left with, and what legacy do you leave to others? The main character is spending his final years in a nursing home, among people who watch a lot of TV and paint their faces. He comes across people he once knew, or thought he knew, but they've changed from how he remembers them. Who were they, and who is he?

In the course of the story, his granddaughter visits him and expresses an interest in his life. What he shares with her isn't inspirational, not the kind of story you're eager to pass from one generation to the next. His past contains a deep betrayal by his father. I don't want to spoil it all here. Suffice it to say that he had discovered a shattering lie that showed him how little he was seen as a person worthy of love and respect, and how much he had missed of the father-son bond a boy craves – to be uniquely his father's son and carry his father's name proudly.

Two Movies Where Women Face Contempt From Their Families

Title: English Vinglish (2012)
Director: Gauri Shinde
Language: English and Hindi, with some French too
Rating: Not rated

Shashi (Sridevi) is a quiet, unassuming married woman who runs a small business from her home selling laddoo, an Indian sweet treat often served on special occasions. Because she doesn't speak English or show much worldly sophistication, she's regularly treated with dismissiveness and contempt by her husband, Satish (Adil Hussain), and daughter, Sapna (Navika Kotia). A shift in her life comes when she flies to New York to help with a family wedding. Secretly, she enrolls in a crash course in English, attended by people from around the world, including Laurent (Mehdi Nebbou), a Frenchman who falls in love with her.

The movie is bright and polished. Much of its depth of emotion comes from Sridevi's performance. Her acting really carries the film and makes even the clichés entertaining. The most moving scene is highlighted in the screen capture above: at the family wedding, Shashi stands and delivers a speech. During one part, she describes the beauty of a family – how a family isn't judgmental and will never make you feel small or mock your weaknesses, but will always give you love and respect. Many families (including her own) fall short of this, sometimes far short. Shashi describes her hopes of a haven free of contempt.

Title: The Heiress (1949)
Director: William Wyler
Language: English
Rating: Not rated

Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland) is the only child of a widowed doctor, Austin Sloper (Ralph Richardson), who often reminds her, in various small sighing ways, that she isn't nearly as beautiful, witty, charismatic, or accomplished as her late mother.

Though Catherine lacks a lot of the qualities that would make her a social success, she's still a kind and gentle person who's full of love. Unfortunately, the people closest to her place little if any value on her good nature.

Who does love her? Not her father - something she realizes more starkly as the film goes by. What about Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), a handsome young man she meets at a party? Morris seems charming and tender, and it isn't long before he and Catherine are making plans to get married. But her father disapproves, insisting that Morris is a mere fortune hunter who's pretending to love Catherine because of her inheritance.

The movie is a powerful look at how betrayal and lack of love can harden someone. Catherine's fine qualities wither under the contempt, ruthlessness, and dishonesty displayed by the people she loves most.

Olivia de Havilland has an expressive face and eyes. She's wonderful at playing the sweet-natured, naive, helpful, loving, loyal, kind, shy, and socially awkward woman... and later transforming into the compelling figure of the cold and terrible beauty. (If you feel optimistic, you can hope that one day she will find someone honest and loving, and will not shut out the world entirely. That maybe her capacities for love and trust have not been permanently destroyed.)

Two Short Stories Involving Girls Suppressing a Memory of Betrayal

Title: The Girl Who Loved Graveyards
Author: P.D. James (Phyllis Dorothy James)
Where I Read It: Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales

It was to be another warm day, and over the serried rows of headstones lay a thin haze pierced by the occasional obelisk and by the wing tips of marble angels whose disembodied heads seemed to be floating on particles of shimmering light. And as she watched, motionless in an absorbed enchantment, the mist began to rise and the whole cemetery was revealed to her, a miracle of stone and marble, bright grass and summer-laden trees, flower-bedecked graves and intersecting paths as far as the eye could see.

This is a quiet, brutal story. It ends with the main character going on a journey to uncover her past, only to find a great gaping nothing. What awaits her is the recognition of a guilt and loss that have already hollowed out her life.

The story begins when she moves in with her aunt and uncle around her 10th birthday. She has been told that her father and grandmother both died of the flu. Until she becomes an adult, her main pleasure in life is to take refuge in a local graveyard. She feels most at home among the dead.

Her aunt and uncle aren't affectionate, and she doesn't have friends. The one relic from her life before her aunt and uncle's house is a cat, and she doesn't even like it. Although she has stifled her memories of her earlier childhood, the events she doesn't remember have left their stamp on her and her relationship with everyone and everything around her.

Those first ten years were a void, unsubstantial as a dream that had faded but that had left on her mind a scar of unarticulated childish anxiety and fear.

The part of the story when she rediscovers these events is horrifying. Memories spring to life, bringing clarity but no hope.

It seemed to her that she had passed through a barrier of fear as a tortured victim might pass through a pain barrier into a kind of peace.

Title: Lavender Lady
Author: Barbara Callahan
Where I Read It: Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives

A folk singer has written a song about a nanny who watched over her as a child. The song speaks of love, devotion, and sudden loss. But when she sings it, she becomes overwhelmed with sadness and fatigue, as if the song demands an extraordinary amount of energy to complete.

The story is a good example of the mind's denials betrayed by the body's truth. The singer doesn't want to examine the beautiful lies she's spun around her former nanny. Her conscious mind can't accept the truth. Her body, however, betrays the presence of a dark memory.

Some thoughts on Home by Toni Morrison

In this Toni Morrison novel, two siblings leave their backwoods Georgia home, get even more scarred out in the world, and come back to find that home is a more complicated place than they’d ever thought. Not as stifling as in their childhood, and offering possibilities for rebuilding their lives.

The novel is set in the 1950s, and one of the siblings, Frank, has returned to the U.S. from the Korean War. He brings with him post-traumatic stress and memories that make it difficult for him to live with himself. He’s also black, and needs to transition from a recently desegregated army back to a society where segregation is still the norm, through official enforcement in some places and unofficial enforcement in others.

Meanwhile, his younger sister, Cee (nickname for Ycidra), flees her hateful grandmother by running off to Atlanta with a man who dumps her. Her search for better paying work brings her to the home of an unscrupulous doctor who hires her as his assistant and conducts unethical medical experiments on her and others.

It’s relatively rare to see novels featuring Korean War vets (and black vets, more generally). During the war, Frank has seen and done things that he can’t come back from. (“Back was the free-floating rage, the self-loathing disguised as somebody else’s fault.”) He has discovered things about himself that he would never have guessed at and that he doesn’t know how to confront.

The novel explores the question of what a home truly is. The characters lead precarious lives, and they could be driven out of their homes all too easily. So how does someone create a home when violence, destruction, illness, and complete destitution are nipping at the borders and can spill in at any moment?

Home is not simply a place, it’s a set of relationships and connections, and deep impressions on the mind and heart. The characters have perpetrated or witnessed profound violations in the world. Home is a place where you’re not degraded and where you ought to be free of those violations. At home, you can confront the demons and have people stand beside you.

Cee gains new strength with the help of women who stand in for the lack of a mother figure in her life. Chief among them is Ethel Fordham, who tells her, “Somewhere inside you is that free person I’m talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world.”

So home is where you can heal, among people who find worth in you, and it’s where you can do worthy things, even in the face of harsh odds. Of Ethel’s garden:

Her garden was not Eden; it was so much more than that. For her the whole predatory world threatened her garden, competing with its nourishment, its beauty, its benefits, and its demands. And she loved it.

Morrison doesn’t sentimentalize home or make the folks of this backwoods town charming and endearingly simple. Other authors might have gone down that path and trivialized the story and the struggle of these scarred characters.

Five Short Stories About Terribly Dysfunctional Marriages

This is a fruitful topic for short fiction.

Title: Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree
Author: Helen Nielsen
Where I Read It: Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives
The main character thinks she's past the point of making terrible mistakes with men, that her life is stable now, but she's wrong. Her husband makes her feel that she needs to be on a pedestal - and then ultimately prove that she's like all other women by falling off it. It's that sort of relationship pattern. In any case, she starts getting calls from someone in her past. She assumes she's being blackmailed or stalked. She's smart and careful in general, but not about the people close to her. This story has murder and betrayal.

Title: Her Three Days
Author: Sembène Ousmane
Translator: Len Ortzen
Where I Read It: The Anchor Book of Modern African Stories
The story is set in a culture with polygamous marriages, and the main character is one of four wives. She's awaiting the three days her husband is meant to spend with her and recognizes that she's falling out of favor with him. I remember her observation about the pretenses in her marriage, the lies she needs to tell to make the marriage seem worthwhile. She has to pretend that her husband is a good man, because her identity is bound to his stature and character. If she has submitted to a man who isn't worthy of respect, what does this say about the meaning of her life and its worth?

Good Short Fiction: Mateo Falcone and The Return of the Prodigal Son

Story Collection: Great French Short Stories
Editor: Paul Negri

I highly recommend these two stories.

Title: Mateo Falcone
Author: Prosper Mérimée
Translator: Stanley Appelbaum

This brutal story explores the concept of honor, and how it can be far removed from mercy and humanity. Set in Corsica a couple of centuries ago, the story shows a society where men are inseparable from their guns; there's a striking image of a husband and wife walking home, with the wife burdened under a heavy load of chestnuts, while the husband merely carries two rifles - as it's beneath a man's dignity to bear anything but his guns. Murder is acceptable, as long as certain conditions are met, chief among them an insult to one's manhood - whether it's to a man himself, his family, or his property, with a blurry distinction between the three.

The action centers on the young son of Mateo Falcone, a well-known property owner. The boy is at home alone when a criminal approaches him and asks for shelter from pursuing soldiers; the boy agrees, after the criminal pays him a small sum. Soon after, the infantrymen show up, headed by a sergeant who bribes the boy to reveal the whereabouts of the criminal. More than one betrayal follows.

Title: The Return of the Prodigal Son
Author: André Gide
Translator: Wallace Fowlie

After wandering far afield, the prodigal son in the story returns to his home and enters into dialogue with four family members: his father, his older brother, his mother, and his younger brother. Each family member represents a different aspect of the prodigal son's struggle between his desire to seek in the wilderness what he can't find in society, and the forces that lead him to renounce his wanderings.

His father represents comfort and stability, along with the bonds of love. Interestingly, his father seems to understand that love can be expressed in multiple ways - that his son could have loved him both from the comforts of home, and from the wilderness, without forgetting or despising him. As for the prodigal son's older brother, he's taken over as the authority figure in the house and represents a strict morality, holding that there's only one true way of life that one must follow with complete obedience. With the mother, the prodigal son speaks of self-denial and humility, placing the needs of others over his own and defining himself only by his relationships with his family; he renounces his need to seek a personal identity beyond that. And then, what brings the story round full circle - in his younger brother, the prodigal son discovers what he once was, or thought he was.

What I love about the story is how it explores different sides of morality, especially as it's expressed in conformity to societal norms. What keeps people from straying from their obligations and duties? What is both attractive and terrifying about the wilderness?

I also thought of the story from the angle of religious practice. In some ways, the father represents divine love, while the elder brother is impatient with the complexity of this love and claims to be able to cut through it and see the one truth that must be submitted to without question:

"I know what the Father said to you. It was vague. He no longer expresses himself very clearly, so that he can be made to say what one wants. But I understand his thought very well. With the servants, I am the one interpreter, and who wants to understand the Father must listen to me... There are not several ways of understanding the Father. There are not several ways of listening to him. There are not several ways of loving him, so that we may be united in his love."

The elder brother, who sets himself up as an enforcer of his father's will, is really attempting to rule over his own father as well, defining him narrowly and making him conform to his own vision. A religious fundamentalist, or any strict ideologue really, would think this way.

Worth Watching: Tales of Manhattan (1942)

Title: Tales of Manhattan
Director: Julien Duvivier
Language: English
Rating: Unrated

Tales of Manhattan is made up of a series of vignettes involving a cursed evening coat. Coming in contact with the coat might bring you misfortune, though in many cases the misfortune reveals an important truth or blessing in disguise.

From Wikipedia

Each vignette is distinct, with its own storyline and set of characters. They're also uneven in quality. Sometimes Tales of Manhattan is great; other times you wonder what the filmmakers were thinking. But I'm recommending it anyway, because it's packed with wonderful actors who do some strong work with whatever they're given.

First Tale
A temperamental actor (Charles Boyer) isn't sure that the woman he's having an affair with (Rita Hayworth) will leave her loveless marriage. Boyer has a compelling screen presence, and Hayworth is mesmerizing. A lot of the action is set in an eerie hunting lodge where the walls are crowned with the antlers of slain deer.