Spark’s characters are interiorised. This means that they are involved in a search for the self that accommodates both personal fulfilment and political or social claims. Personal obsessions guide those characters.
They turn their lives into channels of self-righteous imagination and bring about their destruction. Miss Brodie is one of the characters who is an eccentric spinster and school teacher. She has fine judgement of character and specializes in organising the lives of the Brodie set.
She dislikes team spirit which contravenes individual freedom. She thinks herself that she can seek the beginning and end of the proteges. She resists all questions which question her unorthodox methods. Her pupils also carry this impression. They are unquestioning and uncritical absorbing all that she says. These characters take a hostile stand against those who intrude in the classroom and appear to change the ways of Miss Brodie.
Miss Brodie emanates from those parents who could be trusted “not to lodge complaints about the more advanced and seditious aspects of her educational policy.” She shares also a personal equation with Brodie set. She was ready to go where even her parents feared to treat her. Brodie took them to the world of art by explaining to them the feats of Italian Renaissance painters. They developed an appreciation for operas and also understood the temperament of devoted artists like Anna Pavlova and Sybil Thorndike. Miss Brodie invited them to meals and in this way developed in the girls a sense of indebtedness. She used that sense for her personal advantage. Miss Brodie had a great hold over the girls. It is observed in her machinations and manipulations regarding the future of Rose and Sandy. Miss Brodie oversteps the limits when she is found manipulating situations in order to make Rose Mr Lloyd’s lover. She says that Rose’s instinct would particularly appeal to the art master. Miss Brodie then convinces Sand that she would be an ideal informant on the Lloyd-Rose least. But Sandy does not agree and rejects the teacher’s plan.
The relationship between Miss Brodie and Mr Lowther does not last long. This is due to the fact that the very base of the relationship was deceit and fraud. Miss Brodie convinces her student that her aim was that the falling health of Mr. Lowther did not deteriorate further, but improved. Mr. Lowther suffered from bad health due to the departure of old housekeeper and the non-availability of her replacement for a long time. The Kerr sisters keep Mr. Lowther on tenterhooks and after that start neglecting him thinking that she could marry him at any time. But she feels a great shock. Mr Lowther is engaged to Miss Lockheart, a science teacher. When war clouds were hovering over Europe, the idealogy of Miss Brodie proved to be a failure. She believed in fascim and praised Mussolini and Hitler.
For these beliefs, Sandy betrays her. She thinks that the Girl Guides are her rivals who will disband Brodie set. She is unable to understand that she is coming in between the independence of others. She has a false notion that whoever so comes in her way will surrender to her. In his way, she believes in abusing power. But she fails in her motive and loses her control over others. The pathos of the downfall and the importance of her defeat is conveyed through a description of her sitting “Shrivelled and betrayed in her long preserved dark musquash coat and her blind groping for the real identity of her betrayer.”
Sandy also exhibits propensities of psychological and moral growth. She is in search of herself. It leads her through many diverse experiences and ultimately she becomes a nun. Spark has created Sandy to offset Brodie. She goes on a mission that in the very beginning questions, after that defies, and in the end betrays Miss Brodie for what she is. From the very beginning, Sandy starts investigating Miss Brodie’s weakness. She relies on her experience, images and conscience to help her in this quest. In the beginning, she only tentatively assents to Miss Brodie’s ideology and thinking.
First of all, she disturbs her class by asking Marry to give an incorrect answer.
Then she walks with her head bent back gazing at the ceiling and telling Miss Brodie that she is imitating the big actress Sybil Thorndike and purposely keeps away from Miss Brodie’s tea party after going through the Edinburgh slums. She does all that to watch Miss Brodie’s reactions to subtle forms of defiance. Sandy is often told of that one day she “Will go too far”. by surpassing the limits given by the teacher to her girls.
As time passes, Sandy’s experience of Miss Brodie’s domination over the girls is supplemented by images that reinforce her opinion. When Mr Lloyds kisses Miss Brodie in the art room after school hours, Sandy starts thinking about the sexual aspect of Miss Brodie’s love. Jenny reports about the incident. She is the only one in Brodie’s set who is able to identify the image of the teacher in any figure that Mr. Lloyd claims to paint Sandy, in this way, concludes that Miss Brodie had a passion and sexual yearning for the married art teacher could not be fulfilled.
Emily Joyce goes to fight in the Spanish civil war for General Franco where she meets a tragic end. Sandy revolts against Miss Brodie’s doctrine. She tells Miss Mackay that Miss Brodies has fascist views that her actions constitute authorial agreement.
Spark agrees with Sandy in some aspects, enters a convent, and publishes a psychological treatise which is known as “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.” Sandy is not much different from Miss Brodies. She is in many ways identical to Miss Brodie. Her sense of personal guilt and revenge hound her, which reflect in her picture as sister Helena. Both Miss Brodie and Sandy feel isolated in the later years of their lives. Miss Brodie is shaken by the knowledge that she has been betrayed. She meets her never knowing what the real cause was of her tragic end. Sandy, who later becomes a nun and is known as a sister. Helena lives and achieves fame but she is always aware of cruelly betraying a woman to whom she could never recount the past.
Both Miss Brodie and Sandy arouse the compassing and outrage of the readers. They openly stand against the conventions both in public and personal life. But they cannot perceive and counter their destructive capabilities. The other characters in the novel are peripheral. They only highlight the interaction between Miss Brodie and Sandy. Monica Douglas, Rose Stanley, Eunice Gardiner, Jenny Gray and Mary Macgregor were the six girls in the Brodie Set. They symbolically emphasise the strength of the personality.
These figures stand for flexibility and conformity to Miss Brodie’s visions of them in the time to come. They have the spirit to challenge her and at the same time remain her docile admire even after schooling.
Like Miss Brodie, they can simply speculate about the identity of the person who betrayed Miss Brodie and brought about her embarrassing displacement from the school. The reader’s case across with only two male characters in the play. They are Mr Lloyd the art master and Mr. Lowther, the singing teacher. They have been depicted as satellites of Miss Brodie who satisfy her physical and emotional needs. She interacts with these two people as a man to man. But they do not take her attitude in the same spirit. They treat her woman first and anything else afterward. It causes rivalry between them.
Miss Brodie is inclined to Mr Lloyd. Mr Lloyd is a married gentleman. He can afford only to indulge in Clandestine meetings. Sandy and Jenny happen to see one such meeting between them. Miss Brodie and Lloyds nurture their affections, but they are never open about it. Mr Lowther serves to camouflage Miss Brodie’s true affection and by and by goes out of her life. In her private life also, she is thwarted by social concerns.
She is unable to express her soft corner. Her nearness to Mr. Lowther is known but since there is no evidence to it, Miss Brodies escapes with social censure. Other personalities in the novel appear to be insipid and uninspiring. They have been knowingly presented in this manner to highlight the strength. The technique also highlights the clash of perception.
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