The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

By the time the chapter opens, Miss Brodie’s girls have become students in the Senior school, “a new life altogether”; the Senior school teachers are all very nice, and they treat the girls not as personalities but as students. Miss Lockhart, the science teacher, dramatically opens class by saying she holds enough gunpowder in her hand to blow up the school. The girls appreciate Senior life at first, as well as the dazzling new subjects they study, including geometry and, on the Classical side, Greek. However, a few weeks in, the “party-game effect of that first week” of Senior school instruction fades.

Miss Lockhart, the Senior school science teacher, is like a mysterious priest to the girls, with her dangerous chemicals and lab equipment. During the first week of the term, the girls conduct an experiment in which they ignited magnesium; Mary is so frightened that she runs in panic from flame to flame until Miss Lockhart calms her down and tells her not to be so stupid.

Once, years later, when Rose Stanley is visiting Sandy at the convent, she tells the nun, “‘When any ill befalls me I wish I had been nicer to Mary.’” The narrator immediately shows us once more the scene in which Miss Brodie, dining with Sandy at the Braid Hills Hotel, wonders if it was Mary who betrayed her. “‘Perhaps I should have been kinder to Mary,’” Miss Brodie says on that occasion.

The Brodie set might easily have lost its identity at this time, both because Miss Brodie is no longer a constant presence in their lives, and also because Miss Mackay attempts to break the girls up. She permits Mary, who had wanted to go on to the Classical side but had been unable because of her poor grades, the opportunity to take Latin implicitly in exchange for information concerning Miss Brodie. However, Mary does not understand what Miss Mackay wants of her, thinking all the teachers in league together, “Miss Brodie and all.”

Miss Mackay lays yet another scheme, but this one “undid her.” At the Senior school, there are four “houses” and a system in place that encourages competition between the houses. Miss Mackay places the Brodie girls in different houses as much as is possible, to separate them and force them into competition with one another. Team spirit is greatly emphasized at Blaine.

However, Miss Brodie has trained her girls, perhaps in preparation for their separation, to think that team spirit undercuts individualism, love, and loyalty. Miss Brodie also gave the girls examples of women who rejected team spirit, from Shakespeare’s Cleopatra to Helen of Troy, from the actress Sybil Thorndike to the dancer Pavlova. It is impossible to know whether Miss Brodie planned to keep her set together, or if she just worked by instinct, but she succeeds—the girls who had passed through her hands avoid the playing grounds except under compulsion, all save Eunice Gardiner, who is too good an athlete not to compete.

On most Saturday afternoons during this period, Miss Brodie entertains her set over tea. She tells them that her new pupils do not have much potential, which makes her girls “feel chosen.” Miss Brodie also inquires about Teddy Lloyd, who teaches the girls’ art class. The girls tell her about their first day, when Mr. Lloyd, irritated by how relaxed and chatty and giggly the girls were, smashed a saucer on the floor and told Rose Stanley, whose profile he seemed to admire, to pick it up. Jenny commented to Sandy when Mr. Lloyd smashed the saucer that Miss Brodie had good taste in men. Upon being told of the incident and what Mr. Lloyd had said of Rose’s profile, Miss Brodie looks “at Rose in a special way.”

The narrator tells us that, since moving on to the Senior school, Sandy and Jenny’s interest in Miss Brodie’s love life has moved from being absolutely sexually charged to being “a question of plumbing the deep heart’s core.” Indeed, now that her mother has given birth to another child and she herself is twelve, Jenny can say with truth that she has moved past interest in sexual research.

It is only later, the narrator says fast-forwarding, when Jenny is a forty-year-old actress sixteen years into marriage, that her “buoyant and airy discovery of sex” returns to her, while she is in Rome standing next to a man she didn’t know well. This memory still happily astonishes her, and gives her “a sense of the hidden possibilities in all things.”

One Saturday over tea Miss Brodie tells the girls that Mr. Lowther’s housekeeper has left him, and that she disliked the housekeeper anyway because she, the housekeeper, allegedly resented Miss Brodie’s position as Mr. Lowther’s friend and confidante. The next Saturday, Miss Brodie tells the girls that Miss Ellen and Alison Kerr have temporarily taken on the role of housekeepers for Mr. Lowther, and she criticizes them for their inquisitiveness and being “‘too much in with Miss Gaunt and the Church of Scotland.’”

In addition to hosting tea on Saturdays, Miss Brodie also sets aside an hour during which she has Sandy and Jenny teach her the Greek they are learning in class. She progresses in the language, although Sandy and Jenny give her different information about the accents. Miss Brodie is determined to share in her special girls’ “new life” and what she cannot influence she scorns, like their instruction in geometry, which she regards as merely, needlessly clever. What need had Sybil Thorndike or Anna Pavlova or Helen of Troy for mathematics, after all?

Nonetheless, the girls are dazzled by their new subjects, and would be until in later years the fields of science and math lost their “elemental strangeness” in the young women’s minds. For now, though, the girls are so dazzled that Miss Brodie struggles to retain influence over her set. She knows that her main concern is ensuring that none of her special girls should become personally attached to any of their senior teachers; but these teachers seem so indifferent to the girls that Miss Brodie refrains from directly attacking them.

In the spring of 1933, Miss Brodie’s Greek lessons with Sandy and Jenny come to an end. The Kerr sisters have begun to enjoy caring for Mr. Lowther and have never been so perky or useful in their lives, especially since the time of their sister’s death (mentioned only here in the novel). Miss Gaunt, who has in a sense taken the place of this dead sister, encourages the two women to make the arrangement with Mr. Lowther permanent.

Up to now, Miss Brodie has visited Mr. Lowther at his house in Cramond on Sundays. On that day she also went to church, rotating over time from denomination to denomination, sect to sect. The only church she disapproves of is the Roman Catholic Church, which is perhaps the only church that could have embraced and disciplined “her soaring and diving spirit.” She asserts that it is a church founded on superstition, and she so strongly believes that God supports her no matter what that she feels guiltless about her wrongdoing anyway, even while going to bed with Mr. Lowther.

The Brodie girls are exhilarated by their former teacher’s attitude of self-forgiveness, and only in retrospect recognize its amorality. However, even later on, after Miss Brodie has died, Sandy comes to recognize that “Miss Brodie’s defective sense of self-criticism had not been without its beneficent and enlarging effects.”

When it becomes clear that the Kerr sisters have permanently taken up housekeeping for Mr. Lowther, Miss Brodie fancies that her lover is getting thin because of their skimpiness in caring for him—in fact, it is Miss Brodie who was getting thin—so she begins going to Cramond on Saturdays to supervise them (this is what ends the Greek lessons). Miss Brodie is encouraged in this action by her special girls, and the Kerr sisters take her “intrusion” meekly. Miss Brodie also invites her girls in pairs up to Cramond on Saturdays to spend the afternoon with her in Mr. Lowther’s residence. The girls notice that Mr. Lowther calls their teacher Jean, a fact they kept to themselves.

Miss Brodie exults in her victory over the Kerr sisters. She attributes it, in a discussion with Sandy and Jenny, to her ancestry. She explains that she is a descendent of Willie Brodie, a cabinetmaker and designer of gallows, a member of the Town Council of Edinburgh with two mistresses who bore him five children between them. Willie was arrested for robbing the Excise Office, motivated not by money but the exciting danger of burglary; he was imprisoned for the crime, and later died on a gallows of his own devising in 1788. This is the stuff Miss Brodie is made of, and accounted in her mind for her victory.

Sandy begins to consider not only the question of Miss Brodie’s desirability from a man’s perspective, but also whether she could sexually surrender herself to Mr. Lowther, especially given that she is, though thinner than before, nonetheless larger than him. For example, before he touches anything in his home, Mr. Lowther would look to Miss Brodie as if for approval, which leads the Brodie girls to assume that Lowther’s mother had been a rather oppressive woman.

During the girls’ visits to Cramond, Miss Brodie asks them many questions about Mr. Lloyd, including about his wife Mrs. Deirdre Lloyd and children, while Mr. Lowther eats looking mournfully on, fattening up at Miss Brodie’s insistence. Mr. Lloyd is a Roman Catholic, she explains to Mr. Lowther one day, hence his many children, six in all including lots of babies. Sandy and Jenny report that Mrs. Lloyd is either past her prime or would never have one. At the end of each Saturday in Cramond with the girls, Miss Brodie always makes it seem as if she returned to Edinburgh instead of staying the nights with Mr. Lowther.

While the Brodie girls never discover evidence as to whether or not Miss Brodie stays the night with Mr. Lowther, Miss Ellen Kerr supposes she has: a nightdress allegedly belonging to Miss Brodie stashed under Mr. Lowther’s pillow. At Miss Gaunt’s urging, Miss Kerr tells Miss Mackay about this discovery, but Miss Mackay shrewdly reasons that there is no way to prove that the nightdress does in fact belong to Miss Brodie. Nonetheless, urged on by his sister Miss Gaunt, the parish minister advises Mr. Lowther to withdraw from his positions of choirmaster and Elder at the church. Sandy later learns about the nightdress when she, moved by other considerations, betrays Miss Brodie to Miss Mackay.

One night in the summer of 1933, Sandy and Jenny are at Mr. Lowther’s house at Cramond while Miss Brodie prepares a great ham. She asks them, as she often did, about Mr. Lloyd, and they tell her about two portraits in his studio, an amusingly serious one of his family, and one of Rose Stanley, who has been modeling for him. This is exciting to Miss Brodie, as is the fact that Mr. Lloyd only invites the Brodie girls to his studio. Miss Brodie explains to Sandy and Jenny that this is because these girls were “‘of my stamp and cut.’”

On a joint impulse, Sandy and Jenny decide then to run along the beach. When they return to Mr. Lowther’s house, they listen to Miss Brodie speak of her forthcoming holiday to Germany, for she admires Hitler, the Chancellor of Germany at that point, very much, thinking him a prophet-figure and even more efficient than Mussolini. For their summer holidays, Sandy and Jenny go to a farm, where they don’t think much on Miss Brodie but instead make hay and follow the sheep about.