1. Discrimination, Ignorance, and Aestheticization of Political Life
- Author
-
Joo Ri Lee
- Subjects
media_common.quotation_subject ,Ignorance ,Autocracy ,Politics ,State (polity) ,Aesthetics ,Beauty ,Sympathy ,General Earth and Planetary Sciences ,Charisma ,Sociology ,Ideology ,General Environmental Science ,media_common - Abstract
This article examines how Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) challenges an ignorant schoolteacher’s pedagogical ideas and methods. While maintaining the heroine’s attractive qualities, the 1961 novel also shows her as an “ignorant” educator who is politically naive and forces her students to accept her own personal doctrines about art, history, and politics, which are, in fact, intermingled with political ideologies propagated from fascists. In the process of becoming a socially engaged writer who explores a writer’s political responsibilities, Spark refused to glamorize the ostensibly charismatic teacher, who dictates her students under a state of ignorance. Although The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie tends to draw a sense of sympathy toward the heroine, the text denies aestheticizing Miss Jean Brodie, and exposes the crimes of the politically naive figure, who comes to imitate Fascism’s aestheticization of political life in the post-World War I era. Engaging a delicate mockery of the character’s autocratic actions, Spark’s fiction encourages us to consider the political problems of the naive teacher’s pedagogical approach and her emphasis on beauty, which involves the problematic acts of aestheticizing human beings and political experiences. By observing the novel’s juxtaposition between Miss Brodie and the Fascist leader, this paper interrogates Miss Brodie’s crimes and errors, often committed unintentionally.
- Published
- 2018