The Dangers of Social Conformity Exposed in The Prime of Miss Jean Brod

The Dangers of Social Conformity Exposed in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Sparks The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie depicts the glide path of age of six adolescent girls in Edinburgh, Scotland during the 1930s. The story brings us into the classroom of Miss Jean Brodie, a fascist school teacher at the Marcia Blaine tame for Girls, and gives close encounter with the cordial and political climate in Europe during the era surrounding the second World War. Sparks 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 teachers ideologies. This skepticism is played out through with(predicate) the perso na of Sandy Stranger, who becomes the central character in a class of Marcia Blaine school girls. Sandys character is even more focally sculpted than the teachers 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 trunk 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 nature traits and ideolog... ...t this small group level, conformity dispels individual judgement. Sandy projects to us that this kind of social conformity under the pressure of authority, is to be blamed for many social problems and adversities in the individual liv es of the Brodie girls, and in society at large. Bibliography 1. Coon, Dennis. Psychology Exploration and Application. West Publishing Company 1980. 2. Costanzo, P. Conformity development as a situation of self blame. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 14 366-374 1970. 3. Csikszentmihalyi, M. & Larson, R. Being Adolescent. Harper Collins Publisher 1984. 4. Homans, G.C. Social Behavior Its Elementary Forms. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1961. 5. Lodge, David. The Uses and Abuses of Omniscience regularity and Meaning in Muriel Sparks The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Ithaca, Cornell 1971.