Miss Brodie's Use Of Irony In Primavera
Miss Brodie’s reference to Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (Allegory of Spring) mirrors Brodie’s attempt to demonstrate and teach the set how to live in its prime. The reference to this painting helps readers to better understand Miss Brodie’s fascination with the group and how it goes beyond the norm because she truly believes that each of the girl’s life depends on her teachings and life lessons. Primavera demonstrates irony with its failure to fulfill its primary purpose to represent goodwill as the division between the materialistic and spiritualistic side of humanity doing so with a Greek goddess who is a symbol of love, beauty, and infatuation. The irony found in Botticelli’s Primavera seems to be the novel’s foreshadowing that Miss Brodie
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The utilization of Venus is Primavera parallels with the creation of the Brodie set to teach the girls of their primes. Forming the girls into the Brodie set with the end goal of leading each girl to her prime is ironic because how can one be encouraged to think as an individual when forced to be a part of a set. This is similar to Botticelli’s use of Venus in the painting because using a symbol of temptation as the goodwill necessary to separate the material and spiritual sides of life is ineffective. Brodie’s well-prepared and set-in-stone rules and responses for life situations are never fully utilized by the girls because they become a distinct group rather than individuals. “By the time their friendship with Miss Brodie was of seven years’ standing, it had worked itself into their bones, so that they could not break away without, as it were, splitting their bones to do so,” the girls inability to act alone is evident in this text (Spark). As the text matures, the Brodie set become so engrossed in their group mentality that even as they grow old and separate they are all still in each other’s heads leading to the failure of Miss Brodie’s life mission of making the group the “crème de la crème”. Eunice tells tales of Miss Brodie and the set twenty-eight years later in: “A teacher of mine, she was full of culture. She was an Edinburgh Festival all on her own. She used to give us teas at her flat and tell us about her prime” (Spark 27). The failure of Miss Brodie mirrors the failure of Botticelli in
The utilization of Venus is Primavera parallels with the creation of the Brodie set to teach the girls of their primes. Forming the girls into the Brodie set with the end goal of leading each girl to her prime is ironic because how can one be encouraged to think as an individual when forced to be a part of a set. This is similar to Botticelli’s use of Venus in the painting because using a symbol of temptation as the goodwill necessary to separate the material and spiritual sides of life is ineffective. Brodie’s well-prepared and set-in-stone rules and responses for life situations are never fully utilized by the girls because they become a distinct group rather than individuals. “By the time their friendship with Miss Brodie was of seven years’ standing, it had worked itself into their bones, so that they could not break away without, as it were, splitting their bones to do so,” the girls inability to act alone is evident in this text (Spark). As the text matures, the Brodie set become so engrossed in their group mentality that even as they grow old and separate they are all still in each other’s heads leading to the failure of Miss Brodie’s life mission of making the group the “crème de la crème”. Eunice tells tales of Miss Brodie and the set twenty-eight years later in: “A teacher of mine, she was full of culture. She was an Edinburgh Festival all on her own. She used to give us teas at her flat and tell us about her prime” (Spark 27). The failure of Miss Brodie mirrors the failure of Botticelli in