Waiting Under the Stereoscope
Lonesome Ballroom and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Madeline McDonnell’s new novel, Lonesome Ballroom, is an ingenious investigation of ingenue-ity.
The novel is the story of how Elizabeth (Betty) Block nee Bird, a woman stuck, gets unstuck. Betty is the daughter of a famous feminist artist and the granddaughter of a widow who, Havisham-like, withdrew into her bed—at least as far as Betty is concerned. Betty grew up splitting time between her parents’ house in a New England college town (New Haven/Wellesley/Dartmouth) under the auspices of her famous mother and spending summers in her grandmother’s bed, watching old movies (Gaslight, How to Marry a Millionaire) dressed in her grandmother’s finest clothes.
So, she’s raised between the feminine expectation of being found by the right man and the feminist expectation that she find her own way.
When Betty goes to college, she becomes involved a sequence of boyfriends and girlfriends whom she allows to use her as completely as possible. One of the boyfriends is Guy Greco, who in college is a sensitive indie-guitarist, but who quickly becomes a celebrated hyper-masculine film director (imagine Quentin Tarantino and Lars Von Trier combined). But the most important figure of Betty’s youth is her friend E(lizabeth).
The “present” of the novel—densely concatenated inside all of the above—occurs several some a few years after college when Betty is married to an auteurist film professor and her friend E is now, distressingly, her boss. Thus begins the Tuesday in question.
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Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has the cold water of the Firth of Forth in its veins.
The novella, published originally in the New Yorker in 1961, is an investigation of Miss Jean Brodie, a controversial teacher at a private girls’ school in Edinburgh, and the lives of six of her pupils—the Brodie set.
The novel follows the Brodie set from age ten through to middle age via flashforwards, but the direct action of the novel takes place from 1932 – 1939, ending with Miss Brodie’s betrayal. We are never given interiority to Miss Brodie. We are never told, from the narrator, what she is thinking, we are only given her from the outside. We learn that she is a Fascist sympathizer because she believes in the glories of Classicism—“Mr. Hitler was very naughty” she admits after the war—we learn that she has a deep attraction to the married Art Master, one armed Terry Lloyd, but she will not allow herself to be with a married man, instead attaching herself to the Music Master Gordon Lowther, a wealthy bachelor.
Miss Brodie has no interest in instructing her pupils in mathematics or history’s dates. What she cares about is enlivening their minds, “educating” them, that is, “bringing them forth,” opening them up.
Miss Brodie’s methods are disapproved of by the conservative Presbyterian establishment of the school who try, for years, to get Miss Brodie fired over her sexual and classroom exploits, but they fail.
Politics, in the end, is Miss Brodie’s downfall, as one of her set admits to the principal that it was Miss Brodie who convinced a girl to go off to fight for Franco, only to be killed en route.
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I don’t know if McDonnell and essayist Becca Rothman have ever met, but Rothman’s essay “Ladies in Waiting” and Lonesome Ballroom share many points in common, including an important role for Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, with its exploration of the feminizing aspects of waiting in a romantic relationship because passivity is the feminine quality par excellence in a strictly misogynist world conception.
Rothman, in her essay puts this power imbalance usefully bluntly:
The gendered distribution of waiting assumes a hierarchy of time and activity in which men set the terms and fix the schedules. To be waited for is to assert the importance of one’s time; to wait is to occupy a position of eternal readiness in which one can be called on at male convenience.
And in Lonesome Ballroom, Betty’s mostly mute interrogator, Lizzie Barmaid, skewers Guy Greco for his violent hyper masculinity by mocking the question “where does the violence come from?” The answer is self-evident and the question offensive because no one would look at Betty and ask “where does your passivity come from?”
To wait is to be feminine, and the more feminine, the more passive. The passivity Bety learned from her grandmother, lying in her bed in Long Beach watching the Golden Age ingenues (Ingrid Bergman above all) wait their way through life. They are waiting to see who their love will be, and what he will turn them into.
But this conflation of waiting and passivity is a false congruence (you saw that coming, didn’t you, dear reader?), because waiting is an action. The only time someone can actually be passive is when they are asleep (whence the deviant masculine predilections for the incapacitated and the dead as sexual partners). To wait is to engage with an atemporality: when the lover will return cannot be perfectly known, and so the period of waiting is a pocket of time entirely independent from the chain of time in which the lover is present.
Waiting is also painful—to wait is to sit in a pain which only another can relieve.
So to wait is to sit outside of time in pain.
Rothman connects this, beautifully and troublingly, to faith in God:
The whole purpose of adoring God to the point of such delicious abjection is that he is by nature unattainable. He never arrives…He never defiles the purity of agony with the weakness of relief. He hurts without mercy. He is a story that never ends.
We can now understand why Betty’s mother, Violet, refused to paint God into her pastiche of The Creation of Adam. Violet, reacting against her mother’s passivity, wants to refuse this ultimate root of passivity, the ultimate in patriarchal power. She wishes to proclaim there is no need to wait any longer. She creates herself.
But she created herself in reaction to meeting Betty’s father, and after making this vast, glorious pastiche contra Michaelangelo, she ceases working.
The resolution which Betty arrives at between these matriarchal tensions is same one Rothman arrives at: recognition of the impossibility of passivity. Betty’s dissertation on the ingenue argues for the turning of waiting into its own plot, using Gaslight as the paradigmatic example, and a plot which claims narrative force for the feminine expression of eros (and agency) in the shape of waiting.
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But where Betty is able to become a hero in her own life via this revaluation of values, Brodie’s waiting is desperately tragic because she does not accept the fact she was always waiting. Brodie’s “prime” is a delusion precisely because she does not do what she wants to do: have an affair with the art master. Instead, Brodie “switches” her affection to the music master and then waits for him to move their relationship forward. Of course, he never does.
In her lack of self-knowledge, or, since we are never given any window into Brodie’s thoughts, her inability to act upon self-knowledge dooms her to diminishment, having created nothing but a cohort of girls which destroyed her.
Sandy, her betrayer, is her book’s true protagonist, and like Betty, she sublimates waiting. Sandy is also one of the cruelest figures I’ve ever read. Sandy’s sublimation and her cruelty arise from the same place: she recognizes Miss Brodie as a fraud, and wishes to punish Miss Brodie for her failings. Miss Brodie kept waiting for her prime to kick in, she pretended she could will it, but that was a lie, she was waiting. Sandy, however, does act, seizes what she believes is right—and then decides to become a nun to wait, in that cell, its prisoner, gripping the bars, because she wants the endless pain of waiting.
She wishes to be Miss Brodie but without illusions, but to be Miss Brodie without illusions would be to become something like the Nietzschean Übermensch, a figure too cruel to be countenanced. Sandy, shed of waiting, would do anything, everything.
So, out of fear, Sandy chooses the unending waiting for God in her convent. Only the unhealable wound of the desire for the divine can hold Sandy back from the havoc she believes she would wreck. Her waiting is not a passive act, it is chosen with desperate self-cruelty.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie travels from Miss Brodie’s deluded waiting to Sandy’s horribly clear-eyed waiting. Imprisoned, her hands on the bars of her cell, like a psycho killer desperate for release, Sandy is Brodie’s uncomfortable double.
***
Sandy and Betty, like Rothman, come to recognize the power in waiting. Waiting need not be some negative parenthesis in life. It can be an action, something done with intentionality.
However, Betty must write her dissertation, and Sandy is an object of wonder precisely because the long Patrimonial tradition does not view waiting as an action. The masculine ideal is of actions with immediate consequences. Throw spear, kill deer (Insert whatever pop-Freudian, Ursula K. LeGuin, Jordan Peterson, or Germaine Greer interpretation you would like here). So, the subtler action of waiting is subversive, sinister.
What I hope is that we can, in this small community at least, disregard such crude and sexist judgements and go to the next step: Waiting is an action, which means it is as ethically open as any action.
Which is why I’d love to talk film with Betty, and I wouldn’t get in Sandy’s cell with her for a million dollars.