The Familiar Attractions of Fascism in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

"The Familiar Attractions of Fascism in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" presents Spark's most famous novel as a provocative critical representation of fascism, comparing her analysis with those of Gilles Deleuze, Theodor Adorno, Virginia Woolf, and others. Spark highlights fascism's modes of consensus-building rather than its more readily visible authoritarian qualities and in doing so, usefully shifts our attention from the regimes' culpable deception of the masses to the fascist subject's motivations for shielding him or herself from the recognition of fascist violence. In particular, it inquires into how and why followers invested fascism with a rebellious capacity to break up a sedimented status quo, especially how some female subjects attributed to it a capacity for radical departures from patriarchal conceptions of womanhood.