Abstract
The publication of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1961 brings a change of manner and emphasis in Mrs Spark’s work. This novel and its successor, The Girls of Slender Means (1963), are works of great authority. Their certainty of tone is similiar to that of Memento Mori, but they are motivated by a darker and more pessimistic vision. The action of her early novels was centred on the Roman Catholic faith, towards which her characters aspired. Later novels, however, lose their insistence on the force of the other world, and its positive place in the sometimes seedy realities of this one. Supernatural events no longer occur, and the revelation of the spiritual aspects of reality depends on our eliciting an oblique morality from the narrative without necessarily being given a specific creed from which to take our bearings. Mrs Spark concentrates on portraying evil as it is manifested through the actions of an individual, or through the godlessness of contemporary society, leaving it to the reader to postulate a moral system thus violated. We are given hints that Catholicism provides such a system, but it is no longer shown to be an enabling factor or a saving grace.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Henry James, Preface to ‘The Tragic Muse’, in The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962) p. 84.
Evelyn Waugh, quoted by Christopher Sykes in Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1977) p. 596. (First published London: Collins, 1975.)
SØren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trs. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941; repr. 1952) pp. 66–7.
François Mauriac, quoted by Robert Speaight in François Mauriac: A Study of the Writer and the Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976) pp. 193–4.
Copyright information
© 1982 Ruth Whittaker
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Whittaker, R. (1982). Secular Influences. In: The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07464-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07464-8_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-37411-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-07464-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)