Analysis of W or the Memory of Childhood and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Essay Example

Section/# Childhood and Impressionability: An Analysis of W or the Memory of Childhood and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie One of the oldest arguments for the means of development that exists within the human race is the age old argument with regards to whether environment or heredity serves to be the most important formational aspect of the means by which an individual interacts with and relates to their surroundings. As a function of this, both of the stories which this brief analysis will consider seek to promote the opinion that environment affects the most powerful means by which identity is formed, memories are created and sustained, and the individual is ultimately differentiated from the remainder of society. As such, this brief analysis will focus upon the nexus of how the environment and experience of the individuals within these stories formulate the way in which the impressionability of childhood is molded by events. By seeking to understand this to a greater degree, it is the hopes of this author that the reader will come to realize the key and foundational elements that form the basis of human experience. With regards to the first story, W or the Memory of Childhood, this novel seeks to integrate with the reader the means by which formative memory engages with the individual and creates something of an unrealized determinacy upon which future action and past integration with reality is realized. This serves to integrate an important point upon which this analysis will focus. In this way, regardless of the memory, whether it is positive or negative – regardless of whether it is recalled correctly or incorrectly, the individual who experienced it allows it to serve as a formative event and means by which current reality is understood. States Perec in the introduction, “When I was thirteen I made up a story … [It] was called W and it was, in a way, if not the story of my childhood, then at least a story of my childhood (Perec ii). Whereas this can and does occur in nearly all situations to a greater or lesser degree, the level to which it occurs within childhood is even more profound. Without delving too deeply into the means by which the individual is formatively guided by childhood experience and recollections of the past, it should be noted that most psychologists agree that those events that occur in childhood are integrated within the future determinacy of the individual are profound and have a more of a lasting impact than those that may be experienced, if not recalled, even at a later date; i.e. within adolescence or early adulthood. This is primarily the case due to the fact that early childhood is the point in time wherein the human brain is most desperately craving a framework within which to espouse and understand reality. Speaking of the impressionability, Perec states the following: “I write because we lived together, because I was one amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life” (Perec 19). As a function of this, one can readily understand why such instances within the formative stages of human experience can offer profound and lasting effects on the means by which reality is understood and acted upon. By portraying an experiential recollection alongside a fictional interpretation, the author is able to provide the reader with something of a running analysis of the means by which reality and recollection integrate with the child to form the definitions by which life is ultimately understood for the remainder of life. Similarly, the second novel which will be analyzed herein is that of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Seeking to exemplify the means by which an educator can have a prominent and yet detrimental approach. As such, the students within the novel are exposed to a highly motivated, albeit fundamentally flawed, educator who seeks to create an alternate reality within the group of students and expose them to what can only be described as a warped world view. Says Miss Brodie of her role as an educator and leader, “The word ‘education’ comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul” (Spark 56). By holding up this educator as something of a straw man (straw woman), the author is able to integrate with the reader the understanding of how environmental factors such as role models factor strongly with regards to the level and extent to which memory and understanding of the world is impressed upon the shareholder. In seeking stifle any form of dissent, Miss Brodie notes, “It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden” (Spark 66) In this way, the reader can begin to understand that Ms Brodie is not only acting as a mentor to the group and forming complex and fundamentally flawed interpretations of world views among the students but also serving as a form of a defective spiritual and/or cult leader whose sinister motives will ultimately serve to enact her own fall from grace and subsequent demise. Although she integrates with each of the shareholders to form a degree of permanent hurt, one of the students even dying as a result of her warped world view, the hubris of her fallacious views is ultimately realized in the fact that one of her own students who has seen the error of the brainwashing that she has experienced turns upon her and betrays her. Exemplifications of hurt and the damaging/lifelong effects of memory are well portrayed in both novels. As a function of this, the reader and/or researcher comes to a more full and complete understanding of the pervasive importance that foundational reality and the integration of a world view by way of role models plays an unbelievably important role in defining the means by which the individual will view the world and relate to it even in old age. Whereas the first author integrates with the reader the means by which hurt and pain can be exhibited well into middle and old age, the second author integrates with the reader the understanding that although traumatic, the hurt can be overcome by the realization that a more complete and educated understanding of reality can yield. However, only one of the six students was ultimately able to realize the error of her way; indicating the power that the flawed interpretations of reality and worldview had affected on the other four remaining girls. Works Cited Perec, Georges. W, or, The memory of childhood. Boston: D.R. Godine, 1988. Print. Spark, Muriel. The prime of Miss Jean Brodie. London: Macmillan, 1999. Print. Read More