Abstract
The spectacle that Lucy Snowe, the schoolmistress in Villette (1853), Charlotte Bronte’s haunted novel of thwarted sexual desire, is describing as suggestive is the moment in the text where Lucy, dressed as a man from the waist up, but as a woman from the waist down, takes a part in the school play (Chapter xiv, ‘The Fete’).1 She sets out to win the flirtatious Ginevra Fanshawe away from the male lead role on stage and away from the man in the audience with whom Lucy is infatuated, but who is in love with Ginevra. This suggestive combination of transvestism, sexual substitution and genderbending performance is echoed in Spark’ s novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). The girls of her set become objects of sexual exchange for the ambitious, manipulative Brodie. She chooses the girl who should fill her place with the art master Teddy Lloyd, but her sexual game collapses when the girl she has not chosen betrays her. Spark, like Bronte, is interested in the ambiguous sexual electricity of single-sex classrooms.
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