Eros in the Classroom: Mentor figures, friendship and desire in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The History Boys

Abstract

This article focuses on the characters of Hector and Miss Brodie as two particularly complex examples of inspiring yet ambiguous mentor figures in British fiction, and on their various relationships with colleagues and students. Following a long literary tradition, the different teacher-student relationships in The History Boys and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie encompass aspects of platonic friendship as well as erotic desire. I analyse in detail the erotic triangles and instances of erotic substitutions and doubles in both texts by using and adapting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of “homosociality”, before examining Miss Brodie’s and Hector’s pedagogical agendas and their interaction with students in the classroom in order to offer an overview of the non-eroticised aspects of the teacher-student relationships in the two primary texts.