I recently watched The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a 1969 Scottish film that shows Maggie Smith at her best. The story, based on Muriel Spark’s novel, is almost an inverse of Dead Poets Society (1989), in that the teacher—instead of encouraging the students to open their minds, follow their passions and think for themselves—leads them astray into supporting fascism, due to her own political leanings. The protagonist is a spinster but one who is immune to being shamed for holding that position in society. She states repeatedly that, as an unmarried, childless woman, she is in her “prime”, a radical proclamation for the film’s 1930s setting.
In one famous conversation from Spark’s book, one of Brodie’s pupils asks another about what it means to have a prime, particularly in relation to their own parents:
“Miss Brodie says prime is best,” Sandy said.
“Yes, but she never got married like our mothers and fathers.”
“They don’t have primes,” said Sandy.
“They have sexual intercourse,” said Jenny.
Notably, Miss Brodie herself also has sexual intercourse, but the important difference is that she is not married and does not have children; she has not been sapped of her prime in the way that the parents supposedly have. I see this same sentiment coursing through the “Regretful Parents” subreddit today, where parents lament their stolen prime, in direct opposition to the widely promulgated idea that children give one’s life meaning.
This makes me wonder if there is sometimes a negative convergence of both these concepts, that children have both taken and given something—and also owe something. Is that, for example, what occurs when a parent merges their own identity with that of their child and tries to achieve their own goals through them? Stage parents such as Kit Culkin could be seen to fall into this, or women who groom their daughters into seducing older men, such as the mother in Alberto Moravia’s 1947 novel The Woman of Rome, who sees her own lost youth in her daughter and wishes to make use of the opportunities it may bring. She has for her daughter “the kind of love the housewife feels for a laying hen”.
Of course, these truths can be and often are reconciled in a more positive manner. That is, a person’s future is inevitably changed by having children, but that isn’t necessarily something to resent; a person’s life may have more value added to it through children, but that does not need to be the only meaning their life has.
I think of American actor Seth Rogen’s comments about being married yet happily childless, and how much backlash he and his partner received, how people accused him of being selfish and how fellow actor Timothée Chalamet even referred to Rogen’s attitude as “bleak”, and I wonder what it is that threatens others so much about someone not wanting to sacrifice their lifestyle for children. Isn’t the world overpopulated as it is? The declining birth rate is only an issue if you’re anti-immigration; otherwise we have more than enough people to support older generations.
Everyone envisages their prime differently, and all that really matters is that we all get to have one, and that children aren’t either expected to guarantee one or blamed for a perceived loss. My concept of my own prime is tied to different factors: my financial independence, my physical and mental health and a sense of being in “my good earning years”. This is a period that is impossible to predict or delineate without the benefit of hindsight, for who knows when clients will stop wanting to pay for the pleasure of being with me?
