Vanity

In both Muriel Spark's novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and the fine film version with Maggie Smith, the characters who dislike the charismatic teacher Miss Brodie disapprove of her because of her "vanity"; she teaches well, but she also too much enjoys teaching well and being charismatic to her students -- fatally so in her judges' estimation. Well, Miss Brodie certainly preens; she is guilty of some foolishness (and Spark stacks the deck by having this indirectly lead to one student's death). But my mental rejoinder is, if vanity is to be used as a hanging offense, why in some cases and not in others? Vanity, after all, is pretty close to universal; in the personal sense, or the Thackerayan public sense, or both, it is an explanatory element (not the explanatory element) in everything we do. Saints enjoy their saintliness, the charitable enjoy their charity. This gets us nowhere. Condemnation has to find more of a peg to hang itself on than that!