The Collector

The novel’s epigraph hints that The Collector is a romance about the obsessive, isolating aspect of love. The epigraph is in Old French—“que fors aus ne le sot riens nee” (3), which translates to “apart from them, none knew of their love”—and comes from a 13th-century courtly romance in verse called the Châtelaine de Vergy about the secret love between a noblewoman and a knight that ends in their deaths. By applying this passage to a story of obsession, kidnapping, and death, The Collector reframes this romantic line as a statement about the horror of isolation, which is reflected in the secluded setting of Frederick’s cottage. The Collector twists the genre of romance into a mix of horror and satire about the terrifying and absurd nature of obsession. As a result, the novel’s tone vacillates between the comic absurdity of Frederick’s delusions (over the course of the book, he will cast himself as The Tempest’s dashing Ferdinand and, later, the doomed Romeo) and his nightmarishly absolute power over Miranda.

While The Collector mocks and distorts the tropes of romance in general, it takes Shakespeare’s The Tempest as its main reference. John Fowles uses a number of intertextual devices to draw parallels between his protagonists and those of Shakespeare, including allusion, quotation, and direct reference. One of the main ties to The Tempest is character names: In the play, Miranda, an innocent girl trapped on an island with her magician father and two supernatural servants, falls in love with Ferdinand, a young prince who shipwrecks on the island. The play’s Ferdinand falls in love with Miranda at first sight; similarly, in the novel, Miranda’s beauty captivates Frederick when he first sees her. Although Frederick doesn’t know most of Miranda’s literary references, he seems to know The Tempest—remarking that their shared names are “just a coincidence” (37). Frederick’s alias as Ferdinand symbolizes the dissonance between the person he imagines himself to be (Shakespeare’s Ferdinand is virtuous, devoted, and beloved by Miranda) and the person he actually is—Frederick Clegg, a kidnapper. Miranda periodically jolts Frederick out of his delusion by calling him Caliban—the enslaved bestial monster who tries to rape Miranda in The Tempest.

Frederick is an unreliable narrator: His euphemisms, allusion, and selectivity disguise his intentions and conceal Miranda’s death, marking his behavior as an arch example of Bad Faith. However, Frederick is less a manipulative liar out to deceive the reader and more a man who needs to hide from himself the true nature of his actions. He rationalizes kidnapping, imprisoning, and abusing Miranda, constructing for himself a bubble divorced from reality—in a way, his self-isolation mimics the torture techniques he uses on Miranda, cutting her off from news of the outside world. If he has doubts about the truth of his bubble, he doesn’t voice them. This distorted reality is no more apparent than in his repeated references to Miranda as his guest. Miranda responds in utter disbelief to Frederick using this euphemism of hospitality to describe her imprisonment: “Your guest!” (34). His refusal to see her as his victim conceals the reality that Miranda is Frederick’s prisoner and is emblematic of his faux politeness and concern.

The conflict between how Frederick wants to see himself and the true nature of his actions plays out in his preparation of the cellar. He outfits Miranda’s room with an eye toward pleasing her, buying clothing in her size, as well as art books he thinks she’ll like. (Tellingly, he doesn’t “risk pictures” (20) for fear that Miranda will ridicule his artistic taste.) The comic irony in his description of the orange rug as “cheerful” (20) is that he is outfitting a prison cell, not a bedroom. Only lines later, he describes installing a door reinforced with sheet metal and rigged with an alarm to keep Miranda locked in. Frederick anticipates Miranda’s wants with the same fastidiousness as he forestalls the many ways she might try to escape.

Kidnapping Miranda is an assertion of power that Frederick feels he lacks as a working-class man—a way to break out of the Class Conflict that constrains him. The preparations Frederick makes for Miranda give him a sense of purpose and boost his self-worth: “When Miranda became the purpose of my life I should say I was at least as good as the next man, as it turned out” (18). The “next man” is someone like his coworker Crutchley, who Frederick’s despises for being popular with women. In kidnapping Miranda and evading discovery, Frederick believes he’s surpassed Crutchley’s capabilities: “I didn’t push at the Annexe, it didn’t suit me. But I would like to see Crutchley organize what I organized last summer and carry it through” (18). In kidnapping Miranda, Frederick “pushes” for the first time in his life—reclaiming the power he has never had at work, with his family, or in his romantic and sexual life.

To Frederick, Miranda is the rarest butterfly, a connection that launches the theme of The Death-Dealing Nature of Collecting. The similarity between his butterfly collecting (lepidoptery) and his imprisonment of Miranda is implied through metaphor and stated explicitly by her. In his first description of her physical appearance, Frederick compares her hair to a moth’s cocoon: “It was very pale, silky, like Burnet cocoons” (5). Seeing Miranda is like sighting a rare butterfly, one that only the “real connoisseur” can appreciate (5). These comparisons emphasize Miranda’s physical beauty, and position her as a rare and valuable object worth collecting. After her kidnapping, Miranda remarks to Frederick that he has collected her like a butterfly: “You’ve pinned me in this little room and you can come and gloat over me” (38). To Frederick, Miranda is a prize that he likes to look at whenever he wants, like a dead and pinned butterfly behind glass.