The Collector

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The Collector

collector imprisonment abduction psychological

The Collector is the story of the abduction and imprisonment of Miranda Grey by Frederick Clegg, told first from his point of view, and then from hers by means of a diary she has kept, with a return in the last few pages to Clegg's narration of her illness and death.

Clegg's section begins with his recalling how he used to watch Miranda entering and leaving her house, across the street from the town hall in which he worked. He describes keeping an "observation diary" about her, whom he thinks of as "a rarity," and his mention of meetings of the "Bug Section" confirms that he is an amateur lepidopterist. On the first page, then, Clegg reveals himself to possess the mind-set of a collector, one whose attitude leads him to regard Miranda as he would a beautiful butterfly, as an object from which he may derive pleasurable control, even if "collecting" her will deprive her of freedom and life.

Clegg goes on to describe events leading up to his abduction of her, from dreams about Miranda and memories of his stepparents or coworkers to his winning a "small fortune" in a football pool. When his family emigrates to Australia and Clegg finds himself on his own, he begins to fantasize about how Miranda would like him if only she knew him. He buys a van and a house in the country with an enclosed room in its basement that he remodels to make securable and hideable. When he returns to London, Clegg watches Miranda for 10 days. Then, as she is walking home alone from a movie, he captures her, using a rag soaked in chloroform, ties her up in his van, takes her to his house, and locks her in the basement room.

When she awakens, Clegg finds Miranda sharper than "normal people" like himself. She sees through some of his explanations, and recognizes him as the person whose picture was in the paper when he won the pool. Because he is somewhat confused by her unwillingness to be his "guest" and embarrassed by his inadvertent declaration of love, he agrees to let her go in one month. He attributes her resentment to the difference in their social background: "There was always class between us."

Clegg tries to please Miranda by providing for her immediate needs. He buys her a Mozart record and thinks, "She liked it and so me for buying it." he fails to understand human relations except in terms of things. About her appreciation for the music, he comments, "It sounded like all the rest to me but of course she was musical." There is indeed a vast difference between them, but he fails to recognize the nature of the difference because of the terms he thinks in. When he shows her his butterfly collection, Miranda tells him that he thinks like a scientist rather than an artist, someone who classifies and names and then forgets about things. She sees a deadening tendency, too, in his photography, his use of cant, and his decoration of the house. As a student of art and a maker of drawings, her values contrast with his: Clegg can judge her work only in terms of its representationalism, or photographic realism. In despair at his insensitivity when he comments that all of her pictures are "nice," she says that his name should be Caliban -- the subhuman creature in Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Miranda uses several ploys in attempts to escape. She feigns appendicitis, but Clegg only pretends to leave, and sees her recover immediately. She tries to slip a message into the reassuring note that he says he will send to her parents, but he finds it. When he goes to London, she asks for a number of articles that will be difficult to find, so that she will have time to, try to dig her way out with a nail she has found, but that effort also is futile.

When the first month has elapsed, Miranda dresses up for what she hopes will be their last dinner. She looks so beautiful that Clegg has difficulty responding except with cliches and confusion. When she refuses his present of diamonds and offer of marriage, he tells her that he will not release her after all. She tries to escape by kicking a log out of the fire, but he catches her and chloroforms her again, this time taking off her outer clothing while she is unconscious and photographing her in her underwear.

Increasingly desperate, Miranda tries to kill Clegg with an axe he has left out when he is escorting her to take a bath upstairs. She injures him, but he is able to prevent her from escaping. Finally, she tries to seduce him, but he is unable to respond, and leaves, feeling humiliated. He pretends that he will allow her to move upstairs, with the stipulation that she must allow him to take pornographic photographs of her. She reluctantly cooperates, and he immediately develops the pictures, preferring the ones with her face cut off.

Having caught a cold from Clegg, Miranda becomes seriously ill, but Clegg hesitates to bring a doctor to the house. He does get her some pills, but she becomes delirious, and the first section ends with Clegg's recollection: "I thought I was acting for the best and within my rights."

The second section is Miranda's diary, which rehearses the same events from her point of view, but includes much autobiographical reflection on her life before her abduction. She begins with her feelings over the first seven days, before she had paper to write on. She observes that she never knew before how much she wanted to live.

Miranda describes her thoughts about Clegg as she tries to understand him. She describes her view of the house and ponders the unfairness of the whole situation. She frequently remembers things said by G. P., who gradually is revealed to be a middle-aged man who is a painter and mentor whom Miranda admires. She re-creates a conversation with Clegg over, among other things, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She gets him to promise to send a contribution, but he only pretends to. She admits that he's now the only real person in her world.

Miranda describes G. P. as the sort of person she would like to marry, or at any rate the sort of mind. She lists various ways he has changed her think- ing, most of which involved precepts about how to live an authentic, committed life. Then she characterizes G. P. by telling of a time that he met her aunt and found her so lacking in discernment and sincerity that he made Miranda feel compelled to choose between him and her aunt. Miranda seems to choose his way of seeing, and he subsequently offers some harsh but honest criticism of her drawing, which seems to help her to become more self-aware and discriminating. Her friends Antoinette and Piers fail to appreciate the art G. P. has produced, and Miranda breaks with her Aunt Caroline over her failure to appreciate Rembrandt. Miranda describes her growing attraction to G. P., despite their age difference and his history of sexual infidelity. In the final episode about him, however, G. P. confesses to being in love with her and, as a consequence, wants to break off their friendship. She is flattered but agrees that doing so would probably be for the best.

Miranda says that G. P. is "one of the few." Her aunt--and Clegg--are implicitly among "the many," who lack creativity and authenticity. Indeed, Miranda associates Clegg's shortcomings with "the blindness, deadness, out-of-dateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England," and she begins to lose hope. She gets Clegg to read Catcher in the Rye, but he doesn't understand it. Miranda feels more alone and more desperate, and her reflections become more philosophical. She describes her reasons for thinking that seducing Clegg might change him, and does not regret the subsequent failed attempt, but she fears that he now can hope only to keep her prisoner.

Miranda begins to think of what she will do if she ever gets free, including revive her relationship with G. P. on any terms as a commitment to life. At this point, Miranda becomes sick with Clegg's cold, literally as well as metaphorically. As she becomes increasingly ill, her entries in the journal become short, declarative sentences and lamentations.

The third section is Clegg's, and picks up where his first left off. He tells of becoming worried over her symptoms and over her belief that she is dying. When he takes her temperature, Clegg realizes how ill Miranda is and decides to go for a doctor. As he sits in the waiting room, Clegg begins to feel insecure, and he goes to a drugstore instead, where the pharmacist refuses to help him. When he returns and finds Miranda worse, Clegg goes back to town in the middle of the night, to wake a doctor; this time an inquisitive policeman frightens him off. Miranda dies, and Clegg plans to commit suicide.

In the final section, less than three pages long, Clegg describes awakening to a new outlook. He decides that he is not responsible for Miranda's death, that his mistake was kidnapping someone too far above him, socially. As the novel ends, Clegg is thinking about how he will have to do things somewhat differently when he abducts a more suitable girl that he has seen working in Woolworth's.

After winning the lottery, Ferdinand Clegg, a lonely entomologist, buys a big house in the countryside and kidnaps Miranda Grey, a beautiful twenty-one years old art student with whom he has been obsessed for some time. After a long period of preparations and observations, he forcefully brings Miranda to his own cellar, especially modified to house her for a long time. He treats her nicely, buying all she desires in terms of food, clothes, books, music, and art. He fulfills her every need except her want to be free. He holds her captive, without any connection to the outside world, in the hope that she will eventually grow to know and love him.

The book can be read as a thriller viewed, in turn, from the point of view of the two characters. The first part presents the collector's view of the story. We find out that the title character, Frederick, or Ferdinand, as he prefers to be called, had a very unhappy and lonely childhood. His father dies in a car-crash when he is just two years old. After that, his mother goes off with another man. For the rest of his youth, his Aunt Annie and his Uncle Dick bring him up in the lower class suburbs of London, along with his two cousins. One of them, Mabel, whom Ferdinand dislikes taking care of, is a spastic girl who needs assistance while walking. His other cousin goes to Australia and never sees him again, but as soon as Uncle Dick dies, he moves out and starts collecting butterflies.

His decision to collect not only butterflies, but also the long admired object of his fantasy, Miranda, is made possible by the fact that he wins a large amount of money. As a prisoner in a secluded basement, Miranda is cared for very well, and thus at first the reader has the feeling that Ferdinand is not a monster, but a pitiful, lonely man in need of love. Ferdinand thinks that money is enough to make Miranda love him. But he is wrong.

However, The Collector is more than just a thriller. The author's way of narrating the story gives the reader deep insights into the minds of the two characters. On a psychological level, the book presents Fowles's mastery in conveying profound meanings to the words he uses. If we analyze the collector's actions and thoughts, we realize that he has a psychotic mind. Before kidnapping Miranda, while he was thoroughly preparing the details of his future actions, he tries to convince himself that he is not mad, that all his dreams and the imaginary stories he makes up in his mind about Miranda being his wife, are something normal, as long as there is “nothing nasty” in them.

Frederick is unable to adapt to the modern, the real world. He lives in a world of dreams and fantasies, unconsciously influenced by popular TV shows and movies. He believes that he can build a parallel world for himself and Miranda, where they can live happily together as husband and wife. As long as he thinks that he can make her fall in love with him, it doesn't matter that Miranda is a prisoner living in a room in his secluded basement.

What makes Ferdinand a dangerous character with a stubborn personality is the fact that he believes he is always right. He believes that he is doing the best thing for both Miranda and himself. He is even proud of the way he manages to kidnap the girl without leaving any trace. Before winning the pools, he saw the world through the eyes of a man who was bullied and rejected by society. Now that he is rich, he can build his own world, a world seen through the eyes of a collector. He even divides people into specimens that are or aren't worth collecting.

He treats Miranda with a divine vision in mind. She is the rarest thing that a collector can ever get. She is the pride of his collection. But he cannot understand that, in order to collect, he also has to take life. This is exactly what he does with Miranda. At first he takes away her life as a member of society and, later on, he literally lets her die. He acts like a psychopath who can only feel alive when he has in his possession the only thing that's missing from his collection: Miranda.

Fowles makes the interesting choice of using quotation marks around Miranda's dialogue, but not Frederick's. Perhaps this is meant to signify that he lives so much in his dreamworld inside his head that his thoughts are inseparable from his speech.

The latter part of the book presents Miranda's thoughts through the medium of her diary, kept secret during her captivity. We are thus allowed into the mind of a captured woman who, desperate in her solitude, comes to realize her need for the company of her own captor. Through a series of flashbacks, that bring the reader into Miranda's past, we find out about her parents, her friends and her mentor, the painter G.P. As she goes deeper into the history of her past, the Fowles's skill at characterization comes to light, possibly making Miranda one of his greatest female characters.

After she recovers from the shock of being kidnapped, she makes a deal with Ferdinand: he would release her after four weeks. During that time they talk a lot, look at art books, and she even does some painting. At the beginning she is not allowed to see daylight, a fact that affects and changes her a lot. Her struggle to see a last ray of sun even on her death bed stands proof of how much she suffered in the dark room, illuminated only by artificial light.

Miranda's will to survive impresses the reader. During the time she is locked up, she tries several times to escape. One morning, when he opens the cellar door, she pushes so hard against it that he gets stuck between the wall and the door. Another time, when she is allowed to write a letter, she tries to put a tiny piece of paper with her location in the envelope. Later, when Ferdinand is away shopping, she tries to dig a tunnel by getting stones out of the wall. As a last resort, she tries to seduce him, but all her attempts fail. When she realizes that Ferdinand won't let her leave, not even after one month, she thinks of killing him.

Fowles's psychological study of the two characters is, in fact, a battle of minds and wills. During her time in captivity Miranda didn't lose her desire to live. She is a survivor. She tries to remain sane by writing about those she loves. An important factor in her survival is the fact that she finds freedom in art. Her moments of solitude are spent in the world of art, a world dominated by the influence of her mentor. Miranda travels down the path of self-spiritual discovery, while she spends her time thinking about life and art. As David Loftus, a Resident John Fowles Scholar puts it, “the narrative encourages us to meditate on the differences between the privileged and elite (not only in terms of class and economics, but native talent and ability) and the masses, and what each may owe or offer to the other.”

The reader condemns the collector's actions and perceives him as evil and immoral. But the motive, his upbringing, his strong sense of values and his undying adoration of Miranda makes the reader sympathize with Frederick, too. Near the end, when the unexpected tragedy occurs, we realize the true terror of the situation and what Frederick is really made of.

In The Collector, John Fowles presents a gripping, well-written story that not only horrified me but also made me think of my own life and passions. In a way, all of us are collectors. We all have something that is dear to our heart. Either it is stamps, books, coins, paintings or butterflies, we all tend to keep for ourselves the things that attract us most. When such passions are transformed into obsessions, the human mind builds a new reality that will suit the actions that one undertakes in order to fulfill his or her dreams. It is this kind of thrilling reality that The Collector offers us.

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