The Collector by John Fowles (unboxed spoilers)

Cafe Society
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Hazle Weatherfield’s thought provoking thread about being kidnapped by someone who would obey your every wish except free you and contact your friends and family reminded me very much of one of my favourite novels, “The Collector” by John Fowles.

One of the things I often wonder about is how likeable Miranda (the captive) and the artist boyfriend G.P. that she writes about in her diary are supposed to be to the reader. I get the impression we’re supposed to think he’s pretty hot shit too but he always strikes me from her descriptions as the world’s most pretentious, selfish asshole! Her worship of him and the way she sneers at the working class (not just Fred) can make her hard to like at times. I always wonder if this is a deliberate artistic choice to show how her middles class background blinds her to forging a connection that make save her or whether Fowles just basically thought she and her artist friend are basically right and that the working class are petty, spiteful, selfish people who can’t appreciate art and only lead decent lives because they don’t have the resources to do real harm. What do you think?

However, on the other hand, in contrast to Fred, I do really like the fact that she’s willing to look to her own actions and thoughts and challenge them. For instance, I always found it touching the bit where she eventually concludes that the fact that she always makes a conscious effort to be good and kind to everyone else doesn’t mean she’s ‘allowed’ to make an exception and not be kind to her alcoholic mother who she finds deeply embarrassing. Rather, she decides she should be MORE loving, not less. Whether or not that is wise or not is beside the point - I just like she’s always willing to factor in she might be wrong and admit the possibility of changing herself for the better. That’s why ultimately the ending is so sad to me - I think there’s this powerful sense that she’s still growing as a person and would have continued to improve and really give something to the world and it all gets taken away from her.

I also felt her character was pretty convincing in all the steps she took and the desperation to be free. I found myself thinking what I might try in this situation - all the attempts to either bargain with him, freeze him out, trick him, try to get to know him and the growing horror of nothing working. And indeed just how frightening even this ‘benign’ kidnapping would really be, especially when it becomes obvious to her that Fred’s motives aren’t just blind to her, they’re blind to him too.

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I don’t think Fowles intended Ferdie to be representative of the working class. I think Fowles wrote Ferdie as a psychopath, a person with little or no understanding of morality as normal people have it. The tragedy of the story is that Miranda never figures out that Ferdie is a psychopath, her background has left her totally unprepared to deal with a person like him.

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As I said over PM, glad to find someone else who shares a love of this book.

I don’t know that that’s the tragedy, Evil Captor. I think she recognized that he was messed up, but what else could she do? She tried escaping several times and almost made it on at least one occasion.

I wondered, too, Promethea, about Miranda’s likability. In the part from Fred’s POV, I remember thinking she just seemed so full of herself and her ideas on Art and philosophy and so on. And G.P. did seem like a pretentious ass, didn’t he? The stereotypical artsy professor taking up with a younger girl. But as you say, she does say she wants to be a more loving person. And the way she talks about her sister, I got the sense that she did want to return and change.

I think you’re right about her efforts to escape. She is desperate and I think most of us would be. Just to be free, to be your own person. It’s interesting how it goes from attempting to trick him, to even trying to commit physical violence, to seduction.

Finally, I also thought it was fascinating that Fred doesn’t know his own motives, as you point out. The part where she tries to escape (with the fire poker? I think?) at their little party, and he chloroforms her and puts her on the bed and then takes photographs of her and tells himself they were interesting from an artistic POV…very chilling. He’s clearly incredibly attracted to this girl and yet doesn’t even admit it to himself. In his own mind, he seems to be a nice, quiet guy, and yet he’s only a few steps away from a Phillip Garrido.

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Oh, sorry to post twice in a row but had some more to say.

What you were saying about the working class, Promethea…I interpreted it less as a working class dislike, and more of a dislike of all things bourgeois. It’s not a matter of money–it’s the fact that he buys cutesy duck things or ugly paintings. If he’d been a poor working class artist starving away, trying to devote himself to great art, I’m sure she would have liked him. Though if such a fellow kidnapped her…I don’t know.

Also, if Fred had kidnapped a young woman who wasn’t quite as sophisticated as Miranda (or as sophisticated as she thought she was), would things have gone better? He wants to try this at the end–he’s found a new girl to lust over who he implies is less worldly. I remember Fred saying he couldn’t let Miranda go because he knew she despised him and wouldn’t associate with him again.

I find it hard to believe anyone would have been able to make friends with him, though. In the kidnapping situation or otherwise. He was a real pill.

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I’m not sure what background she could have had that WOULD have enabled her to deal with such a person, though. I mean, she doesn’t outright pin the label of psychopath on him, but she is totally terrfified by his behaviour in large part because she realises he’s mad and that he can’t be reasoned with. Do you think there’s things she could have done differently is she’d have known more?

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HA! I remember the bit where she smashes the ornaments. And yeah, you’re right - it’s probably more accurately a hatred of the bourgeois. The ornament thing was interesting (and hila. As well as understandably wanting to see the look on his face as tiny payback for his treatment, she also really does seem genuinely enraged that he’s filled a beautiful house with such shit. That said, I do think there’s an underlying suggestion that the poor getting richer is a terrible idea because it empowers them to become bourgeois. Or, to put it another way, the only thing that stops the working classes becoming this loathed class is money. After all, it’s not just Fred who doesn’t come out of things well - his family are shown as totally horrible too.

In fact, I do actually feel pretty sorry for him when he describes his upbringing because it sounds so vividly rotten. I always remember the bit where when trying to convey how Mabel (?), one of his relatives is in a wheelchair and how how the rest of the family use this to make each other feel bad. He gives as an example that he might comes home saying he’s sweaty because he had to run to catch the bus and they say piously how Mabel would love to be able to run to catch buses whilst Mabel just sits there looking proudly stoic. He also reads her that postcard from them on holiday and though Miranda denys it’s the working class background per se that makes her hate what she hears, she does say she hates the sense of bitter entitlement, the spite of complaining that the world is holding them back and endlessly trying to cheat them and I get the impression it’s about more than just this one family.

I also found it interesting where she tells him that no-one actually CARES about the class divide any more but I think for once Fred sees an issue more clearly then she does. I think that she doesn’t see it as significant because her upper class background means she never has to think about such things. Heh. It always fascinates me how when thinking about Fred how easy it is to fall into the same trap that Miranda scolds herself for, namely feeling sorry for the bloke who has just kidnapped a young woman and left her poor friends and family to never know
what happened to her.

The bit about people not liking him in a social setting made me think a bit. You’re right of course - he IS a total pill! He’s so endlessly concerned with saying or doing the ‘correct’ thing that there’s nothing left for a personality but the habit is so ingrained he no longer realises it’s all fake. I guess it makes me wonder - would he have been a better person if he’d have been a more authentic person and so the weird facade which eventually leads him to kidnapping would just not happen or would he merely have been more open to himself about just why he was kidnapping them in the first place and thus skip straight to rape and violence with them?

It’s an interesting idea to wonder how it would work out with the less worldly version of Miranda. I’d never really done much more other than to conclude he’d learned absolutely nothing and would therefore continue this grim cycle of kidnapping young women and then getting disullusioned as each one showed herself to be a human being in some way rather than an object.

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And I don’t even think it was just the ornaments that offended them. Well, they were pretty tacky, but it was his attitude toward them. She’d ask him what he felt about a painting or a drawing she did and he’d say it was nice because it looked like its subject (a bowl of fruit, etc.). It was the fact that there was no real passion. If he owned a mediocre or even bad painting but felt passion or love for it for whatever reason, I think she could have appreciated that. Or if, say, he hated “great” music like opera, but liked something like rock music…even if the latter isn’t necessarily as artsy, at least he would be stirred by something. It was the fact that he was so passionless and dull that infuriated her.

The Mabel stuff is another great point. His family is quite awful. Though doesn’t Miranda say similar things about her own parents? I seem to remember her being quite critical of them as well.

I, too, wonder what he would have been like if he’d been more self-aware. But I also wonder about serial killers and rapists and kidnappers. You have to know you’re doing something wrong…right? But then of course, look at the power of denial. I’m sure there are kidnappers who think just like Fred. People like Philip Garrido must tell themselves that they’re normal and maybe they rationalize that because they look outwardly normal to people that they are. And I think that gets back to what Miranda said. Fred is so conventional in every way. And yet he’s missing something so important. A soul, if you believe in it, or basic empathy. But no one else in his life is even aware that he is so flawed because all they see is the outside–that he has a job, he gives money to support his family, he owns a house, talks/acts nicely.

I think he would have continued the cycle of kidnapping woman after woman and just not getting it. And getting upset when he sees her as a real human. Do you remember the parts when she’s dying of pneumonia (or bronchitis?), and he says that she has little pimples or sores about her mouth and it looked rather nasty? I remember shuddering at that. This is the woman he supposedly loves and he’s frowning and evaluating her like I would if I were evaluating a t-shirt that’s gotten stained or ripped. It was a small moment but it just made me think that that’s all she was to him–a very pretty thing.

The other thing it made me think of was men who, for whatever reason–social class or social awkwardness or looks–feel very bitter towards women they think wouldn’t give them the time of day. The guy who bitches about women not liking nice guys. It’s a bit like Fred. He assumes that as an educated, upper middle class woman she’d never look twice at a man like him, and of course, this is justification for kidnapping her. And I couldn’t help think of guys who say that to women in many situations. “Someone like you would never go out with someone like me.” But it just screams entitlement, too. As in, you’re so much better than me that I have to take you down a peg–whether by pointing out how “uppity” said woman is being or in Fred’s case by basically erasing her.

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I do remember, yes. I thought it was grim too. One of the reasons I think the whole novel is so chilling is that he seems incapable of realising what it is he actually wants from her is ultimately impossible. The minute she becomes a real person (who gets ill, etc) his Dream Girl illusion collapses. And then she gets thrown away :frowning:

Yes, I think there’s a LOT of entitlement in him. Plus, he ascribes this horrible attitude to the whole world, never seeing that actually it’s HIM who’s like this. Like right at the start where he assumes that all of his colleagues will be grasping and jealous after his Pools win and so he shuns them. Or when he lies to Miranda about giving money to Charity, justifying it to himself by telling himself they’d just keep the money for themselves anyway. This horrible “everyone is on the take so I’m justified in grabbing everything I can”, eventually, as you say extends to him taking Miranda. And yeah, he is the King of the Nice Guys.

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Definitely. He says he’ll be happy just to go on living with her and loving her. But I could never have been love because it was so perverse. You think of people who sacrifice for their loved one. Sydney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities, to be cliched. And then you see Fred who makes Miranda give up her entire life and who lets her die like a dog when she gets sick. I know, he was perverse, but I kept hoping he would get her a doctor. That maybe he’d develop some real feeling. It wouldn’t have made it better but there would have been some redemption if he’d said to himself, “I know I’ll go to jail if I get her to a hospital but I’ll do it for love of her.”

And I think what made it worse was just that he buried her and went on with life. He threw her away, and for him it was over because she was gone. But I kept thinking–her parents and her sister and her lover and her friends are going to go on wondering. They may assume she’s dead but they’ll never know.

That’s the thing about Hazel’s thread that would make it impossible for me to like being a kept prisoner, even if I (very improbably) decided I wanted it.

And I think that’s part of what made Fred so inhuman. Did he really think she’d be all right being deprived of her loved ones, and not only that, knowing how her family felt? I don’t care how many DVDs or books or CDs you give me, there is nothing that would make up for knowing how much pain everyone who knows you is in.

Yes, he really is. And the first time I read it, I couldn’t help assuming his POV, as we so often do when we read a book in the first person. I thought that his co-workers really do sound awful. But maybe they’re not. I think a lot of it is just him.

Also when it comes down to it, it’s scary how much I found myself in Fred’s head, thinking his thoughts and agreeing with him, the first time around. (Of course that changed when I got to part two.) Like when Fred says he’ll send Miranda’s family a letter saying she’s okay and not hurt or in pain, and then when he isn’t looking she slips in a note trying to describe where she is and who Fred is so they’ll have a better chance of trying to track her down and rescue her. Fred is genuinely hurt and, I hate to admit it, but so was I. Of course, anyone would want so desperately to be free, but I couldn’t help assuming all of Fred’s thoughts.

I don’t know why that is. Is it that we just can’t help getting into the perspective of whoever we’re reading about? Or is it that the book would end if Miranda did leave, so we perversely want to read more?

The other thing I’m kind of curious about is sex. We get two perspectives of it–Fred’s and Miranda’s. And Fred is just so button down and repressed and honestly thinks that it’s dirty and something he never thinks about. It’s quite creepy how he’ll describe how Miranda looks and it’s like he’s trying to avoid making it sound sexy. In the most extreme version, he says the pictures came out nice (the ones he took when he held her down and took them of her). He even says something like, “I had to so I could use them as blackmail if she ever left.”

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Just wanted to bump this…I know I was the last to post, but I was curious about whether anyone else had anything to say. And even if not I was curious about what you had to say about my last post, Promethea, as I was enjoying reading your commentary on the book so far, too.

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Sorry, I meant to get back to this, thought about the responses and then never er, got around to posting it. :smack:

I agreed with you! Especially here:

He has this horrible habit of constructing visions of doing the right thing and that imagining seeming to be enough. And then actually not bothering. Again I also thought of how he promises her he’s sent money to her charity but decides the impulse is enough because anyway they’d probably just steal it :frowning:

I shared the hurt feeling too! I thought about it and can only think that because we’re seeing* everything* from behind Fred’s eyes, we’re more vulnerable to sharing the hurt feeling of being fooled too. I don’t think this feeling is felt in the film version, for instance because it’s much harder to control who the audience is directed to identify with. On screen, I think it’s impossible to overlook the fact that this is a madman who’s snatched a young woman from the street. They try to increase the sense of identification by having us know way more about Fred than we do about Miranda but I think they’re not successful. I think (or hope) for most viewers, the primal sense of threat overrules the character based identification.

It reminds me of Hazle Weatherfield’s original question and why (to me) it was a logical impossibility to answer - namely, how do you try and convey to a cinema audience that this is a ‘nice’ kidnapper? To me, you couldn’t. In the book, we know to a large extent at least when things are getting worse for Miranda but on film, the audience have no way of knowing that he won’t rape or kill her at any time. He’s already demonstrated that he’s capable of doing evil things without admitting to himself that this is so by kidnapping her in the first place.

The sex thing in the novel is something I always wondered about. His repression is so extreme as to defy any identification or even to me, much understanding. It’s so weird. He tells his diary how he makes up some ie about how trauma from the war has left him damaged as far as relating to humans sexually and seems kind of smug she believes him. but he never seems to wonder or even quite realise that he’s extremely messed up for real and why that might be. It’s like the kidnapping though - it’s terrifying that he has these massive blind spots in his motivations even to himself. I mean, it’s obvious that he doesn’t ever dream he’s going to be caught so it’s not like he’s writing those diaries to withstand scrutiny if captured - he really doesn’t admit to sexual attraction. And yet it’s there and it leads him to start treating Miranda REALLY scarily after she makes that last ditch effort for freedom by trying to seduce him, telling his diary in essence what a whore she is and how stupid he feels for formerly treating her like a lady. It’s such a tragic contrast with Miranda who I think genuinely is trying to make a connection of sorts. She’s trying to escape of course but I think by this stage she’s also become very isolated and does want to connect emotionally on some level. She says something in confusion afterwards about “we’ve been in bed together - we can’t be further apart now then before” (or words to that effect). But of course they are.

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Oh, no worries. Just glad to hear back. It’s a book I’ve read so many times but never really had anyone to discuss it with.

I also wonder how much of it is projection. That is, when you’re a selfish or thieving person, you assume that the rest of the world is like that. As you say, he doesn’t realize that he’s the one who’s like that. He thinks he’s a nice person, though. For all the pettiness he ascribes to charities and all the judgment he assumes upper class people have towards him, he’s the one who’s petty and judgmental. He doesn’t come out and say it all at once, though, so at first you sort of start to agree. You think that, yeah, maybe those co-workers are real jerks, as Fred says they are. But then you see him saying stuff like, “I bet they thought I was mean for not giving them any of the money I’d won” (paraphrased from memory), but then were they even thinking that? They may have been perfectly nice people, but he just saw them as horrible.

The sex thing–yeah, that is bizarre. He never thought anyone would see that diary, so I think you’re right that he genuinely believed he wasn’t a sexual person. And Miranda tries to explain that sex isn’t inherently a dirty thing. It’s just two people trying to connect at its most basic level. Even if it’s not about love, it can be about reaching out, about understanding. And I think that though Miranda (like everyone, really) is flawed, one thing I liked about her is that she did want to understand people, even Fred.

Yet Fred just seems to reduce things to nice or not nice as Miranda pointed out. Sex isn’t nice because it’s messy and complicated. And the way he sees Miranda is frightening. When you bring up the seduction and how things change, I think that does get to the heart of the matter. For him, either Miranda was non-sexual and nice to look at and a real proper lady. Or she was sexual and therefore dirty and not nice.

When I think about it, it’s even more objectifying than if he were some stereotypical guy making crass remarks about her body. He objectifies her by treating her as though all that matters is what’s on the surface and by rejecting her the minute she expresses real opinions and thoughts of her own. He doesn’t accept that she can have these thoughts and opinions that are unfamiliar to him. And when she does, he deems her unworthy.