The Collector

John Fowles, utilizes classic fairy tale as portrayed by other literary works to structure his narration in The Collector. He tells his version of a fairy tale by creating the characters of Clegg and Miranda to mirror Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, the Prince and Belle in Beauty and the Beast. The Collector and the aforementioned tales are similar not in the circumstances of the narrative, but the traditional dichotomy of captor and captive, good and evil, love and hate, that the characters of Clegg and Miranda portray. Fowles draws upon the classic Beauty and the Beast story of a delightful princess put in captivity by her malevolent admirer. He also infers a similarity to The Tempest: The protagonist is named Miranda and Clegg’s character sees himself as Ferdinand although his tendencies points more to a Caliban. According to Sherrill E. Grace, Fowles explored the Bluebeard tale and it influenced the dynamics of his writings. She states that “in reading Fowles and Atwood we court Bluebeards who continuously escape our reforming urges, in castles which are subtle verbal traps” (Grace 247). The theme of female imprisonment by a male which the Bluebeard story alludes, is adopted to narrate The Collector. Fowles retells and refines the Bluebeard story by structuring The Collector around characters with genuinely misshaped perspectives of good and bad and along these lines indicate a breakdown of the moral and social frameworks in the social order they depict.

In The Tempest, Prospero is the one who lives for the arts whereas, in Fowles’s novel, Miranda is the one dedicated to the arts. Clegg’s lust for power and control is depicted by the aristocrats in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Fowle...

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...or the character, Miranda, her tendencies of undaunted optimism and superiority best explain her reason for speaking to Clegg in fairy tale. As Zipes says, “old wonder tales” often portrayed the strife to overcome or to humanize the scary monsters that terrified individuals and societies (Zipes 1).

Works Cited

Cooper, Pamela. "The Fictions of John Fowles: Power, Creativity, Femininity." Hutcheon, Linda. Foreword. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1991. 241.

Fowles, John. The Collector. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc, 1963.

—. The Collector. Vintage. New York: Random House, 2010.

Grace, Sherrill E. "Courting Bluebeard with Bartók, Atwood, and Fowles: Modern Treatment of the Bluebeard Theme." Journal of Modern Literature , Vol. 11, No. 2 (1984): 245-262.

Zipes, Jack. When Dreams Came: True:Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. New York: CRC Press, 1999.