The Collector

Frederick’s interaction with Miranda dramatizes the internal battle between his feelings of inferiority and superiority. These feelings are largely bound up in ideas of class: As a clerk, Frederick was lower-middle class, though this status was precarious given the fact that he comes from a working-class family. In London, he finds that even though he’s now rich, people from the bourgeoisie—the established middle and upper-middle classes—condescend to him and his family for being uneducated and uncultured new money.

Frederick and Miranda’s Lord–Bondsman Dynamic is a microcosm of this greater class conflict. Unlike Frederick, Miranda has been educated to have knowledge and opinions about art and politics. Despite her avowed hatred of snobbery, Miranda finds herself playing the role of the snob to Frederick. This includes disparaging his kitschy decorations: “‘It’s a lovely room. It’s wicked to fill it with all this shoddy stuff. Such muck […] you must see it’s wrong! Those terrible chichi wall-lamps and […] not china wild duck!’ She looked at me with real anger” (42). Miranda’s moralistic language (words like “wicked” and “wrong” imply an ethical dimension to Frederick’s taste) and anger suggest that, to her, it’s almost a crime to decorate in such an unfashionable way. Frederick likes his decorations and feels belittled by Miranda’s judgments.

This Class Conflict also manifests in speech. Miranda despises the stilted, clichéd way Frederick talks, seeing it as a failed imitation of an outdated bourgeois patois. She accuses him of diluting the English language: “You know how rain takes the colour out of everything? That’s what you do to the English language. You blur it every time you open your mouth” (71). In Miranda’s metaphor, Frederick saps English of its meaning by relying on hackneyed phrases that do not really express his true feelings, but falsify his speech with borrowed elevation. Miranda—who prizes creativity and originality—sees Frederick as a member of the unoriginal, inauthentic masses.

Conversely, Frederick has a bipolar view of Miranda: She is either a Madonna to be admired on a pedestal or a lowly sexual object to be used and despised—a dehumanizing bifurcation that in psychology is called the Madonna–Mistress (or Madonna–Whore) complex. This view of women, which discounts their existence as full people in favor of flat and reductive stereotype, is associated with deep sexual dysfunction in men. In the first weeks of her imprisonment, Miranda can do no wrong in Frederick’s eyes: She is the ideal of feminine beauty and morality, to be treated gingerly and worshipfully. However, after she tries to seduce him to secure her release, his opinion flips: “You’re no better than a common street-woman […] I used to respect you because I thought you were above what you done. Not like the rest. But you’re just the same. You do any disgusting thing to get what you want” (96). Frederick uses debasing language that strips Miranda of the superiority he previously attributed to her. He groups her with the rest of “them”—the morally bankrupt, promiscuous population of England.

Frederick evades mention of Miranda’s death through allusion and obfuscation. His use of nonspecific hints creates a sense of foreboding as it foreshadows the tragic end for which the story seems fated. His language keeps the nature of Miranda’s fate and his role in it vague, building suspense. The night Miranda hits Frederick with the ax, he reveals how fickle he is in his self-aggrandizing commitment not to hurt her: “It was just about the straw that broke the camel’s back, as the saying is, and certain ideas did come into my mind. I don’t know what I mightn’t have done if she’d kept on as before” (89). He is talking around his potential for volatility and violence, hiding these tendencies behind his composed, methodical demeanor, arousing a sense of horror. After Miranda enrages Frederick with her attempted seduction, this part of him becomes more pronounced: “I could have done anything. I could have killed her. All I did later was because of that night” (94). At this point in the story, what exactly he “does later” is unknown; however, for once Frederick states in the barest terms the absolute power he has over Miranda. Nonetheless, he still tries to elicit the reader’s commendation for not using this power (as he frequently claims other, lesser, men would have), framing his restraint as evidence of his morality.

At the farewell party, horrific reality collides with the charade of romance. Throughout the scene, the tone slips between horror and comedy, as Fowles plays with the tension between reality and fiction, between the actual and a facsimile. Frederick tries to correct his imitative, petit-bourgeois taste that Miranda criticizes, replacing the fake fireplace logs with wood and buying her a necklace of real diamonds and sapphires. For Frederick, the party is the opportunity to realize his fantasy of winning Miranda’s love. Conversely, Miranda requests the party to ensure that Frederick is serious about freeing her. Neither can really enjoy the party; however, both have to act as if they are a couple having a romantic evening. This charade fractures as soon as Miranda realizes Frederick never intended to release her and Frederick realizes that Miranda doesn’t actually like him. When Miranda promises to make Frederick over in London, he has to admit to himself that “It was all unreal. I knew she was pretending just like I was. I had a headache. It was all going wrong” (85). Frederick is neither delusional nor so narcissistic that he’s blind to Miranda’s feelings; he is ultimately unable to talk himself into accepting what he knows to be an ersatz version of a love story.