The Collector

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1963

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1, Pages 5-48

Chapter 1, Pages 49-102

Chapter 2, Pages 103-166

Chapter 2, Pages 167-235

Chapters 3-4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapter 2, Pages 103-166Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 2, Pages 103-135 Summary

Miranda begins keeping a secret diary a week after her kidnapping. Journaling provides some escape from her claustrophobic cell. In the first entry, she thinks of escape and laments that neither her parents nor her friends know her whereabouts. Above all, she tries to decipher Frederick’s motives—she doesn’t understand why he kidnapped her if his intent isn’t sexual. His polite, obsequious manner clashes with her expectation that, as a kidnapper, he would be callous and violent.

Frederick (who Miranda thinks is named Ferdinand) blushes whenever Miranda mentions sex or catches him in a lie. He dresses, speaks, and decorates like a working-class man pretending to be bourgeois. He is gangly, stiff, and looks perpetually aggrieved under his false humility. His eyes betray a hidden part of his psyche: “[H]is eyes are mad. Grey with a grey lost light in them” (105). Upon learning he’s an atheist, Miranda finds she wants to believe in God; she begins praying daily for deliverance.

Frederick changes Miranda. She notices that she’s always reacting against him: “He makes me change, he makes me want to dance round him, bewilder him, dazzle him, dumbfound him” (115). Imprisonment starves Miranda of human contact to the extent that she begins asking Frederick to stay with her after dinner. That Frederick doesn’t physically assault or rape Miranda makes her feel indebted to him; however, she resents being forced to feel this gratitude. She begins calling Frederick “Caliban”—the antithesis of everything civilized. Despite Frederick’s debasing influence, Miranda maintains her class superiority: “I’m so superior to him. I know this sounds wickedly conceited. But I am” (134).

Miranda writes the first of many play-like dialogues based on conversations between her and Frederick, embellishing some of what she said to better express her opinions. In this dialogue, Miranda criticizes Frederick for not having an opinion about nuclear disarmament and for doing nothing to support it—he prioritizes himself over the common good. Frederick believes his opinions and actions are meaningless because he’s working class—no one cares about what people like him think. Miranda reprimands his defeatism, telling him that now that he’s rich he’s as good as the next man, though he believes money hasn’t changed the way people treat him. Miranda convinces Frederick to give money to a campaign for nuclear disarmament that she worked for. He doesn’t send it.

Two weeks into her imprisonment, Frederick allows Miranda outside for the first of her shackled and gagged walks. Under the stars, she senses that he wants to kiss her, or worse. She feels helpless without her usual defense—her tongue. A car passes on the nearby road and a plane flies overhead; the cruel proximity of other people reminds Miranda how easy it is to remain ignorant of other peoples’ suffering; she writes, “we’re all in aeroplanes” (111). Isolated from the outside world, Miranda feels that Frederick is the only person who exists.

Chapter 2, Pages 135-166 Summary

Miranda thinks a lot about a 41-year-old painter she fell in love with, George Paston (whom she refers to as G.P.). Her feelings for George are complicated: She wishes he was closer to her in age, finds him ugly (she describes him in bigoted terms, which reveal her antisemitism, as short and bald with “a nose like a Jew’s” [154]), and despises his lasciviousness; however, she worships his opinions and his passion for art.

After meeting George, Miranda adopted his worldview and artistic sensibility; in her diary she codifies his opinions into a list of seven rules for making art. George changed Miranda: “He’s chipped off all (well, some of, anyway) my silliness, my stupid fussy frilly ideas about life and art, and modern art. My feyness. I’ve never been the same since he told me how he hated fey women. I even learnt the word from him” (128). Miranda fears becoming a “lame duck” (127) housewife like her mother, or a trend-chasing dilettante like her aunt Caroline; Miranda wants to make art but fears she’ll succumb to bourgeois complacency.

Reminiscing about George is an escape. Additionally, Miranda admits she likes reminiscing about the way her humble precocity distinguishes her from her friends. Miranda also finds some escape in the expensive foods she orders from Frederick (she tries, and loves, caviar) and in removing the kitschy decorations from the cottage. Being upstairs makes her feel closer to freedom.

Miranda writes another dialogue based on a conversation she and Frederick had about literature and lepidoptery. She chastises him for only reading pulp fiction and directs him to read J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. She learns that a teacher Frederick was close to introduced him to lepidoptery and that Frederick remains interested in it in part because naturalists don’t condescend to him. Miranda abruptly ends the conversation: She hates sounding as if she cares about Frederick and his “miserable, wet, unwithit life” (133). She also hates that in their conversations she feels as if she’s reciting lines like a character in a play.

Two weeks into her imprisonment, Miranda despairs: She feels weak and depressed. She plots to send Frederick away on errands for a day so that she can try to dig a tunnel around the reinforced door.

Miranda recalls when her aunt Caroline introduced her to George at an art museum. Caroline’s pretentiousness embarrassed Miranda because it annoyed George. When Miranda ran into George days later, she jumped at his invitation to visit him. At his apartment he put on Indian music and sat in silence for 20 minutes, affecting a reclined pose on a divan. Then he showed her his studio, which had a cluttered, authentic artistic feel that Miranda loved. In the following weeks, George introduced Miranda to an invigorating world of people and ideas—a welcome change from the affected cool of her art student friends. Caroline warned Miranda against George, who had a reputation as a Lothario.

When Miranda showed George her art, he criticized it as derivative photographing (reproducing), not painting (creating). Despite the sexist and demeaning George telling her that she’s too pretty to make art (“The art of love’s your line: not the love of art” [140]), Miranda treats his opinions on art as gospel. Miranda likes that George disabused her of the stodgy bourgeois ideas that suffocate England.

Frederick epitomizes this same stodginess: He aspires to the bourgeois manners of people such as Miranda’s parents, but only succeeds in affecting a derivative form of their behavior—gentility. Miranda decries Frederick and the people of his class as “the great deadweight of the Calibanity of England” (145).

The luxuries Frederick provides have a fatal attraction: “I know he’s the Devil showing me the world that can be mine. So I don’t sell myself to him” (153). Despite herself, Miranda enjoys Frederick’s daily gifts and flowers because they make every day feel like Christmas. Simultaneously, she collects makeshift tools she can use to tunnel around the door; these escape preparations give Miranda some hope.

Miranda acknowledges George’s faults: His artwork was derivative in its own right; he dismissed emotion for intellect; he condemned abstractionism out of hand, though Miranda saw beauty in some abstract paintings; finally, George was promiscuous. Miranda hates promiscuity, which she defines as sex without love. After Miranda declined George’s advance over tea, he called women a “disease” (159). The following day he sent her a beautiful drawing of the tea set with a dedication on the back: “‘pour “une” princesse lointaine.’ The ‘une’ was very heavily underlined” (160). She sensed that George wanted her to rebuff him to prove her chastity. In the following weeks, George continued to hint that they should have sex.

Miranda went on vacation and months passed before she saw George again. When they reunited, he told her that he wanted to marry her, but that because she didn’t love him, he resolved to sever contact. Miranda left his apartment ecstatic with the romance of George’s unrequited love, secure in her conviction that she didn’t love him. In her diary Miranda’s conviction wavers. She daydreams about being with George in romantic environs, only to despair upon foreseeing his inevitable betrayals.

Chapter 2, Pages 103-166 Analysis

Chapter 2 is Miranda’s perspective of her imprisonment, written in epistolary form. Surprisingly, her account corroborates many of the key events Frederick recounts, indicating that Frederick’s unreliability as a narrator is mostly unintentional—a product of his delusions. Miranda’s diary introduces a self-awareness and capacity for reflection absent from Frederick’s account, providing both an unmediated window into her mind and a profile of Frederick.

Miranda struggles to figure Frederick out: Every time she thinks she understands him, he does something that upsets that understanding. He isn’t the evil stereotype of a kidnapper she expects: “He wants desperately to please me. But that’s what madmen must be like. They aren’t deliberately mad, they must be as shocked in a way as everyone else when they finally do something terrible” (104). In Miranda’s description, Frederick’s danger lies in his obsession with her—his desperation to treat her like a piece of collection—not in some psychosis or violent temperament. His approach to her—fawning one second, barely repressed rage the next—ties into the theme of The Death-Dealing Nature of Collecting. His obsequious demeanor and awkward bearing—his sheep’s clothing—masks that his love is an obsession that will eventually lead him to violence.

In Chapter 1 Frederick establishes the parallel between himself and Miranda, and Shakespeare’s lovers in The Tempest, by introducing himself as Ferdinand; this reflects his delusion of a possible romance between him and Miranda. In Chapter 2, Miranda rejects this parallel, refusing to submit to the perverse romantic narrative that the “vile coincidence” (126) of their shared names suggests. Miranda instead reworks their roles within The Tempest. She remains the civilized, virtuous Miranda, but casts Frederick as the savage, immoral would-be rapist Caliban. The theatrical dialogues she uses to document her interactions with her kidnapper emphasize that they are each playing a set role (like characters in a play). Like Caliban, Frederick believes he’s beneath Miranda—a conclusion that frequently provokes him to at least imagine violence; in response, she finds herself acting superior to him: “He makes me change, he makes me want to dance round him, bewilder him, dazzle him, dumbfound him. […] He forces me to be changeable, to act. To show off” (115).

A similar power dynamic is at play in Miranda’s relationship with George, though in this case, it is Miranda who believes herself inferior. Miranda’s servile admiration affirms George’s belief that he has more artistic integrity than anyone else. Conversely, George’s condescending interest in Miranda convinces her of her specialness and precocity among her peers. George and Miranda rely on each other to validate superiority (George above everyone, Miranda above her art school peers). Miranda subjugates herself to George, allowing him to mold her to his image: “He’s chipped off all (well, some of, anyway) my silliness, my stupid fussy frilly ideas about life and art, and modern art. My feyness. I’ve never been the same since he told me how he hated fey women. I even learnt the word from him” (128). This reference to “feyness” is another, more subtle, allusion to The Tempest: Caliban is not the only enslaved being on Shakespeare’s island; the other is Ariel, an air spirit whose fey nature is exploited by the magician Prospero. If Frederick is Caliban to Miranda’s Miranda, then Miranda is Ariel to George’s Prospero.

George and Frederick want Miranda to be a princesse lointaine—French for “a distant princess,” a stock medieval romance character of an ideal yet unattainable woman. Both men are attracted to Miranda’s chastity, which precludes the consummation of their desire. This perspective demands that the beautiful object of affection remain a flat idol—neither man is interested in Miranda’s inner life or her own desires; each refuses to allow her to Become Authentic. After Miranda rebuffs George’s advances, she senses that if she had accepted, he would no longer have valued her—admitting to her own desire would have made her un-virtuous in his eyes. In the note George sends in retort, he tells Miranda that she’s not special. He indicates this by underlining the article (une) in his note: “‘pour “une” princesse lointaine.’ The ‘une’ was very heavily underlined” (160). Miranda is just one distant princess—one of many.

Miranda uses slang and colloquialisms to distinguish herself from Frederick’s formal, outdated speech. His manner of speaking represents everything she hates about her world: “the blindness, deadness, out-of-dateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England” (165). By using the hip slang of 1960s cultural revolution—words like “withit” (cool) and “digs” (a place to live, usually apart from your parents)—Miranda identifies herself as one of those few fighting all those backwards people holding back change, those she calls “the great deadweight of the Calibanity of England” (166). Of course, she is not fully self-aware, as her reflexive racist and antisemitic language reveals her lack of actual progressive values to back up her new linguistic veneer.