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

Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary

When Frederick returns to the cellar, Miranda is sicker than the previous night. Miranda is afraid to die. Frederick evades her questions about what he’ll do if she does. Her fever rises to 104 degrees and she becomes delirious. She tells Frederick that she forgives him. Miranda’s sickness dissolves Frederick’s bitterness; he reminisces about the happy times he spent with her before she tried to seduce him. In her delirium, Miranda calls out for George, her sister Minny, and her mother.

After delaying getting a doctor for days, Frederick drives to a doctor’s office in Lewes. The waiting room is full of people who seem suspicious of Frederick. After seeing that the doctor is a retired army officer—the type of person Frederick finds aloof—Frederick leaves. Being around other people for the first time in months reminds him that Miranda is the only person he likes. Frederick goes to a few pharmacies for stronger medication, only to find that he already has the strongest stuff. Back in the cellar, he tells Miranda a doctor is coming.

Frederick leaves to take a nap because he hasn’t slept in a day. He oversleeps; when he returns, Miranda is more delirious and has stripped off her clothes in her fever. Frederick moves her upstairs to spare room in the cottage. She keeps asking for a doctor and Frederick again tells her one is coming. Frederick fears that she’ll try to escape despite her condition.

Frederick delays returning to the doctor’s until 1:30am. On the deserted street outside the doctor’s house, Frederick tries to muster the courage to ring the bell. Before he can, a policeman knocks on his car window, records his information, and tells him to move along. Frederick returns to his cottage with the vague plan of taking Miranda to the hospital and then fleeing the country.

At the cottage, Frederick sees that Miranda is dying. He soothes her by again telling her doctor is coming. Frederick sees that he’s stuck: He must choose either prison or the death of the only woman he will ever love.

Miranda dies the following day:

Well, it dawned, the last day came. Strange, it was a beauty, I don’t believe there was a cloud all day, one of those cold winter days when there’s no wind and the sky is very blue. It seemed specially arranged, most appropriate, seeing she passed away so peaceful (246).

She dies as the suns sets while Frederick is dusting downstairs.

Frederick moves Miranda back to her bed in the cellar, arranges her body, cuts off a lock of her hair, and says a prayer before bolting the door. Frederick forgives Miranda’s seduction and reminisces about the first time he saw her, reflecting that after that day, the random nature of fate thwarted his happiness:

It’s luck. It’s like the pools—worse, there aren’t even good teams and bad teams and likely draws. You can’t ever tell how it will turn out. Just A versus B, C versus D, and nobody knows what A and B and C and D are. That’s why I never believed in God. I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing (261).

In the middle of the night, Frederick returns to the cellar half expecting Miranda’s body to have vanished—he can’t believe she’s dead. A phantom movement in the corner of Miranda’s cell scares Frederick back upstairs. He believes Miranda is fortunate to be free of life’s difficulties: “[S]he was lucky to be done with it all, no more worries, no more hiding, no more things you want to be and won’t ever be” (252). He decides that the best thing to do to avoid being seen as a kidnapper is to kill himself. He plans to burn his photos of Miranda and send a letter to the police informing them that he and Miranda were in love and that, like Romeo and Juliet, they had a suicide pact. Then he plans to take a final look at his butterfly collection before lying down next to Miranda’s body and swallowing a fatal dose of aspirin.

Chapter 4 Summary

Frederick feels differently when he wakes up to a beautiful day in the countryside. Over breakfast, he considers how he might get rid of Miranda’s body. He rationalizes that he hasn’t even committed a crime—Miranda died of natural causes.

Frederick drives into Lewes and buys flowers and the pills he planned to use to kill himself. In town, he sees a girl who looks like Miranda. He follows her and learns that she works behind the sweets counter at a drugstore. Returning to the cottage, Frederick arranges the flowers on Miranda’s bed. He realizes he doesn’t want to kill himself. His subsequent discovery of Miranda’s diary cements his decision—from it he learns that she never loved him and only thought of George.

Frederick builds a coffin and takes three days to dig a grave under the apple trees in his backyard. He commends himself for having the uncommon fortitude to handle Miranda’s decomposing corpse (using a blanket to avoid looking at and touching it) and the skill to figure out how to bury her by himself.

Weeks pass. Annie writes that she and Mabel will stay in Australia, leading Frederick to consider kidnapping Marian, the drugstore clerk. Frederick doesn’t love Marian as he did Miranda—Marian isn’t as pretty—but her commonness would better suit him: “I ought to have seen that I could never get what I wanted from someone like Miranda, with all her la-di-da ideas and clever tricks. I ought to have got someone who would respect me more. Someone ordinary I could teach” (256). Frederick claims he isn’t seriously considering the idea as he stalks Marian and prepares the cellar.

Chapters 3-4 Analysis

In the final two chapters, Frederick regains control over both Miranda and the narrative, emerging as the winner of the Lord–Bondsman Dialectic. These chapters reveal the extent to which Frederick has disappeared into his own reality—the only place where he remains the dominant force. The cottage cellar is outside civilized time and space—a place where he forces Miranda into an underground existence of privation. This sense of existing outside of regular life is reinforced by Miranda’s inability to use the sun as a marker of time (she doesn’t see daylight for weeks) and her isolation from the news. However, his trip into Lewes shows how little Frederick’s position in the real world has changed. In the doctor’s office, Frederick returns to the world from which the cottage offered refuge. We see that isolation has made him paranoid and anxious. Frederick feels watched: “I hadn’t been in a room with other people for a long time, only in and out of shops, it felt strange, as I say, they all seemed to look at me, one old woman especially wouldn’t take her eyes off me” (265). Frederick flees scrutiny, leaving the office despite knowing Miranda needs a doctor. Returning to crowded streets reminds Frederick that he hates people: “It made me see Miranda was the only person in the world I wanted to live with. It made me sick of the whole damn lot” (266). In Lewes, Frederick again loses his accustomed superior position—the mastery of his domain that prevails in the cottage.

Frederick refuses to accept that Miranda is dying and rationalizes his innocence in her death—a self-deception that plays into the theme of Bad Faith. When he reflects on Miranda’s death, he paints himself as a victim of inexorable fate: “It was like a joke mousetrap I once saw, the mouse just went on and things moved, it couldn’t ever turn back, but just on and on into cleverer and cleverer traps until the end” (249). In Frederick’s analogy, he has no choice but to move forward toward an inexorable fate. This framing removes Frederick’s agency from the equation, making him the powerless figure he pretends to be.

Chapter 3 embraces the dark comedy produced by the dramatic irony between Frederick’s romantic, grandiose fantasies and the horrific reality of hiding Miranda’s body. His plan to stage a death scene resembling that in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet marks the pinnacle of his delusion. Since The Tempest ends happily for Miranda and Ferdinand, Frederick must switch his reenactment of Shakespeare to the play whose titular lovers famously die. His baseless hope is to become the Romeo he wishes he were in society’s eyes: “If I destroyed the photos, that was all there was, people would see I never did anything nasty to her, it would be truly tragic” (293). Having once again seen his low status in the real world, Frederick cares what other people think of him.

In contrast to Frederick’s poetic flights of fancy, burying Miranda devolves into banal horror. Rather than keeping a well-preserved Miranda forever, like a butterfly in his collection, Frederick must confront The Death-Dealing Nature of Collecting as Miranda’s body begins to decompose. Even though Frederick is still eager to retain his delusions, commending himself for figuring out how to bury Miranda on his own, seeing it as a distinguishing accomplishment (“I don’t think many could have done it. I did it scientific. I planned what had to be done and ignored my natural feelings” [297]), he cannot help being physically affected by the state of her days-old flesh. Frederick’s aversion to Miranda’s corpse is still not enough to shatter his self-deception: He sees overcoming this aversion a triumph; his matter-of-fact description of the burial is devoid of grief or remorse, indicating a lack of emotional sensitivity. The fact that he plans to kidnap and imprison another young woman, hoping that she proves more tractable to his inscrutable desires, ends the novel on a chilling note.