The Collector

My father was killed driving. I was two. That was in 1937. He was drunk, but Aunt Annie always said it was my mother that drove him to drink. They never told me what really happened, but she went off soon after and left me with Aunt Annie.”

The emotionless tone with which Frederick conveys the tragedy of his childhood suggests either that this tragedy stunted him emotionally or that he’s innately unable to feel emotions such as grief. There is not even a trace of anger in his description of being abandoned to the care of his unloving aunt—he writes in a completely reportorial style. That Annie conceals the truth from Frederick leaves an open wound in his past that continues to affect his attitude toward women.

“There’s never been anyone but you I’ve ever wanted to know. ‘That’s the worst kind of illness,’ she said. She turned round then, all this was while I was tying. She looked down. ‘I feel sorry for you.’”

In the novel, what the characters describe as love is actually an all-consuming obsession, akin to a kind of sickness. Miranda and Frederick discuss hopeless, since Miranda experienced a form of unrequited attraction in her relationship with George. The Collector re-contextualizes of the fixated love so often venerated in romances, showing that it can lead to absurd and horrific consequences.

“Because you think I don’t feel anything properly, you don’t know I have deep feelings but I can’t express them like you can, I said.”

Frederick often finds himself outmatched in his conversations with Miranda. He attributes his inability to express himself to his lack of education. However, since in his narrative, he expresses himself clearly and sometimes eloquently, readers get the sense that Frederick is unable to express himself to Miranda because he cannot disentangle his conflicted and shame-inducing feelings around sexuality, love, beauty, and women. This passage also contains Frederick’s characteristic way of fishing for pity—he reflexively subordinates himself to Miranda, playing on the reader’s sympathies.

“There were just all those evenings we sat together and it doesn’t seem possible that it will never be again. It was like we were the only two people in the world. No one will ever understand how happy we were—just me, really, but there were times when I consider she didn’t mind in spite of what she said, if she thought about it.”

Frederick isn’t completely delusional—though he wishes Miranda would also be happy, he acknowledges that only he is. Frederick tries to twist his story into the mold of romance, blending fact with narrative tropes like lovers being marooned together. This reference to romantic isolation of being the only two people in the world recalls the novel’s epigraph: “apart from them, none knew of their love” (3), changing the tone of this passage from romance to horror.

“I could sit there all night watching her, just the shape of her head and the way the hair fell from it with a special curve, so graceful it was, like the shape of a swallowtail. It was like a veil or a cloud, it would lie like silk strands all untidy and loose but lovely over her shoulders. I wish I had words to describe it like a poet would or an artist.”

Frederick’s description of Miranda’s hair—the feature he loves most—belies his facility with words, although he dismisses his lyrical description because he doesn’t believe he can be either a poet or an artist. Frederick’s overlapping similes are beautiful and also deeply creepy—he is describing a woman whom he has kidnapped and imprisoned. His focus on her physical appearance shows that he cares only about Miranda’s beauty, not about her personality.

“‘We all want things we can’t have. Being a decent human being is accepting that. We all take what we can get. And if we haven’t had much most of our life we make up for it while the going’s good,’ I said. ‘Of course you wouldn’t know about that.’”

Frederick and Miranda have dueling views of life, views representative of their respective social classes. Frederick has a cynical, amoral attitude rooted in privation and resentment; Miranda has a moral, verging on moralistic, attitude rooted in privilege. This exchange is an example of the lord–bondsman dialectic that plays out between the two of them in the novel. With no one else around to weigh in, the two are locked in a battle over epistemology and ethics.

“‘Why do you take all the life out of life? Why do you kill all the beauty?’ I never had your advantages. That’s why.”

Frederick again blames his upbringing for his character. There is a kernel of truth in Frederick’s response: Miranda’s upbringing has allowed her the privilege of valuing beauty in a way that Frederick’s did not. Frederick’s terrifying rage at this will become a cycle of violence—of finding and trapping beautiful women. Frederick often exploits his class grievances to justify his behavior.

“I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can’t you understand? I don’t think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.”

Both Frederick and Miranda have judgmental ways of seeing the world. Whereas Frederick judges things in strictly moral terms—nasty or nice—Miranda judges on aesthetic terms—beautiful or ugly. Neither can see shades of nuance (though Miranda develops this ability later). That they share this judgmental outlook but differ in their evaluative framework sets them up for conflict—Miranda trying to convert Frederick to aesthetics and Frederick moralizing Miranda.

“What she never understood was that with me it was having. Having her was enough. Nothing needed doing. I just wanted to have her, and safe at last.”

This statement illuminates Frederick’s nature as a collector: He is interested in possessing the rare and valuable, like a butterfly specimen or Miranda. This desire to objectify rather than sexually exploit defies Miranda’s expectations. As Miranda notes, there is nothing recognizable in Frederick’s desire because it initially lacks the violent sexual component she expects. Frederick claims to be concerned with protecting and preserving Miranda as a beautiful trophy—having her “safe at last.”

“I kept thinking, stop it, stop it, it’s wrong, but I was too weak. The next thing was I was naked and she was against me and holding me but I was all tense, it was like a different me and a different she. I know I wasn’t normal then, not doing the expected, she did some things which I won’t say except that I would never have thought it of her. She lay beside me on the sofa and everything, but I was all twisted inside. She made me look a proper fool.”

Frederick’s narration of his sexual encounter with Miranda hints at the depths of his sexual repression. He’s so prudish that he can’t bring himself to name what specific sexual acts Miranda performs on him. Sex is a deeply shameful thing to Frederick, and because his shame is too much to bear, he becomes angry with Miranda rather than his own failure to live up to what’s expected of a man in his position.

“It made me really laugh to think of her down there, she was the one who was going to stay below in all senses and even if it wasn’t what she deserved in the beginning she had made it so that she did now. I had real reasons to teach her what was what.”

Miranda’s seduction enrages Frederick; in the subsequent days, he develops a vengeful attitude toward her. After weeks of making himself inferior to Miranda, Frederick delights in having a justification to punish her. As Miranda says when she describes madmen being “as shocked in a way as everyone else when they finally do something terrible” (127), Frederick gradually builds himself up to doing terrible things, building a stepladder of rationalizations.

“What I am trying to say is that it all came unexpected. I know what I did next day was a mistake, but up to that day I thought I was acting for the best and within my rights.”

Frederick distances himself from his monstrosity by pretending to surprise himself when he commits a terrible crime, wallowing in a mix of admission and rationalization. His absurd claim here to be “acting within his rights” with a woman he’s torturing suggests that his concept of morality is self-centered and infinitely flexible.

“I’ve grown to know every inch of this foul little crypt, it’s beginning to grow on me like those coats of stones on the worms in rivers.”

Miranda’s analogy describes the way in which imprisonment changes her. Stones reoccur as a symbol of the burden Frederick—and by extension the petite-bourgeoisie—place on Miranda. In other instances, she describes being weighed down by the millstone of envy and the great dead weight of the masses.

“The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.”

Frederick and Miranda share a similar resentment for faceless masses they imagine oppressing them: Frederick resents everyone above him, while Miranda resents conventional people unconcerned with creativity or authenticity. She identifies what she terms “New People” as having the highest concentration of such “ordinary men”—in her mind, the great scourge of England.

“This isn’t just a fantastic situation; it’s a fantastic variation of a fantastic situation. I mean, now he’s got me at his mercy, he’s not going to do what anyone would expect. So he makes me falsely grateful. I’m so lonely. He must realize that. He can make me depend on him.”

Miranda uses the many meanings of the word “fantastic” to describe her predicament: Kidnapping is extraordinary in its rarity; Frederick subverts Miranda’s expectations by not raping her—a seemingly unreal variation of this crime. Frederick is purposely using these expectations to elicit Miranda’s gratitude for not acting according to them. Frederick manipulates Miranda in this subtle way.

“How I hate ignorance! Caliban’s ignorance, my ignorance, the world’s ignorance! Oh, I could learn and learn and learn and learn. I could cry, I want to learn so much.”

Miranda’s cri de coeur expresses her disappointment in herself, Frederick, and the world. Notably, Miranda lumps herself in with Frederick and the masses she so often disparages. This is an acknowledgement both of the faults she sees in herself and of her desire to rectify them.

“You’re too pretty. The art of love’s your line: not the love of art.”

George’s sexist turn of phrase shows that he thinks of Miranda only as a sexual object, not as another person capable of producing art like him. Miranda is surrounded by men who only value her for her beauty. Like Frederick, George objectifies women, but unlike Frederick, George does so in a way socially acceptable in the 1960s, enabling him to live openly in society as a Lothario.

“Always with that I’m-sorry expression on his face, which I begin to realize is actually contentment. The sheer joy of having me under his power, of being able to spend all and every day staring at me. He doesn’t care what I say or how I feel—my feelings are meaningless to him—it’s the fact that he’s got me.”

As Frederick says earlier in the book, he is interested in possession—having Miranda starts out as enough. Frederick uses his servility to conceal his contentment, which belies his ostensible concern for Miranda’s wellbeing.

“You teach me to despise her and think like you, and soon you’ll leave me and I’ll have no one at all.”

Frederick guilts Miranda into pitying him for being alone, criticizing her for trying to turn him against his aunt, the only person he has in his life (other than Miranda). Frederick tries to make his loneliness Miranda’s burden. This exemplifies one of the ways in which he manipulates Miranda.

“He will suffer when I am gone. There will be nothing left. He’ll be alone with all his sex neurosis and his class neurosis and his uselessness and his emptiness. He’s asked for it. I’m not really sorry. But I’m not absolutely unsorry.”

Miranda is fundamentally conflicted about how to feel about Frederick, echoing the reader’s conflicting feelings. Frederick is at once a sympathetic and despicable character. It seems likely that if Miranda escaped, Frederick would be left feeling as she describes here; however, her death gives Frederick a perverse form of closure—she belongs to him forever. He quickly redirects his energy toward kidnapping another victim, leaving little time to dwell on his neuroses.

“He showed me one day what he called his killing-bottle. I’m imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it’s all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.”

Miranda’s stone cell is analogous to the bottle in which Frederick kills his butterflies with chloroform. Miranda experiences the same false hope as the butterfly who sees escape through the transparent glass. There is a callousness, a perversity in Frederick showing Miranda the cell of her fellow victims.

“I said, what you love is your own love. It’s not love, it’s selfishness. It’s not me you think of, but what you feel about me.”

Frederick likes to portray himself as a romantic hopelessly in love, in the vein of Shakespeare’s Ferdinand or Romeo. However, Frederick cannot tell love from selfishness or adoration from obsession. Frederick is fundamentally incapable of connecting with others because he only sees humanity in himself.

“The more I thought about it, the worse it seemed. It came to midnight and I couldn’t sleep, I had to have all the lights on, I don’t believe in spirits but it seemed better with the lights. I kept on thinking of her, thinking perhaps it was my fault after all that she did what she did and lost my respect, then I thought it was her fault, she asked for everything she got. Then I didn’t know what to think.”

Frederick is often characterized as a child. (Miranda too remarks on his peculiar innocence.) Following Miranda’s death, Frederick channels his guilt and self-hatred into a childlike fear of the dark—an absurd claim, considering he has just killed Miranda through neglect. As Frederick expresses self-doubt and questions his role in Miranda’s death, it is the closest he comes to feeling remorse.