ABSTRACT
In The Collector the door to the cellar, in which the inadequate and deprived Frederick Clegg symbolically reverses the social order by imprisoning the privileged and hapless Miranda underground, is disguised by being lined with bookshelves. The Collector refers insistently, like The Magus, to The Tempest, itself a species of romance and John Fowles’s favourite William Shakespeare play. Like Shakespeare’s heroine, Miranda has attempts made on her virtue by her ‘salvage and deformed slave’ and awaits an impossible rescue. In Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, another contemporary reworking of The Tempest, and an anti-romance in which a man imprisons his ladylove, it is the Prospero figure who must learn to emancipate himself and, as in The Magus, reordain narrative propriety. Fowles has called The Collector a parable, and it is an impressive and not uncompassionate depiction of human evil, albeit one sometimes portentously scored. Fowles has related The Collector to Barbara Hardy’s The Well-Beloved.
