When Ferdinand Clegg, a butterfly collector, turns his attention to human beings, the results are disastrous for Miranda Grey, the young woman he stalks and “collects” to assuage his obsession for her.
Clegg has led a less than satisfactory life; he has been reared by his aunt and uncle, together with their unmarriageable daughter, Mabel. His father was killed in a car accident when he was two, and his mother had then abandoned him to her late husband’s older sister. His uncle treats him kindly, taking him on frequent fishing trips and supporting his nephew’s growing obsession with collecting butterflies. But he died of a stroke when Clegg was 15, leaving him with the two women.
He had served a while in the army and then found a job, but his life-changing event had occurred the day he won a sizable sum in the lottery. He quit his job and sent his aunt and cousin off on a cruise to Australia, where some of the family had settled. Then he devoted his attention entirely to Miranda.
As an experienced collector, Clegg knows how to watch and wait and plan. He assembles everything he needs, purchasing an isolated house with an extensive multiroomed cellar. He buys a van and invests in camera equipment. He decorates the cellar, turning the most remote part of it into a cozy prison, then learns every detail of Miranda’s schedule. His attachment to her had begun while she was still in the English equivalent of a high school in his hometown. She had even done business with him at his old job.
But Clegg is not an ordinary man with ordinary drives and desires: He does not court Miranda and take the chance of the rejection he is certain he will receive. He prefers to collect her. She is too fine to accept him willingly, but he is still confident of his ability to possess her. Eventually, he captures her and drags her home to his cellar, keeping her there several months until she dies, possibly of pneumonia.
Although Clegg prepares his prison and plans his capture in flawless detail, he does not have a clear story as to what will happen once he has collected Miranda. He has bad thoughts that he tries to keep pushed down, and he looks at pornography with a notion to take pictures of Miranda. At first, he thinks he can be satisfied with ordinary pictures. And sometimes he imagines that Miranda will inevitably come to feel for him the way he feels for her, and they will find true, voluntary love.
But he has virtually no experience with living, breathing, talking women, and his own responses to his captive are more extreme than he had expected them to be.
At first, Clegg tries to appease Miranda with every material object that might make her happy. She had been an art student in her real life, and so he brings her everything for drawing she might need. And Miranda perceives that she has enough power over him to demand and receive any material comforts she can imagine. He buys the finest materials she asks for, and the books, and the music; he learns to cook and provides the healthy foods she requests prepared the way she likes them.
But once she is in the cellar, he will not allow her to have any contact with the outside world. She cannot read newspapers or watch television, and she cannot send a message to her family even to tell them that she is alive and well. Clegg sees their appeals in the papers or on TV, but their suffering doesn’t move him. Oddly, her suffering doesn’t move him, either. He is obsessed with her, but the fact that he has destroyed her life to possess her makes no difference to him.
Miranda tries everything and finally wins a concession in being allowed outside, under his supervision, at night in the backyard. She waits for her opportunity and lashes out, hoping to escape and run for her freedom. But she only manages to wound him, and after that, the conditions of her imprisonment become more severe. Eventually, she wins him back and is allowed into the house for a change of scene, but she cannot stop trying to escape.
And finally, she tries to earn her freedom by satisfying his desire to photograph her in degrading ways, but none of these stratagems works. When she becomes ill, he is afraid to seek medical treatment for her. If he tries to take her to a hospital, she will be out of his control and will find assistance and gain her freedom, and of course no doctor can be brought to the cellar to treat her.
Little by little, her condition worsens, and then one day she dies, after only three months of imprisonment.
After the first week, Miranda had demanded writing paper from Clegg for a diary; knowing she could not get a message past him, he did not care how much time she spent writing. After her death, he finds the diary, but in reading it, all the relationship he imagined they had had evaporates.
His plan to atone for Miranda’s death by committing suicide seems ludicrous in light of the true feelings she reveals in her diary—all she ever wanted was to get away from him. Before he can even figure out what to do with Miranda’s remains, however, he is startled to see what he at first thinks is her ghost in the nearby town.
Another beautiful young woman, though not as beautiful as Miranda, crosses the street in front of his van. And even when Clegg tells himself that there could never be another woman for him, he disposes of Miranda’s body in a grave in the backyard and cleans out her room as good as new.
John Fowles tells this chilling story using a first-person point of view, but by employing the device of Miranda’s diary, he doubles the story’s effect. First, Clegg talks, almost confessionally, relating the entire story of his life, his obsession, and his unwilling, doomed “guest.” The first half of the novel is a nonstop explanation of Clegg’s capture of Miranda and his experiences with her. He is, of course, rationalizing much of the time, but Fowles communicates much in the hurried, cold, self-justifying sentences.
The poor punctuation suggests a lower-class background even as Clegg condemns the educated classes and the rich who, he feels, look down on him. He brings the story to the point at which Miranda is so sick it seems she cannot live much longer without medical attention, and then the focus shifts to Miranda’s journal.
As Miranda records her thoughts in a section almost as long as Clegg’s opening explanation, the reader already knows where each event is going, and so a certain dread accompanies her accounts of her dealings with her captor. But since she was not quite dead when Clegg’s narrative stopped, there is still a faint hope that somehow everything will turn out well for her.
Instead, viewing the suffering from her point of view makes it even more harrowing. Early in her journal, Miranda provides the detailed background information about herself that converts her from the object of Clegg’s obsession—a flat character—to a fully rounded human being who is suffering through no fault of her own.
She recounts her life with a loving family, her artistic ambitions, her attachment to an older man, and her helpless rage toward Clegg. She also relates her version of her escape attempts, and these become more poignant given the knowledge that they will not succeed. Eventually, her journal begins to become incoherent, and then she is too weak to write any more.
Clegg returns as narrator for two additional short sections. First, he explains his pain at losing Miranda and his short-lived plan to kill himself. He falls in love with her all over again and relives the days before he collected her when she occupied his every waking thought. He forgives her, now that she’s dead, for her escape attempts and for the lewd behavior he forced her to perform that he simultaneously longs for and loathes.
But before these melodramatic and sentimental thoughts can lead to his self-destruction, he finds the diary; afterward, everything is different.
The very short closing section shows, in Clegg’s own words, how he has grown in his compulsive need to dominate women who have no recourse but to endure him. He speaks of having learned his lesson, but the new object of his attention—the woman who reminds him of Miranda—undermines the reader’s ability to believe him.
He is repeating a compulsive pattern of antisocial, misogynistic behavior. His experience with Miranda has not made him a better man; it has made him a better collector.
Bibliography
Laughlin, Rosemary M. “Faces of Power in the Novels of John Fowles,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 13, no. 3 (1972): 71–88.
Rackham, Jeff. “John Fowles: The Existential Labyrinth,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 13, no. 3 (1972): 89–103.
Woodcock, Bruce. Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity. Brighton, U.K.: The Harvester Press, 1984.
Categories: British Literature, Crime Fiction, Literature, Novel Analysis
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