“The Collector” by John Fowles: Author’s Existentialist Philosophy and Sympathy for People with Multiple Personality

1963 Author Interview

“I think of The Collector as a parable…to illustrate the opposition of the Few and the Many…I take these terms from the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Haracleitus, who’s been a major influence on my life. For him the Few were the good, the intelligent, the independent; the Many were the stupid, the ignorant, and the easily molded…

“I also wanted to attack…the contemporary idea that there is something noble about the inarticulate hero…I don’t admire beats, bums, junkies, psychopaths, and inarticulates. I feel sorry for them…The boy in The Collector stands for the Many; the girl for the Few…

“But to get back to the girl-in-the-cellar situation. How did I come on it? Well, some time during the 1950’s, I went to see the first performance in London of Bartok’s opera, Bluebeard’s Castle…It so happened that about a year later there was an extraordinary case (again in London) of a boy who captured a girl and imprisoned her in an air-raid shelter at the end of his garden…And eventually, it led me to the book”…

“I think the existentialist trend [in literature] will increase…We’ll have more of the key existentialist notion of authenticity in life…To live authentically is not giving in to the anxieties, not running away from the nauseas [search Sartre], but solving them in some way…The girl in The Collector is an existentialist heroine although she doesn’t know it. She’s groping for her own authenticity…What I tried to say in the book was this: we must create a society in which the Many will allow the Few to live authentically, and to teach and help the Many to begin to do so as well. In societies dominated by the Many, the Few are in grave danger of being suffocated” (1, pp. 1-8).

The Collector (1963)

The novel does not have any clear-cut multiple personality, but the protagonist, Frederick Clegg (who kidnaps Miranda Grey and keeps her locked in the cellar), is repeatedly said to be out of touch with another side of himself, which could be interpreted as either existentialist inauthenticity or psychological split personality.

“I went into that coffee-bar, suddenly, I don’t know why, like I was drawn in by something else, against my will almost” (2, p. 13).

“Don’t look like that,” she said. “What I fear in you is something you don’t know is in you” (2, p. 72).

“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…” (1, p. 105).

“Sometimes I think he’s being very clever. He’s trying to enlist my sympathy by pretending he’s in the grip of some third thing” (1, p. 129).

“For a second there was that other side of him I sense, the violence, hatred, absolute determination not to let me go” (2, p. 149).

“He said, I can’t say. As if someone else had strictly forbidden him to speak. (I often feel that with him — a horrid little cringing good nature dominated by a mean bad one.)” (2, p. 194).

“There are moments when he is possessed, quite out of his own control” (1, p. 217).

While the above quotes are all about him, the following type of mirror experience, typical of multiple personality, is hers:

“Staring at myself in the mirror. Sometimes I don’t seem real to myself, it suddenly seems that it isn’t my reflection only a foot or two away…I watch my face and I watch it move as if it is someone else’s” (2, p. 242).

1995 Interview

Dianne L. Vipond: The doppelgänger motif is ubiquitous in your fiction. Twins, sisters, parallel characters, and often the dynamics of male-female relationships all seem to point to “the double.” Your poem “The Two Selves” also deals with the idea of a dual persona. Could you comment on your use of the double?

John Fowles: I honestly don’t know, but I suppose it’s a sort of longing for an impossible freedom. I have some sympathy for those suffering from that psychiatric illness, I think they call it multiple personality disorder. I often wish I were someone else…” (1, p. 209).

1. Dianne L. Vipond (Editor). Conversations with John Fowles. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

2. John Fowles. The Collector [1963]. New York, Back Bay/Little Brown/Hachette, 2010.