The Collector

During World War II and in the postwar period in Europe, intellectuals struggled to make sense of a world destroyed by war and genocide—an absurd situation seemingly without reason. One of the philosophies that flourished in this climate was existentialism, a decades-old philosophy of self-determination that originated with philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. A philosophy of personal accountability seemed absolutely necessary as Nazi leaders denied personal responsibility for the Holocaust at Nuremberg, deflecting culpability to those above them. Sartre and Camus piqued John Fowles’s interest in college at Oxford in 1947, and he went on to study French. His first novels (The Collector and The Magus), published in the early 1960s, have a notable existentialist influence.

The main figures of this new existentialism were French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, and Albert Camus (whose philosophy of absurdism differs slightly from existentialism). Sartre and De Beauvoir believed that people, although partially limited by the circumstances into which they were born, were condemned to be free. They presented freedom as a vital human duty, a duty to make conscious choices knowing that these choices would have (sometimes irreversible) consequences. This duty is a source of anguish: One cannot be absolutely sure of the morality of their choice until its consequences play out, so one must choose knowing that one could harm themselves or others, while planning against that to the best of one’s ability.

Existentialism argues that because of this anxiety-provoking reality, many people try to deny that they have choice. By doing so they evade responsibility for the consequences of their actions. The most extreme examples of this evasion—what Sartre called bad faith—were the Nazi leaders who denied their culpability in the Holocaust. Sartre provided more everyday examples of bad faith—for example, a waiter who acts like a caricature of a waiter: By acting as this caricature, the man forsakes his individuality, making his job his identity. In The Collector, Frederick exhibits this same type of bad faith: In imitating some fictional ideal of bourgeois manners, he pretends to be someone he’s not. Frederick also acts in bad faith by portraying himself as a passive observer, almost a victim, in Miranda’s death. In doing so he evades responsibility for her fate.

De Beauvoir identifies another type of bad faith: In a patriarchal society, women can become complicit in their own oppression. This self-imposed oppression can happen when a woman loses herself in the identity of her lover—for example, the way Miranda adopts George’s personality for her own. Miranda begins owning her individuality while imprisoned, gradually separating her ideas from those of George and becoming her authentic self despite her continued imprisonment.