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<title> COLLECTED THEMES FROM THE COLLECTOR </title>
In this literature essay I will discuss the themes in John Fowles's The Collector. I will pay special attention to Miranda's diary on the 7th of November and I will clearly show the evident themes in this passage. 
The themes I will discuss are the New People versus the Few People, George Paston's painting and finally I will give my personal thoughts about the title.

Evil versus goodness is clearly shown in the 7th of November passage from Miranda's perspective. Ferdinand Clegg, also called Caliban, the man who has kidnapped Miranda and keeps her in his basement, is a man of the New People. The New People are everything that Miranda is not and she does not like anything about them.

I the hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and the mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little. I hate what G.P. calls the New People, the new-class people with their cars and their money and their tellies and their stupid vulgarities and their stupid crawling imitation of the bourgeoisie. (pp207)

This is what Miranda thinks about the man who has brought her away from her freedom and who keeps her imprisoned. According to her, the New People think that their money can buy them everything. The New People hate the unusual and they want everybody to be the same, a stereotypical, uniform mass. Miranda thinks that they misuse their money and she asks herself why people like that should have so much money if they do not know how to use them. They even have so much money that they think that they can buy anything. On one occasionan Miranda asks Ferdinand what he wants her to do, if he wants her to be his mistress. But he answers that he can buy that in London. 

This is evil and Miranda thinks that the New People have no normal values and that they are not free-minded at all. 

He said, the New People are still the poor people. Theirs is the new form of poverty. The others hadn't any money and these haven't any soul. (pp207)
Ferdinand thinks, according to Miranda, that he can buy her friendship and her love, he only needs the time. But since Miranda thinks of herself as belonging to the Few People there is no possibility for her to love Ferdinand under such circumstances. The Few People are honest, giving people who love freedom, making things and respect others for their moral values.
 
That I belong to a sort of band of people who have to stand against all the rest. I don't know who they are - famous men, dead or living, who've fought for the right things and created and painted in the right way, and unfamous people I know who don't lie about things, who try not to be lazy, who try to be human and intelligent. (pp208)

Ferdinand is the embodiment of evil, according to Miranda, and she herself is just an innocent girl trying to develop herself in the right way, in the Few People-Way.

The 3rd of November Miranda is given a painting by Ferdinand. She had asked him to buy her the painting, which is painted by her best friend whom she later realizes to be her big love George Paston, G.P. The picture is a drawing of a nude girl, not like anything else of his she had ever seen. It is drawn with simple lines which makes it vivid. The painting symbolises life and all the living things that comes with real life. 

My one consolation is G.P.'s drawing. It grows on me. On one. It's the only living, unique, created thing here. It's the first thing I look at when I wake up, the last thing at night. I stand in front of it and stare at it. I know every line. He made a fudge on of one of her feet. There's something slightly unbalanced about the whole composition, as if there's a tiny bit missing somewhere. But it lives. (205)

Miranda thinks that the painting is the only thing that lives. She is not even sure that she herself lives, but the picture does. She is surrounded by dead things. The room in the basement, where she is kept, is decorated according to Ferdinand's taste and she feels that it is a kind of dead air about everything. She can feel that he does not live in the rooms or in the house, he is just using it for storage. 

The picture, on the other hand, is pure life and it also becomes more and more like a symbol of her love for the painter G.P. Miranda's writing in the diary about him and her feelings for him helps her to hold out and manage living in the basement. G.P. is her mentor, her mentor of life. He has tought her to think like the Few people and he has the right ideals. He is more experienced than her and he knows so much more about the world than she does, and that is why he represents her ideal. According to Miranda, he knows exactly what counts and he is proud to belong to the Few People. He is independent and he does not do what the others do. 

Later in the book when Miranda has lost almost all her hope of freedom she turns to her diary and writes about G.P. and she also puts her hopes in the picture. She believes in the painting. It is like a crucifix is to a believer. She talks to the picture and she receives hope and trust from it.

The title of the book The Collector shows clearly to me, that Ferdinand thinks that his purpose of life is to collect things. He starts quite normally with collecting butterflies, but then he becomes obsessed with Miranda and he picks her up for his collection. He is so fascinated by beauty, both in the butterflies and in Miranda. He is also impressed by his own role in the play, that he means something to someone else, and that that person is dependent on him and his decisions. 

I know what I am to him. A butterfly he has always wanted to catch. I remember (the very first time I met him) G.P. saying that collectors were the worst animals of all. He meant art collectors, of course...... But of course, he is right. They're anti-life, anti-art, anti-everything. (pp123)

Ferdinand is like a small child with his collection and when something goes wrong, like it did in Miranda's case, he does not know what to do. However, finally it shows that he is not a schoolboy, but a real collector. 
She isn't as pretty as Miranda, of course, in fact she is only an ordinary common shop-girl, but that was my mistake before, aiming too high, I ought to have seen that I could never get what I wanted from someone like Miranda, with all her la-di-da ideas and clever tricks. I ought to have got someone who would respect me more. Someone ordinary I could teach. (pp282)

The main themes in this passage of the book, and as a whole, are that you cannot buy yourself friendship or love. It is something that has to come naturally and it has to be built up by two people reciprocally. This is also the main reason why Ferdinand and Miranda cannot get along. They come from two morally different worlds and they do not see things from the same perspective.

Another theme is that even if we are not believers of God it is important to have something to believe in, and this belief will help us to get through difficult times that we have in our lives. Miranda's belief in the picture gave her the power to hold on to life a little bit longer and her belief also gave her the power to stay closer to the world outside. Maybe belief will not get us all the way, but it will help us get a little bit further.
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