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<title> The Main Theme in Fowles's The Collector. </title>
I have read The Collector by John Fowles and I will now discuss the theme in it as it is made evident in Miranda's diary entry dated November 7th.

I think that the main theme of this book is that money leads to depravation. It makes people corrupt. First this is shown in the beginning of the book when Caliban is writing about how he first was thinking about kidnapping Miranda: "All this time I never thought it was serious. I know that must sound very strange, but it was so. I used to say, of course, I'll never do it, this is only pretending. And I wouldn't have pretended even like that if I hadn't had all the time and money that I wanted. In my opinion a lot of people who may seem happy now would do what I did or similar things if they had the money and time. I mean, to give away to what they pretend now they shouldn't. Power corrupts, a teacher I had always said. And money is power." Here he says that if he did not have the money he should not even have been thinking about kidnapping her, which means the whole situation had been avoided if he did not win that money. His money made him greedy and it gave him the power to possess Miranda against her will. He is talking about it earlier in the book too: "I knew it was just a dream and it always would have been if it hadn't been for the money." Even Miranda realise this as she writes in her diary: "With Caliban it's as if somebody made him drink a whole bottle of whisky. He can't take it. The only thing that kept him decent before was being poor. Being stuck to one place and one job."

The second part where the bad influence money can have on people is mentioned is in Mirandas diary entry date November 7th. She writes: "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." Later she tell us that G.P. laughed when she told him that she was Labour, since Labour were the ones who brought in the New People to existence. She said to him: "I'd rather that we had the New People than poor people." And he said: "the New People are still the poor people. Their is the new form of poverty. The others hadn't any money and these haven't any soul." This too shows that money is a problem. It makes people think in a materialistic way, and they forget all about the other important parts of life. "The most beautiful things in life are quite independent of money", G.P. said to Miranda. 

It is also shown in the book that we can have everything in a materialistic way, but still lack what we need the most, namely freedom. Miranda can have anything she asks for that you can buy with money, but she can not have her freedom. When Caliban kidnaps her he thinks that she will start to like him if he spoils her, but he can not understand that she will not be happy until she is free to do whatever she wants. Here Caliban is a typical for the New People, who think that you are happy if only you can buy anything you want. One day Miranda has asked Caliban to buy her a perfume. She says that she wished she could go and sniff the different scents to se which she likes the best. Later Caliban brings home fourteen different kinds. She writes "He came in this morning with fourteen different bottles. He'd ransacked all the chemists' shops. It's mad. Forty pounds' worth. It's like living in Arabian nights. Being the favourite in the harem. But the only perfume you really want is freedom."

In conclusion the theme in Fowles's The Collector is that you can not buy everything, no matter how much money you have, and it is not money but the way you look at life that can make you happy. Not money, but love, freedom and things like that are what makes us better people.
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