When we approached the distinguished dramatic monologue, “My Last
Duchess,” which is written by the Victorian poet Robert Browning, detailing
a Renaissance Italian Duke whose behavior is, in spite of various
interpretations of the poem, neither acceptable nor extenuating, we once
seriously regarded the Duke as a collector who appreciates beauty only in
lifeless objects. After we further discussed about the masterpiece, the poem
itself reminded me of another famed novel, The Collector, finished in 1963, in
which the tormented leading character is also dubbed a “collector” owing to
his obsession with not only specimen-collection but also human-collection.
The collector is a novel completed by the well-known John Fowles who was
highly inspired by both the legend of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle and one
newspaper story of a London colleger kidnapping a girl and eventually
murdering her. Rumor has it that the story lasting for more than three hundred
pages was finished within two months. Even though The collector is made up of
four separated parts including the monologues of both the kidnapper,
Frederick Clegg, a surprised lottery-winner, and his victim, Miranda Grey, a
student in art school, the book is more considered as a monologue than as a
thriller. With the great amount of money he just won, Frederick Clegg, an
ordinary young man who was greatly interested in capturing various kinds of
butterflies and turning them into specimens, bought a mansion with a spacious
basement. He later brutally kidnapped Miranda, a girl he had been obsessed
with for years, and imprisoned her in the well-embellished underground room,
treating her with no more violent deeds. By sickly narrowing down Miranda’s
world, Frederick originally hoped that she could, eventually, fall in love
with him and stay with him. However, he gradually became a literal “collector
” who collected not only butterfly-specimen but an animated human being, who
tried desperately to escape from her plight and, at the same time, help her
mentally-sick kidnapper to get in touch with true human relationship and
interaction. Unfortunate enough, Miranda died, in the end, of infection in
her confined chamber without the recognition of anyone else, and Frederick
Clegg turned into a real collector who began to search for his next victim
three weeks after he buried Miranda’s corpse under the apple tree in his
garden.
Even though Miranda was imprisoned both ideologically and, similar to
Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” typographically with three parts of
Frederick Clegg’s monologues encircling the only part of Miranda’s diary
kept in her days with her diabolical “admirer,” she was the one who
self-developed and demonstrated vitality in the story. The other similarity of
those two thrilling works lies in the characteristic that in revealing the
protagonists' crime, the language unveils much more about the protagonists
than their original targets. Both the Duke and Frederick Clegg justified their
behavior, but readers can eventually see through the web of lies and
discovery the brutality within it. Again, both as collectors, the Italian Duke
and Frederick evinced desperation to keep the beauty of their collection
intact when one of them had his Duchess portrayed and one of them had his most
beautiful “butterfly” photographed.
In the justification of the Duck, it seemed that his Duchess deserved
this kind of “punishment,” broadening our imagination of the possible
transgression of his bride. On the other hand, Frederick Clegg, the other
collector, insisted that his decision came out of the purest form of love and
he actually meant no harm at all. Nevertheless, not only their crimes appear
to be not forgivable, but the genuine beauty and liveliness of their prisoners
last forever.