Neo-Victorian Materialisms in John Fowles’s The Collector

Abstract

While John Fowles’s (1926-2005) The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) is studied frequently as a neo-Victorian novel, his first published novel, The Collector (1963), is ignored in the critical analyses of neo-Victorian studies. This is mostly due to the fact that The Collector is neither a re-writing of a Victorian novel nor sets in the nineteenth century. However, a critical reading of the novel demonstrates how Fowles explicitly manifests the continuation of the Victorian materialist obsession in this particular novel. In other words, albeit the contemporary setting of the novel and the critical appreciation of it as a feminist fiction, the protagonist, Clegg’s obsession with the material objects echoes Victorian cultural materialisation in a way that leads him to collect butterflies and women. Drawing an analogy between these two collections, it is mostly argued by the critics that Fowles discusses the issues of gender in this particular novel. From a different perspective, it will be argued in this study that Fowles actually illustrates the obsession with the material objects with respect to both the dead butterfly collection and also to the commodification of the female body as the material object. From this vantage point, the aim of this study is to analyse The Collector as a neo-Victorian novel revisiting the material culture of the Victorian period and the repercussions of the traumatic relationship between the human and the object in the twentieth century.