Claustrophobia Of The Enlosed Space

The Collector, published in1963, is the debut of John Fowles, one of the mostimportant British writers of the twentieth century. The novel depicts how a clerk, afterwining pools, kidnaps and imprisons a middle-class girl. Although this novel soongoes popular and initiates Fowles’s literary career, it has long been marginalized incritical circle due to its resemblance to crime fiction. In recent years, researches ofthis novel, though increasing in number, fall basically within the scope ofexistentialism, gender politics, and psychoanalysis. This research, however, focuseson Fowles’s use of Gothic elements, especially Gothic space in The Collector, andexplores how the Gothic spatial trope is employed to manifest the thematicsignificance of the fiction. Under the theoretical frame of literary space studies,Gothic critical approaches are adopted to analyze how the novel createsclaustrophobic experience for both the characters and the readers. This research alsotries to connect Fowles’s Gothic spatial metaphor with his existentialist ideas; byconstructing a multi-layered enclosed space in the novel, Fowles shows his concernfor the contemporary social problems such as the isolation and alienation of self, theloss and abuse of individual freedom, and how to obtain the freedom of self in anabsurd world.This thesis, consisting of five chapters, aims to interpret The Collector as amodern Gothic fiction. The first chapter introduces the author, the novel, previousresearches and the main tasks of this research. Chapter Two traces the origin and development of Gothic genre together with relevant studies on Gothic space; still, thischapter introduces the main ideas of the “spatial turn” in literary criticism, whichprovides an analytical framework to this thesis.The third and forth chapter constitute the main body of this thesis. Chapter Threeis devoted to expound on how Fowles Gothicizes the novel with his spatial art andwhat the spatial metaphor is through enclosed Gothic spaces. Chapter Four analyzesthe possibilities of transgression in the enclosed space, and discusses Fowles’sdevelopment of Gothic tradition. The fifth chapter is a conclusion.