The Collector.

     Clegg collects beauty but in fact his heart is ugly.  When he has the money from lottery he expands his desire to an extreme point, which is to collect Miranda.  The desire is frightening so that Miranda called him “Caliban” in Tempest.  He is a shallow man, too.  Contrast to Miranda, he knows very little and has a very fragile dignity.  Miranda could easily cheat him.  Like one time, she wanted him to choose the most beautiful picture she drew, then he did, but Miranda picked the most ugly picture to tell him that this is the best.  He believed her.  On the contrary, she can see through him.  There is an obvious contrast between Miranda and Clegg—good and bad, beautiful and ugly.  I think it’s more interesting and bloody than Beauty and the Beast.  Miranda’s beauty is created to be the most perfect and Clegg is frustrated with her perfect characters.  The book uses this contrast to show the people in 30’s were upset and doubted the world which started to bosom in capitalism.  They didn’t believe what the world could bring to them.  They were disappointed at the messy world and they were frustrated because they world was far from their ideal world.

     Miranda had her ideal world, which implies the ideal world 30’s people had.  Her world is beautiful and peaceful.  She studied art, did the beneficial thing to the weak group and was against H-bomb.  She had high eyesight on men.  She was attract to the special qualities of G.P..G.P. was realistic, not like the ideal Miranda.  G.P. taught Miranda a lot of thing, and inevitably G.P. had sexual attraction to Miranda.  At last, the ideal should learn from the reality; the perfect should learn from the imperfect.  Miranda died, and it implies that ideal dies when reality pushes it.  It is a tragedy, but it’s reasonable in the 30’s—the disappointing time.

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