The relationship between painting and early photography was an uneasy one; many painters felt threatened by the new medium, although others – those of a p
The Collector 1963;
The Magus 1965) is hinged on a selection of intertexts ranging from Darwinian Naturalism (or “post-modern Evolutionary Theory”), Victorian and contemporary Feminism, Victorian poetry, Marxist criticism and post-modern Existentialism.
Fowles implants himself as a character in the story adding yet another meta-dimension within the storyline and challenging the cognitive skills of the reader. Furthermore, the main characters in the story often personify a given school of thought. The critic, Katherin Tarbox, writes:
…of the two threads – one a philosophy, the other a scientific theory – that eventually weave themselves into the fabric of the twentieth-century self, one (existentialism) is associated with Sarah…while the second (Darwinism) seems out of her ken altogether. Both come together in Charles. His case makes it appear that the philosophy and the biological theory are mutually implicative: The existentialist self implies the (postmodern) Darwin