Generations of readers continue to enjoy the appealing story of an old miser who regains his humanity through the love of a lost child in George Eliot’s Silas Marner. In typical Eliot fashion, the novel reveals the tensions in a small English community, much of which turns upon the theme of wealth, both of a material and a spiritual kind.
The novel begins with a fairy-tale air, suggested by the opening phrase “In the days when,” and introduces the reader to certain “undersized men” who resemble “remnants of a disinherited race.” It foreshadows Eliot’s emphasis on inheritance, in both a literal and figurative sense, as she features family relationships and fortunes lost and regained. The protagonist, Silas Marner, has been unjustly condemned as a thief and thus has lived apart from his dissenting community for 15 years. His vocation as a linen weaver suggests the act of creation and indirectly reflects on the metaphoric weaving of Eliot’s tale, while the linen fabric suggests both finery and a death shroud.
Marner’s proximity to a deserted stone pit emphasizes his isolation but also ties him to the basic element of the earth, albeit a rocky earth where little could grow. The imagery Eliot uses to surround Marner includes “lingering echoes of the old demon-worship” and “a shadowy conception of power” as the shape “most easily taken by the sense of the Invisible in the minds of men . . . pressed close by primitive wants.” Marner’s primitive desire will begin as one for material goods as he accumulates a large hidden sum of money, but will later be for love and companionship.
In the village of Raveloe reside Squire Cass and his two sons, Godfrey and Dunstan (Dunsey). Godfrey proves driven by base passion, secretly marrying and impregnating the opium-addicted Molly Farren, while also pursuing the lovely Nancy Lammeter. The evil Dunstan discovers his brother’s secret and blackmails him. He then steals Marner’s fortune and disappears, and Molly attempts to cross snow-covered fields with her toddler daughter, Eppie, to tell the squire of her marriage to his son. She dies close to Marner’s cottage, and he discovers Eppie, taking her in as a solution to his loneliness. He proves a surprisingly excellent parent, allowing Eliot to contrast him with Squire Cass.
The book fast-forwards 16 years, and Eppie has become a lovely young woman, devoted to Marner as they survive on the income from his weaving. He has long realized her value to be superior to that of the gold Dunstan stole from him, an epiphany that changes his life. When Dunstan’s remains and Marner’s gold are discovered ironically close to Marner in the stone pit, Godfrey confesses his earlier marriage to Nancy, now his wife. They have no children and set out to adopt Eppie, but even though they tempt her with their wealth, she refuses to leave Marner. She eventually marries Aaron Winthrop, and Marner shares their home, inheriting a full family after regaining his fortune.
Although Eliot’s style suggests a cautionary tale, Silas Marner cannot be reduced to a simple moralistic presentation. In her traditional manner, she reveals through painstaking detail the complicity of characters that could never be mistaken for flat fairy-tale contrivances. Nancy’s romantic nature is played off against that of her sister, the “good-natured” and commonsensical Priscilla. While Nancy indulges in “inward drama,” vowing never to marry a man “whose conduct showed him careless of his character,” she will learn that such character is not always clearly revealed, even among those highly born.
The discussions between Aaron Winthrop’s mother, Dolly, and Marner about the proper way to raise a child introduce a gently ironic emphasis on the morality that common folk assume their “betters” possess. She instructs Marner, “You must bring her up like christened folks’s children, and take her to church, and let her learn her catechize,” adding that no one could die and rest peacefully “if they hadn’t done their part by the helpless children as come wi’out their own asking.” Eliot examines that native innocence that all humans possess at birth, demonstrating that community and family guidance remains imperative if they are to retain that guileless state.
Her continued emphasis on the fact that guilt of the conscience can prove a more powerful force than the guilt awarded an individual by a civic court supports her favored theme of ethics and the sense of duty and personal responsibility that should be practiced by all. Clearly, Marner is rewarded for acting on that sense, while Godfrey is punished through rejection by his daughter for delaying his action. His fate proves infinitely more desirable than that of Dunstan, who had never developed the sense at all.
Silas Marner remains a satisfying read more than a century after its publication. Its moral sense readers of any age can relate to, and Eliot’s details about country life ring satisfyingly true. Both television and movie versions have been produced.
Bibliography
Pangallo, Karen L., ed. The Critical Response to George Eliot. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Perkin, J. Russell. A Reception-History of George Eliot’s Fiction. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1990.
Rignall, John, ed. Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Semmel, Bernard. George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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