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A Little
Child Shall Lead Them: Silas Marner
by Marilyn
Green Faulkner
"In old days
there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them
away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels
now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand
is put in theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and
bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may
be a little child's."
The man is Silas
Marner, a miserable miser saved by the love of an abandoned child,
and the fictional creation of a remarkable woman named George Eliot.
Actually, her name was Mary Anne Evans, and the nom de plume she
adopted for her fiction allowed her to be taken seriously in a time
when women, if they wrote at all, wrote only what she derisively
termed "silly novels." Born in 1819 in Warwickshire, England, Mary
Anne's philosophical quest mirrored that of her society, which was
undergoing a crisis of faith in the wake of the scientific discoveries
that seemed to undermine traditional Christian dogma. From the start
Mary Anne was a brilliant and emotional idealist, and she first
embraced the Evangelical Christianity of one of her favorite teachers
at school, then made a complete turnaround when she read the highly
influential "The Origins of Christianity," which claimed
that Christianity was not a revealed religion. At twenty-two years
of age she dismayed her family by refusing to accompany them to
church, and from then on developed her own philosophy of secular
humanism, based on a belief in the natural goodness of the individual.
This little novel, Silas Marner, is an examination of a
similar crisis of faith in the life of a simple weaver.
Silas, raised
in one of the dissenting religious sects prevalent in the England
of the early 19th century, loses his faith when he is
betrayed by his dearest friend and misjudged by his brethren. Eliot
understands that a loss of faith in God is often precipitated by
a loss of faith in those we have trusted on earth. An outcast from
his tribe, Silas wanders alone until he finds a home in Raveloe,
a little village where he plies his trade as a weaver. The townspeople
are suspicious of this newcomer, since he is a weaver (a trade associated
with the devil) and in addition because he suffers from epilepsy,
a malady that causes him to freeze in a trance-like state now and
then. Again the subject of social ostracism, Silas gradually forms
an attachment to the money generated by his craft. His gold becomes
his god, and he hoards it carefully in his tiny shack on the edge
of the Raveloe stone pits.
The life of
this unhappy weaver is itself woven in with the lives of his wealthy
landlords, Squire Cass and his sons. It is a hallmark of Eliot's
fiction to portray the lives of humble peasants as carefully and
completely as she does the rich and powerful. In the romantic novels
of the time (mostly written by women) the poor were treated as a
species apart from "real people." Eliot wrote, "They (the poor)
are so many subjects for experimenting on, for reclaiming, improving,
being anxious about, and relieving. They have no existence apart
from the presence of a curateÖthey live in order to take tracts
and broth." Eliot greatly admired Wordsworth and attempted, like
him, to look closely at the lives of people who lacked all of the
advantages she enjoyed, sympathetically recording their forms of
speech, their customs, superstitions and struggles.
Eliot understood
a life as a social outcast. As editor of the controversial Westminster
Review, she was at the center of intellectual life in England
and accepted in many circles. All that changed when she met and
fell in love with George Henry Lewes, a prominent literary figure
of the time. Lewes was married, though estranged from his wife,
and after two years of close companionship they decided to share
a life together. This move caused a scandal that turned even the
more radical members of society against them. She and Lewes were
referred to publicly as "the stinkpots of humanity." Of this ostracism
Eliot wrote, "I have counted the cost of the step I have taken and
am prepared to bear, without irritation or bitterness, renunciation
by all my friends." Her beloved brother Isaac never spoke to her
again and Eliot was excluded, for the rest of her life, from "respectable"
homes. It was Lewes who first persuaded Mary Anne to write fiction
and who provided the encouragement and emotional support she desperately
craved. (He even hid unfavorable reviews of her novels from her,
so she wouldn't become discouraged.) Evans referred to herself as
"Mrs. Henry Lewes" throughout her life, and they remained faithful
companions for twenty-five years until his death in 1878.
Like the artisan
in her tale, Eliot takes the strands of religious faith, peasant
life, aristocratic pride and family love and weaves them into a
perfect tapestry. We are drawn into the dilemmas that Silas faces
and see them through his myopic vision (symbolically, he can only
see up close). Eliot's moments of crisis are often so subtle they
slip by us. Consider, for example, the turning point of the novel,
when Godfrey Cass confronts his baby daughter, who has wandered
onto Silas's hearth. The child simply looks into his face, then,
when Cass says nothing, turns her blue eyes to the weaver and clings
to him. The moment is past, and Cass has the illusion of having
escaped the consequences of his actions since his child cannot condemn
him for his sins. It appears as if nothing has happened, yet it
is this moment that will haunt Godfrey Cass ever after. Eliot believes
in the law of the harvest. Each of her novels feature protagonists
who cannot escape the consequences of their actions. There are no
great villains, no spotless heroes; only, as she called them, "mixed
people."
The imagery
of weaving and spinning give this tale the dreamy quality of a fairy
tale, and the connection to such stories as Sleeping Beauty and
Rumplestilskin is deliberate. Eliot is attempting a new kind of
fairy tale here, complete with such stock elements as the weaver,
the wood, the rich landowner, the poor girl who is really an heiress,
and the strange turns of fate that signal an order in the universe
unknown to man. She combines these elements with a realistic portrayal
of English village life unparalleled in fiction. This unlikely combination
of the real with the mythical caused the book to be less popular
than some of her other works, yet it has endured as a unique creation
by a great and virtuous mind, who believed in the goodness of the
human soul even as she searched in vain for a resolution to her
own crisis of faith.
Silas Marner
is the April/May selection for the Best Books Club. Join like-minded
individuals from around the world and read with us, then share your
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