3. This
strangely novel situation of opening his trouble to his Raveloe
neighbours, of sitting in the warmth of a hearth not his own, and
feeling the presence of faces and voices which were his nearest
promise of help, had doubtless its influence on Marner, in spite
of his passionate preoccupation with his loss. Our consciousness
rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than
without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before
we detect the smallest sign of the bud.
Here, in Chapter 7,
is the first moment since his banishment from Lantern Yard that
Silas is in any way part of a community. He is at the Rainbow, having
gone there to seek help after he is robbed. The tavern-goers sit
Silas down by the hearth and make him tell his story from beginning
to end. As he does so, unbeknownst even to him, Silas begins to
experience the first stirrings of a sense of solidarity with his
neighbors. Everything about the experience is “strangely novel”
for Silas: he has never been to the Rainbow and has not in a very
long time been inside anyone’s house but his own. More important,
he has not in fifteen years had the experience of feeling reassured
by the presence of others.
In describing these beginnings of a change, Eliot relies,
as she often does, on a metaphor drawn from the natural world. Here, Silas
is compared to a budding plant in the late winter, when the sap has
started to circulate but before there is any outward sign of life. This
image of rebirth suggests an idea of community as something natural
and organic, as opposed to the unnatural, deforming isolation from
which Silas is beginning to emerge.
