Summary: Chapter 1
To have sought a medical explanation
for this phenomenon would have been held by Silas himself, as well
as by his minister and fellow-members, a willful self-exclusion
from the spiritual significance that might lie therein.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
The novel opens in the English countryside “in the days
when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses.” In this
era one would occasionally encounter weavers—typically pale, thin
men who looked like “the remnants of a disinherited race”—beside
the hearty peasants who worked in the fields. Because they possessed
a special skill and typically had emigrated from larger towns, weavers were
invariably outsiders to the peasants among whom they lived. The
peasants were superstitious people, often suspicious of both “cleverness”
and the world beyond their immediate experience. Thus, the weavers
lived isolated lives and often developed the eccentric habits that
result from loneliness.
Silas Marner, a linen-weaver of this sort, lives in a
stone cottage near a deserted stone-pit in the fictional village
of Raveloe. The boys of the village are drawn to the sound of his
loom, and often peer through his window with both awe and scorn
for his strangeness. Silas responds by glaring at them to scare
them away. The boys’ parents claim that Silas has special powers,
such as the ability to cure rheumatism by invoking the devil. Although
Raveloe is a fairly affluent, attractive village, it is far from
any major road. Sheltered from currents of progressive thought,
the townspeople retain many primitive beliefs.
In the fifteen years Silas has lived in Raveloe, he has
not invited any guests into his home, made any effort to befriend
other villagers, or attempted to court any of the town’s women.
Silas’s reclusiveness has given rise to a number of myths and rumors
among the townspeople. One man swears he once saw Silas in a sort
of fit, standing with his limbs stiff and his eyes “set like a dead
man’s.” Mr. Macey, the parish clerk, suggests that such episodes
are caused by Silas’s soul leaving his body to commune with the
devil. Despite these rumors, Silas is never persecuted because the
townspeople fear him and because he is indispensable—he is the only
weaver in town. As the years pass, local lore also begins to hold
that Silas’s business has enabled him to save a sizable hoard of
money.
Before Silas came to Raveloe, he lived in a town to the
north, where he was thought of as a young man “of exemplary life
and ardent faith.” This town was dominated by a strict religious
sect that met in a place called Lantern Yard. During one prayer
meeting, Silas became unconscious and rigid for more than an hour,
an event that his fellow church members regarded as divinely inspired.
However, Silas’s best friend at the time, William Dane—a seemingly equally
devout but arrogant young man—suggested that Silas’s fit might have
represented a visitation from the devil rather than from God. Troubled
by this suggestion, Silas asked his fiancée, a young servant named
Sarah, if she wished to call off their engagement. Though Sarah
seemed at first to want to, she did not.
One night Silas stayed up to watch over the senior deacon
of -Lantern Yard, who was sick. Waiting for William to come in to relieve
him at the end of his shift, Silas suddenly realized that it was nearly
dawn, the deacon had stopped breathing, and William had never arrived.
Silas wondered if he had fallen asleep on his watch. However, later
that morning William and the other church members accused Silas
of stealing the church’s money from the deacon’s room. Silas’s pocketknife
turned up in the bureau where the money had been stored, and the
empty money bag was later found in Silas’s dwelling. Silas expected
God to clear him of the crime, but when the church members drew
lots, Silas was determined guilty and excommunicated. Sarah called
their engagement off. Crushed, Silas maintained that the last time
he used his knife was in William’s presence and that he did not
remember putting it back in his pocket afterward. To the horror
of the church, Silas angrily renounced his religious faith. Soon
thereafter, William married Sarah and Silas left town.
Summary: Chapter 2
Marner’s face and figure shrank and bent
themselves into a constant mechanical relation to the objects of
his life, so that he produced the same sort of impression as a handle
or a crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
According to the narrator, Silas finds Raveloe, with
its sense of “neglected plenty,” completely unlike the world in
which he grew up. The fertile soil and climate make farm life much
easier in Raveloe than in the barren north, and the villagers are
consequently more easygoing and less ardent in their religion. Nothing
familiar in Raveloe reawakens Silas’s “benumbed” faith in God. Spiritually depleted,
Silas uses his loom as a distraction, weaving more quickly than
necessary. For the first time he is able to keep the full portion
of his earnings for himself, no longer having to share them with
an employer or the church. Having no other sense of purpose, Silas feels
a sense of fulfillment merely in holding his newly earned money and
looking at it.
