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.
Around this time Silas notices the cobbler’s wife, Sally
Oates, suffering the symptoms of heart disease and dropsy, a condition
of abnormal swelling in the body. Sally awakens in Silas memories
of his mother, who died of similar causes. He offers Sally an herbal preparation
of foxglove that his mother had used to ease the pain of the disease.
The concoction works, so the villagers conclude that Silas must
have some dealings with the occult. Mothers start to bring their
sick children to his house to be cured, and men with rheumatism
offer Silas silver to cure them. Too honest to play along, Silas
sends them all away with growing irritation. The townspeople’s hope
in Silas’s healing power turns to dread, and they come to blame
him for accidents and misfortunes that befall them. Having wanted
only to help Sally Oates, Silas now finds himself further isolated
from his neighbors.
Silas gradually begins to make more money, working sixteen hours
a day and obsessively counting his earnings. He enjoys the physical
appearance of the gold coins and handles them joyfully. He keeps
the coins in an iron pot hidden under the floor beneath his loom,
and takes them out only at night, “to enjoy their companionship.”
When the pot is no longer large enough to hold his hoard, Silas
begins keeping the money in two leather bags. He lives this way for
fifteen years, until a sudden change alters his life one Christmas.
Analysis: Part I, Chapters 1–2
Eliot opens Silas Marner by immediately
distancing the novel from its readers. The narrator repeatedly stresses
that the time, physical setting, and characters are unfamiliar to
us. Eliot evokes the pastoral English countryside of the early nineteenth
century, emphasizing Raveloe’s distance from large towns and even
large roads, an isolation that keeps the town mostly ignorant of
the intellectual currents of its own time. The characters behave
according to a rustic belief system that is distant and alien to
us. This distance is temporal as much as it is spatial. Intervening
between the era in which the novel is set and the era in which it
is written is the Industrial Revolution. This industrialization
dramatically transformed England from a society of farms and villages
to one of factories and cities. In Silas Marner Eliot
is therefore describing a lost world, and part of her purpose in
the novel is to evoke what she feels has been lost.
Here, as in all of her novels, Eliot’s narrative voice
is sympathetic but strongly moral. Eliot does not romanticize the
simplicity of her characters. On the contrary, she underlines the
flaws and limitations of their worldview with a sort of benevolent
condescension. Administering justice by drawing lots, for instance,
or suspecting that Silas is allied with Satan because he knows how
to work a loom, are clearly outmoded beliefs. However, Eliot also
takes it upon herself to explain these characters and their shortcomings—not
to justify them, but to make them understandable and human.
Though Silas is isolated, there are hints of his eventual
incorporation into the community of Raveloe. Silas’s outsider status
is partly due to his profession, as, the narrator tells us, weavers
of his day were rarely accepted by their neighbors. However, Silas’s
work also provides a powerful metaphor of unity for that same community.
It is Silas who takes the threads spun on Raveloe’s individual spinning
wheels and weaves them into whole cloth. This work both contrasts
with his literal isolation and prefigures a later act, his adoption
of Eppie, which serves to unite the community. This metaphor is
further reinforced when Chapter Two ends with a comparison of Silas’s
hermetic existence to a “little shivering thread.”
Silas has not always been an outsider. His rejection
of community coincides with his loss of faith, and thus, in a sense,
his faith in his fellow man has died along with his faith in God.
Whereas the religious community in which Silas grew up is founded
and governed by a strict belief system, the community of Raveloe
shares a looser set of superstitions. When Silas rejects his former
beliefs, he begins to idolize his money to fill the void. This spiritually
impoverished worship only reinforces his isolation. Money allows
Silas to once again worship something, but without
involving other human beings. When he is banished from his church,
he casts away his desire for human fellowship and finds a new source
of fulfillment in his gold coins.
Silas’s mechanical aptitude and worship of money can
be seen as representative of the imminent onset of industrialization,
a historical phenomenon that uprooted many people from their villages
and tore apart the communities that had previously connected working-class
people to one another. The German social philosopher Karl Marx,
writing shortly before George Eliot, coined the phrase “the commodification
of labor” to describe this uprooting, which tended to dehumanize
workers as they came to be defined solely in terms of the monetary
value produced by their labor, rather than by their place in a local
economy. Silas’s existence has become as mechanized as any factory
worker’s. He is described as shrunken to fit to his loom, so much
so that he looks like a part of it, and the narrator compares him
to “a handle or a crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart.”
Silas’s labor holds no significance for him except as a means to
collect more of the money he loves. He does not view his work as
a contribution to the community or as something in which to take
pride. Bereft of connections to other human beings, Silas attributes
human qualities to his money, admiring the faces on the coins as
if they were friends.
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