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.
