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.
