Silas Marner

Posted by H

In Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861) George Eliot makes a harsh critique on city life, but not in the fashion that her contemporary Charles Dickens made in novels like Bleak House. While Dickens attacked the city for its filth and poverty, Eliot’s critique replaces poverty with disability or bodily otherness in cities where nativity already divides it. Silas’s “protuberant eyes” or “short-sighted brown eyes” are statements of disability attached to him to make distinction from everyone else, but the eyes are also the representation of awareness. It is suggested that Silas is a wiser man because his disability, which others interpret as the ability to go outside the body and back into it. Silas is a particularly interesting outsider as he is described as a cataleptic that lives a modest lifestyle even though he has enough gold to rub elbows with the likes of Godfrey Cass. Eliot’s interest is less about class structures than the individual and what matters is not one’s place of origin but how both then and now can survive in Silas’ mind. He wants to be himself, introverted, and outside of culture—he has no interest in remarrying, socializing, or attending church. As a solitary skeptic, doubtful of institutions, like the organized church, he chooses to follow his own path and is remarkably modern and enlightened. Because of Silas’ unique personality and condition, the people in the city find him strange and avoid him. But Eliot does not paint bodily otherness or eccentricities, rather his peculiarities grant Silas an autonomy which suits his introverted nature so that rather than reflect on being ostracized, he enjoys his solitude and his strangeness and “disability” are actually markers of his individuality.

Who Silas is though is a source of confusion and reflection. Upon revisiting Lantern Yard, the town he was born, he measures the gulf between himself and that place that was once his home. He neither practices Lantern Yard’s traditions nor does he adopt the customs of Raveloe. Since he fits into neither place, he belongs nowhere. His identity has to come from somewhere else, and he chooses himself. In this manner Silas is a self-made man, a quality that is also reflected in his financial affairs. Silas functions as an efficient, economic system rather than a defenseless immigrant, for he accumulates gold “that could buy up ‘bigger men’ than himself” (8). His individuality is exemplary of the modern novels (e.g. Jane Eyre, Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, and David Copperfield) that had first name-last name titles emphasizing the self-hood of their title characters. The titles indicated the novel is about one person who exists in society but is unique enough to be named within it. In a sort of Romantic vision, Silas is able to retreat into himself without ever needing to leave the city. Though the Romantics preached a rejection of the mechanical, utilitarian, and alienating relations of industrial, capitalist England, Silas takes a more balanced approach. But what’s more, the romantic notions one can trace in Silas are the sovereignty of the imagination and transcendence into one’s own mind.