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Comment on the characterization present in this extract
To what extent does the narrator become a character?
How does this extract contribute to our understanding of the role of religion
in the novel?
How is the passage important to the plot of the novel?
At last, when everyone rose to depart, he went towards William Dane and said, in a
voice shaken by agitation —
"The last time I remember using my knife, was when I took it out to cut a strap for
you. I don't remember putting it in my pocket again. You stole the money, and you
have woven a plot to lay the sin at my door. But you may prosper, for all that: there is
no just God that governs the earth righteously, but a God of lies, that bears witness
against the innocent."
There was a general shudder at this blasphemy. William said meekly, "I leave our
brethren to judge whether this is the voice of Satan or not. I can do nothing but pray
for you, Silas."
Poor Marner went out with that despair in his soul — that shaken trust in God and
man, which is little short of madness to a loving nature. In the bitterness of his
wounded spirit, he said to himself, "She will cast me off too." And he reflected that, if
she did not believe the testimony against him, her whole faith must be upset as his
was. To people accustomed to reason about the forms in which their religious feeling
has incorporated itself, it is difficult to enter into that simple, untaught state of mind in
which the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of reflection. We
are apt to think it inevitable that a man in Marner's position should have begun to
question the validity of an appeal to the divine judgment by drawing lots; but to him
this would have been an effort of independent thought such as he had never known;
and he must have made the effort at a moment when all his energies were turned into
the anguish of disappointed faith. If there is an angel who records the sorrows of men
as well as their sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from
false ideas for which no man is culpable.
Marner went home, and for a whole day sat alone, stunned by despair, without any
impulse to go to Sarah and attempt to win her belief in his innocence. The second day
he took refuge from benumbing unbelief, by getting into his loom and working away
as usual; and before many hours were past, the minister and one of the deacons came
to him with the message from Sarah, that she held her engagement to him at an end.
Silas received the message mutely, and then turned away from the messengers to
work at his loom again. In little more than a month from that time, Sarah was married
to William Dane; and not long afterwards it was known to the brethren in Lantern
Yard that Silas Marner had departed from the town.
Marner's betrayal at the hand of his best friend recalls the Biblical story
of David and Bathsheba. In II Samuel, King David is so enamored of Bathsheba
that he causes her husband, Uriah, to fight on the front lines of battle in a
hopeless cause. When Uriah is killed as expected, David takes Bathsheba as one
of his wives. Similarly, William sets Marner up for his expulsion from the church
in order to marry his friend's betrothed, Sarah. Eliot invites this comparison
explicitly by comparing the friendship of Silas and William to that of "David and
Jonathan." (In the first book of Samuel, Jonathan is an intensely, perhaps blindly
devoted friend of David.)
Gradesaver:
The biblical story of Cain and Abel also parallels the betrayal in that the more
righteous brother, Abel, is betrayed by Cain. Marner interprets William's first act
of two-facedness toward him as merely an execution of William's "brotherly
office." Brothers tend to fight for the patrimony. In the novel, however, Silas
Marner (figured as Abel) survives and is the one who goes into exile, not the
betrayer William. Marner is the one who becomes an outsider, one of the
"remnants of a disinherited race." This upending of the traditional story suggests
the injustice of Lantern Yard, where the innocent are banished and the guilty
thrive.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Biblical Realism in Silas Marner. By: Fisch, Harold, Bloom, Harold, Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations:
Silas Marner,
Database: Literary Reference Center
Like the Genesis-stories or those relating to Samuel, Saul, and David, Silas Marner is a story of
trial, retribution, and redemption. The characters are morally tested, forced to acknowledge their
trespasses. "There's dealings" says Silas, or, as Dolly Winthrop puts it in her more stumbling
fashion, there's "Them above." Faults hidden in the past come to light. Silas, who has suffered
from malice and injustice, lives to gain a blessing. The characters come to us weighted with their
previous history; as Auerbach says of the heroes of the Genesis-narratives, they are "fraught with
background." Silas's personality is conditioned by what has happened to him in Lantern Yard and
earlier. Similarly, Godfrey Cass's past, which he conceals from his wife, will eventually constrain
him and there will be a reckoning. Providence works wonderfully and mysteriously, calling the past
to remembrance, turning sin and suffering into a path of salvation.
In speaking to Dolly Winthrop in chapter xvi, Silas recalls the evil done to him by his friend William
Dean in his Lantern Yard days, an iniquity which left him friendless and bitter for fifteen years.
There was no longer a God of righteousness in whom he could believe. "That," he said, "was what
fell on me like as if it had been red-hot iron." And he continues:
"... because, you see, there was nobody as cared for me or
clave to me above nor below. And him as I'd gone out and
in wi' for ten year and more, since when we was lads and
went halves--mine own familiar friend in whom I trusted,
had lifted up his heel again' me, and worked to ruin me."
Critical from this point of view is the choice of Hephzibah as the name for the foundling who has come
to Marner's door. Dolly doubts whether it is really "a christened name," but Silas retorts by saying that
"it's a Bible name."
George Eliot: Good Without God by Alan Jacobs
2000 First Things (April 2000).
George Eliot: The Last Victorian. By Kathryn Hughes. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
400 pp. $30.
On the second day of January 1842, in a mild corner of the English Midlands, a
young woman of twenty–two named Mary Ann Evans refused to attend church
with her father. "Robert Evans’ response," writes the young woman’s most
recent biographer, "was to withdraw into a cold and sullen rage." Thus began
what Mary Ann called a "holy war."
The conflict had been coming for some time. Robert Evans—the agent of a large
estate in Warwickshire, near Coventry—had raised his children as middle–of–
the–road Anglicans, but some of his daughter’s teachers, in the "ladies’
seminaries" she attended from age nine, were more enthusiastic. Their
evangelical piety appealed to Mary Ann, but she had not been in their world for
too long before she began to perceive a dissonance between that piety and her
already impressive reading in literature, theology, and science. An inner tension
mounted, and culminated in a decisive recognition that she was no longer a
Christian. What remained was to summon the courage to make this recognition
public—which is to say, reveal it to her father. And this is what she did on the
second day of January 1842.
Because of her father’s silence, Mary Ann felt that she had to explain herself in a
letter to him. Of the Bible she wrote, "I regard these writings as histories
consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of
what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the
system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life . . . to be most dishonorable to
God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness."
This was scarcely calculated to assuage Robert Evans’ anger, but it had the
singular merit of honesty.
Pink Monkey POINT
OF VIEW
Technically, Silas Marner has an omniscient third-person narrator- a narrator who
isn't a character but can enter the thoughts and sensations of all the characters. This
lets George Eliot delve into her characters' psychological processes, to show the mind
of Godfrey, as well as Silas, and then to contrast them. Dunstan's and Nancy's minds
are probed, too. With the rest of her characters, however, who provide a social context
for the story, the narrator steps back and adopts the role of a social observer. She
analyzes the patterns of village life and comments on them- often with the perspective
of someone from the outer world.
Maybe that's why it isn't quite true to say that George Eliot is not a character in her
novels. She isn't a figure acting in the plot, but her presence certainly is felt as she
speaks to the reader. (At the end of the second paragraph, notice that she uses the first
person.) Her commentaries bridge the gap between Raveloe and your world.
Sometimes she needs to explain attitudes and ideas that would seem strange to
"modern" readers. (There's a lot of this in the first chapter.) Sometimes she shows you
parallels between the events of the story and your own life. (Look, for example, at
Chapter 2, where she compares Silas' hoarding to the way sophisticated men bury
themselves in their work.) These comments keep you from getting too caught up in
the story. But this is intentional- Eliot wants you always to think about the moral
significance of what is happening. Some readers resent this preaching and feel that the
story itself teaches the lesson well enough without her comments. Yet other people
enjoy her interpreting remarks, feeling that they open up depths of wisdom in this
seemingly simple novel.