Silas Marner (1861) stands apart from George Eliot’s other major novels, in that it is less a psychological study than a sort of morality play. To be sure, the novel is not without Eliot’s usual penetrating portrayals of souls, and of course all of her books are intensely moral. Still in general Eliot wrote of men and women’s complex, faltering struggles to understand what is right, and then do it. In Silas Marner the right is entirely clear, and several characters follow it with an almost angelic purity of heart, for which they are duly rewarded.
The story, like many Victorian novels, is set in that lost world of the country village before the railways. Silas Marner, a weaver, comes to the village of Raveloe from a larger town, where his best friend has treacherously framed him for theft, so as to have him cast out of their chapel and to steal his sweetheart. In Raveloe, Silas has lost his faith in God, and lives alone, bitter and friendless. He begins hoarding his earnings from his weaving, till he resembles a miser from a children’s story, sitting every night counting his gold by the firelight.
Silas has lost his faith in God, and lives alone, bitter and friendless.
Silas’s story runs, in the first section of the novel, in parallel with that of Godfrey Cass, the son of Raveloe’s richest farmer. Godfrey, a good-hearted but weak man, is in love with the beautiful Cecilia Lammeter, daughter of another wealthy Raveloe farmer. But Godfrey cannot marry Cecilia, because he has secretly married a barmaid in another town, one Molly Farren.
Godfrey Cass’s life and Silas’s intersect in two ways. Firstly, Godfrey’s wastrel brother Dunstan, who has been blackmailing Godfrey under threat of revealing to their father his brother’s marriage to Molly, steals Silas’s gold one night when the weaever is out of his cottage. Dunstan then disappears, uncaught, leaving Silas broken and bewildered by the loss of his treasure.
In the book’s next episode, Eliot brings Molly onto the scene for the first and last time. We learn suddenly that she has a two-year-old daughter by Godfrey, and certain dark hints of Dunstan’s are explained when we find out she is addicted to laudanum. Molly has walked into Raveloe on New Year’s Eve, with her daughter in her arms, planning to come to the Cass house and expose her and her daughter’s existence to Godfrey’s father. But drunk with laudanum, she lies down to sleep in the snow outside Silas Marner’s cottage. Her little girl toddles into the cottage, where the astonished Marner tends to her, and finds her mother dead outside in the snow.
The upshot of all this is that Silas adopts the little girl, all his bitterness and greed now replaced with an overwhelming love for the child. He names her Hephzibah—“Eppie” for short—after his dead mother and sister. Hephzibah in Hebrew means “my delight is in her”, and Eliot wishes us to remember the book of Isaiah:
Thou shalt no longer be termed, Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed, Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land, Beulah, for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thou shalt be married.
This is what Eppie’s presence does to Silas’s soul.
Silas adopts the little girl, all his bitterness and greed now replaced with an overwhelming love for the child.
The book then jumps forward sixteen years. Eppie, now eighteen and soon to be married, lives in perfect love and harmony with her adoptive father, Silas. Godfrey Cass, freed from his first wife, has married Cecilia Lammeter. They have no children, and Godfrey, though otherwise now a decent man, has never revealed that he is Eppie’s father, and has given her and Silas only such moderate help as would not hint at the secret.
The truth comes out when Dunstan’s body is discovered in a newly drained pond near Silas’s cottage: he had drowned on the night of the theft. Godfrey now confesses all to his wife. She is forgiving, and, at the novel’s climax, Godfrey and Cecilia make their way to Silas’s cottage to reveal all, and offer to adopt Eppie and make her into a “lady”. Silas protests that Eppie is in truth his child: “God gave her to me because you turned your back upon her, and He looks upon her as mine: you’ve no right to her. When a man turns a blessing from his door, it falls to them as take it in”. Still he leaves Eppie free to choose her course.
At this stage, it would have been well within the range of Eliot’s imagination to turn the story into a bitter one. Eppie could have accepted the Casses’ offer of wealth and status, believing it to be her birthright, and then slowly turned her back on her humble adoptive father. The Casses’ good intentions could in turn have slowly gone sour as the living testimony of Godfrey’s betrayal joined their household. But none of this is what happens. Eppie refuses without hesitation to leave Silas; the Casses accept this with gentle resignation; and the novel ends with Eppie’s springtime marriage to her village sweetheart, with whom she will live in bliss at Silas’s old cottage.
It would have been well within the range of Eliot’s imagination to turn the story into a bitter one.
The story, as painted with Eliot’s masterly hand, is full of beautiful detail, and is deeply affecting. Yet it is also, unquestionably, sentimental. Nor is this the mere incidental sentimentality of some of Eliot’s (and Dickens’s) rather tacked-on happy endings. Silas’s redemption through his love for little Eppie is the very core of the tale, and from the moment the golden-haired two-year-old toddles up to the miser’s fireplace, there is a streak of treacle in the book that then runs through to the end.
Still I do not think that the profoundly serious Eliot was—unlike Dickens in his lower moments—aiming to serve up to readers the cheap emotional satisfactions of sentimentality. Rather she was attempting to write in the mode of a parable, in the tradition (as Rosemary Ashton has suggested) of Pilgrim’s Progress:
“In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s”.
Now it is true enough that a child has saved many a foundering soul from perdition. However no child, no matter how delightful, is a white-winged angel. Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory, and so there is no sentimentality involved in its personages speaking and acting as angels. But Silas Marner—however allegorical in intention—remains a realist novel in the tradition of Balzac. It is sentimental precisely because it is realist: Eppie and the reformed Silas are too good to be true—that is to say that they betray the sort of truth of inner light and shadow that the realist novel promises. Narrative sentimentality is indeed a by-product of realism, because it endows men, women and situations that seem like our own with a resolution and perfection that are false.
It would be overly harsh to call Silas Marner a failure: its fusion of allegory and realism comes close to working, and this has made it for many a beloved book. Yet it seems to me far less successful than that earlier tale of a miser saved, Dickens’s Christmas Carol. Of course, Dickens’s story ladles on far more treacle than Eliot’s tasteful helpings. But, with its ghosts and time-travel, it is also openly an allegory and a fairy-tale, and so escapes the reproach of sentimental mendacity. We may struggle to believe that any child could save a closed-hearted miser as perfectly as Eppie does Silas Marner. But the Ghosts of Christmas can do as they please.
