Silas Marner by George Eliot
By barenib
- 852 reads
This novel is of course one of the classics and hardly needs my
endorsement.
I am reviewing it however to point out that not only is it a piece
of
English Literature, but it's also a historical document of a way of
life now
long since disappeared.
For those who are unfamiliar with the plot, Silas Marner is a weaver
who is
ostracised from his home town in the midlands and goes to live in a
country
village where he lives a solitary life, gradually accumulating a fair
amount
of money from his labours. The villagers think him strange and foreign
and
their view is compounded by the fact that he suffers from bouts
of
narcolepsy which send him into a state of waking sleep without warning.
The
story hinges on the turn of events during two such occasions, the first
in
which his fortune is stolen, but the second seeing him 'acquire' a
daughter.
It's all classic BBC costume drama material and the ending is
almost
embarrassingly happy, even for Sunday teatime viewing, but I don't wish
to
denigrate George Eliot for the literary conventions prevalent in her
time,
and if you want critical accounts, there are plenty about.
What struck me about it is the country way of life described by Eliot
in her
fictional village of Raveloe and the language which accompanies it.
She's
dealing with a point in time right at the beginning of the
industrial
revolution, but the gap between this and D.H. Lawrence's rural
mining
community in Sons and Lovers, for example, is huge. As far as the
villagers
are concerned, Silas is literally from another country, a world that to
them
might just as well be Mars. This is the end of an age of ultimate
parochiality and self sufficiency that the coming industrialisation
would
sweep away forever, and I haven't yet read another book which captures
the
spirit and atmosphere of that time quite so well. It becomes obvious
that
this was a conscious element of the novel as near the end Eliot
describes
Silas going back to his home town only to find that his old home
and
surroundings have been demolished to make way for new industrial
buildings.
He rapidly retreats back to Raveloe which now represents a haven for
him,
though there is the sense that even the village won't be safe forever -
it
will lose its innocence.
I greatly enjoyed Eliot's depiction of Raveloe and the characters
who
populate it, and particularly their language. It is a bridge back to
that
past which plainly wasn't idyllic, but one which we would find as alien
as
the villagers find Silas, and one which if it weren't for stories like
this
would already be lost forever.
- Log in to post comments