The book compares Silas to a spider. This increases villager’s suspicions, because spiders are creatures feared and not often seen, just like Silas. The book does this by making Silas seem as if he was hiding in Raveol. This is just like a spider hides in a house and this image is created on page fifteen it says “set within sight of the widespread hillsides, than this low, wooded region, where he felt hidden from even the heavens by the screening trees.” It continues to pursue the relationship between Silas Marner and a spider by saying that Silas would make children “take to their legs and run in terror” which is traditionally the reaction associated with spiders. However the obvious feature strengthening the bond between Silas and a spider is his weaving because of a spider and the complex web it often weaves. However the weaving meant more than just his career, the loom symbolised Silas’s life constantly moving but not going anywhere and on a literal level the loom was Silas’s way of making money. The money itself replaced contact with people however when his money is stolen Silas becomes upset, as if he had lost his friends. However when Eppie arrived she took the moneys place and Silas mistakes her golden curls for his money and consequently comes to love Eppie more than his gold. This symbolism is all based around his loom and ironically the structure of the play is based on a simple woven item. The first threads are woven loosely and as time progresses vital threads are added and the whole piece comes together. Silas was the loose threads, Eppie was the vital threads and the finished product was the reunited village.
The village is a very close community, everything is discused in the local pub and everyone is so close due to them all being a purely bred part of the village. On page eight it backs this idea up and says that “linen-weavers-emigrants from the town into the country” weren’t born and bred locally. The book shows how close the people are and how they trust each other but not anyone outside of their community. They do this by wrongly accusing Silas of theft, who was outside of their community and then finding the peddler guilty, and although the peddler was actually guilty the author made it so that it was obvious that it had to be the stranger. This is displayed when a man thinks of the obvious option, the peddler. This was displayed in the book when it states “a man accustomed to putting two and two together” this just shows that these people live in a box, where only strangers do wrong and that they never think outside the box. It’s just ironic that the clue to who committed the crime was a tinderbox. On page sixty it shows they took this as a strong lead to who committed the robbery when it is written that “the inference generally accepted was, that the tinder-box found in the ditch was somehow connected with the robbery.
Silas is helped more by Dolly Winthrop than anyone else. She plays a dominant role in the later stages of the book by acting like a mother to Eppie and a tutor to Silas. On page one hundred and twenty she tutors Silas by teaching him that buying clothes is expensive because they grow so fast, “its ill spending the money on them baby-clothes, for the children ‘ull grow like grass” she says. However it’s on the same page that Dolly shows how she will help him when ever possible and to the best standard she can, meaning that she is a friend. She does this by saying ‘I’ve got the little petticoats as Aaron wore five years ago.’ Then she plays a mother role to Eppie and offers Silas reassurance in the upbringing of Eppie, she says ‘you’d like to see her taken care of by those who can leave her well off an make a lady of her.’
The village needed a stranger to show them that there was an imperfect world outside of Ravelo and things like fathers leaving their families is just one example. Silas needed the village of Ravelo to fulfil his life with the things he didn’t have such as a community to befriend him.
