How does George Eliot portray the changes of the character Silas Marner?

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How does George Eliot portray the changes of the character Silas Marner?

     George Eliot describes Raveloe at the start of the nineteenth century through a changing world. At this time the changes in the industrial revolution were making many poor, working people leave the countryside to work in factories and live in crowded, squalid towns where small religious groups were beginning to form such as the one in Lantern Yard. There were many inequalities of society such as the high living standards of the landowners compared to the poor people in Raveloe.

       

     The first change of character is when Marner is made to move from Lantern Yard to Raveloe after being wrongly accused of stealing money from the Deacon. In Lantern yard he was ‘highly though of’ and was believed to be ‘a young man of exemplary life and ardent faith’. When Marner’s friend, William Dane, betrays him and frames him for stealing money he is called to the church where he believes God would clear him. However he is found guilty and he was said to ‘have despair in his soul that shaken trust in God and man’, so now he begins to lose faith and trust in everyone. He is further burdened when his fiancé calls the wedding off and is soon married to Marner’s friend William Dane. At this he moves to Raveloe.

       

    George Eliot shows the effect of this event by creating a whole new view of Marner. He looses Religion and trust, which makes him very isolated. She makes him seem like a very dark strange character by using phrases such as ‘The little light that he possessed spread its beams so narrowly, that frustrated belief was a curtain broad enough to create for him the blackness of night’. In other words its made out that Marner has nothing to look forward to because of his loss of faith. His loneliness in emphasised when he seems to find company in his money. George Eliot describes them as his ‘seeds of desire’, this makes you think that money is the most important thing in Marner’s life. Also he is made isolated because nothing in Raveloe is the same as Lantern Yard which also creates pity.

       

    The reader first regards Marner as being a level headed and much respected character. However when he is betrayed he shows he is very innocent and unsuspecting which shows he is too trustful, and relies too much on the teachings of God.

       

    When he moves to Raveloe the reader feels great pity for Marner. George Eliot creates this by making out that Marner has lost everything and by making him so isolated from the rest of the village, ‘he invited no comer to step across his door-sill, and he never strolled into the village’. Also the writer makes us commiserate with Marner because he loses all his respect. She creates this by making all the characters in Raveloe think that Marner is strange and also by using a group of lads that pester and torment him to show that this view runs through all the generations of Raveloe.

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    The readers view of Marner again changes when the writer describes his money as they ‘were like the satisfaction of a thirst to him’ and that his ‘life had reduced itself to the mere functions of weaving and hoarding’. It makes him seem as if he is a robot with a program. It makes him seem even stranger but again creates great empathy because he really has no life and it’s hard to believe that a once well regarded man had become this machine.

       

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