Silas Marner.

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SILAS MARNER

By Kayleigh Minihane 10x

George Eliot the pseudonym of Mary Anne Evans was born in Warwickshire, England in 1819. Eliot was one of the finest realists of Victorian fiction and produced a remarkable range of intellectual novels throughout her life, including the moral fable of Silas Marner. The 19th Century was an extremely patriarchal period, which Mary Anne Evans had to pen her name as George Eliot, otherwise her novels would not be published. George Eliot was a critic of the Victorian society in which she lived, and which she felt remarkably hypocritical in its treatment of her, as an intelligent, freethinking woman, who lived with a man to whom she was not married. She wrote in numerous ways affectionately but realistically of rural life, which she frequently compared positively to the life of the town. The Industrial Revolution seemed to Eliot and to many other social critics to threaten the natural human and community ties which were the basis of a happy life and this underlies the action of Silas Marner despite seldom being seen or directly referred to. Eliot is a more severe novelist of organized religion, particularly in Lantern Yard. She brings many themes into the novel such as religion, custom, social change and superstition.

The effect of the Napolenic war meant that landowners could earn significant amounts of money from farming, since prices for crops remained high and so it is clear to see why there were none to keen for the war to terminate.

Silas Marner is the protagonist of the tale, when ostracised from Lantern Yard and church after being falsely accused of embezzlement. Silas Marner is a fable, a story with a moral message. The novel's major theme of loss and redemption through love is embodied in the experience of its central character, Silas. George Eliot and Silas Marner even though both have male names, this is not what connects them because George was a matron. Both people have been ostracized, Eliot expressed her own experiences in her writing. Silas Marner lived in the within the same time period which Eliot lived her life.

Silas Marner belonged to a narrow religious sector and was highly thought of in that little hidden world known to himself as Lantern Yard. Silas had a friend called William Dane, which he later found out that with friends like him Silas did not need any enemies. Marner turned into a miser when he was wrongly accused of stealing church money, he then travelled to a village called Raveloe. After Silas had been accused of theft the people in the church in Lantern Yard had to make themselves sure of his guilt, any resort to legal measures for ascertaining the culprit was contrary to principles of the church in the Lantern Yard so they resolved to drawing lots, the lots declared that Silas Marner was guilty. He was solemnly suspended from church membership and called upon to render up the stolen money. After the lots declared his guilt Silas lost his faith in God and man from this he deliberately cut himself off from other human company and all religious beliefs. Silas knew that William had stolen the money and framed him as the thief. Not long afterwards it as known to the brethren in Lantern Yard that Silas Marner had departed from the town and gone to a little village called Raveloe. Silas then started to live as a weaver in Raveloe and that's where the hoarding of the money began. Silas Marner learnt his trade in Lantern Yard. Silas Marner was a skilled handloom linen-weaver, of simple life that had come to live in the village of Raveloe. Nobody knew where he had come from, why he was here and no man knew his parents. From the moment Silas set foot into Raveloe, in the rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England, it is clear that there is a large difference from Lantern Yard.
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'The sound of his weaving machine was very different from anything the villagers were used to and the village boys would stare in at his window until he chased them away, Silas´ Loom, so unlike the natural cheerful trotting of the winnowing-machine. Or the simpler rhythm of the flail, had a half-fearful fascination for the Raveloe boys, who would often leave their nutting or birds- nesting to peep in at the window of the stone cottage, counter balancing a certain awe at the mysterious action of the loom, by a pleasant sense of scornful superiority, drawn from the ...

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