Silas Marner.

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Michael Robertson

George Mitchell 13410

Silas Marner

Silas Marner, by George Elliot, is a story about a weaver who is betrayed by a friend and his fiancée and is forced to move to another town, where he is an outcast alone in the world and overcome by the power of money but is rescued by the love of a child.

        In a way George Elliot is writing from personal experience. She lived with a married man whom was separated from his wife, and accounts from people who met her say that she was extremely ugly. She used a different name when writing Silas Marner and other books and it would probably not sell as well if it was known that a woman had written the book.         

The story’s themes mainly revolve around money, love, and redemption. In the story Silas is framed for killing of the senior deacon and stealing the money that lay by his bed side. Later on in the story he becomes a miser living as minimallistically as possible in order for his money to grow faster and is nearly broken when his money is stolen by Dunstan Cass whose body is later found with the stolen gold. He is then revived and redeemed when he finds Eppie in his house.

Almost immediately after he finds Eppie he is forced to talk and socialise with other people, to buy cloths for her, to find out how to discipline her and to baptise her. Silas soon starts to weave less and look after Eppie, and Godfrey proposes to Nancy Lammeter at the Christmas party.

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The relevant passages in chapter 12 (134 & 135) are extremely symbolic. “He had contracted the habit of opening his door and looking out from time to time, as if he thought that money might be somehow coming back to him”, which starts to get the reader to think about the idea of his money coming back to him, because he was only half a soul and was incomplete without his money. He finds the child shortly after he hears “the old year rung out and the new rung in” thus symbolising a new beginning. He was also in a ...

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