Silas Marner - By George Elliot - Goodnight Mr. Tom - By Michelle Magorian - How is the child's relationship with his or her carer presented by each of these writers? How are we made interested in these relationships?

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By Claire Plumpton 10B

Year Ten Independent Essay

Books that I am comparing

Silas Marner – By George Elliot

Goodnight Mr. Tom – By Michelle Magorian

        

How is the child’s relationship with his or her carer presented by each of these writers? How are we made interested in these relationships? 

Silas Marner tells the story of a weaver who lives, and works in a cottage just outside the village of Raveloe. Raveloe is a very different world from the northern town, Lantern Yard, where Silas grew up, and belonged to a strict religious group.

Silas suffered from caleptic fits and his friend, William Dane took advantage of this, to frame him for the theft of church money. Silas was then expelled from the church. Silas then moves to Raveloe and starts a new life there becoming a miserly old man of whom everyone is afraid.

Goodnight Mr. Tom tells the story of a young boy named Willie who has abused by his mother and evacuated during the second world war. A widowed man named Tom Oakley, of whom many of the villagers are afraid, looks him after.

There are quite a lot of significant similarities in both of these stories, one of them being that in both stories the writer tells us that the people in their community are afraid of them, and that they themselves have brought about this view of them by their own actions and attitudes. In Goodnight Mr. Tom, Tom has rarely spoken to anyone in the village since his wife died, an event that made him feel lonely and isolated from the rest of the world. Similarly in Silas Marner, his betrayal by his friend makes him feel lonely and isolated also.

Silas must have felt very betrayed, both by his friend, and by God, who failed to clear him of the charges wrongly brought against him. His betrayal by these figures, results in a total loss of faith in both people and God, leaving Silas to think that “there is no just God that governs the earth righteously, but a God of lies, that bears witness against the innocent”. Silas’ fiancée, Sara, then ended their engagement, and married William Dane. This makes the reader feel very sorry for Silas as he has been betrayed by the people he is closest to. His personality changes dramatically and he is transformed from, ”A young man of exemplary life and ardent faith” to a “bitter” man with “despair in his soul” and a “shaken trust in God”. As a writer, Eliot makes us feel both sorry for Silas and interested in him at the same time. We want Silas to regain his trust in God and people, and in this way we are drawn into the story. We see the decline of his character as well as the emotional pain he is going through when he, “for a whole day sat alone, stunned by despair…(and) benumbing unbelief” .The reader gets to know and understand Silas and how he sees things. The reader is brought to be on Silas’s side as we see the wrongdoings that befall him and we have been brought to know him through the writer who makes us feel compassion towards him.

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When Silas moved to Raveloe, a rural community, the people in the community are very suspicious of him, as he is a stranger, whom they regard as alien, “pallid, under-sized m(a)n who…looked like the remnants of a disinherited race”. Silas works long hours and is very antisocial. Eliot demonstrates Silas’ self-isolation and withdrawal from all human contact, as he invites “no comer to step across his door-sill”. He also never stops to “drink a pint at the Rainbow (inn)”, or enjoy a “gossip at the wheelwrights”. He never went to the village “save for the purpose of his calling” and ...

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