The Bad are Punished, The Good are Rewarded,Is ‘Silas Marner’ a Moral Tale?

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Colin MacRae                2nd November

The Bad are Punished,

The Good are Rewarded,

Is ‘Silas Marner’ a Moral Tale?

        A moral tale is a recalled story with a deeper, meaningful lesson to be learned hidden in it. The earliest moral tales probably originate from the Bible. One such moral tale in it was about a shepherd who had one hundred sheep. But when a lamb strayed away, the shepherd left his flock of ninety-nine and looked for that one lost sheep. When he found the lamb, he took it back to the flock. And the moral of this tale? Everyone is just as worthy/valuable as everyone else. Many of these moral tales appear in other books as well.

        One common trait in many moral tales, is that they are quite simple, or at least the moral part normally is. And the moral within the story is easy to spot. It is a lesson on how to treat others/ or how to behave or act.

        The setting and atmosphere at the beginning of ‘Silas Marner’ is the simple village, Lantern Yard. You get the impression that Lantern Yard is a very religious village, and has minimal contact with the outside world and new technology. They aren’t greedy, nor is food as plentiful as in Raveloe. In the first paragraph, Silas Marner, and weavers in general, are described as near aliens, and the craft they are skilled at, couldn’t “be carried on entirely without the help of the Evil One” the evil one being the devil. George Eliot is trying to make the point in the first few lines of ‘Silas Marner’, that people judge people and things that they don’t understand. And you get the feeling that the residents of Lantern Yard are almost primitive, in the sense that they don’t even understand the simple craft of weaving. The name, Lantern Yard, also has a meaning. The yard in Lantern Yard, gives you the sense that the village is enclosed and lantern being warm and homely.

        Silas Marner is first introduced in the book as a mysterious weaver living in a stone cottage by a stone pit in Raveloe. But the description of the noise from the loom, “so unlike the natural cheerful trotting of the winnowing-machine or the simpler rhythm of the flail”, gives the feeling that he was perceived as unknown to Raveloe. He is described as someone obsessed with his work, and his “large brown protuberant eyes in Silas Marners’ pale face really saw nothing very distinctly that was not close to them” although the Raveloe kids believed he could “dart cramp, or rickets, or a wry mouth” with a single stare. And because of this description, he must look very daunting and almost spooky and frightful.

        I believe some of George Eliot’s life mirror themselves in this book in an abstract form. Parts in the book about Silas Marner losing faith. She also lost her faith (George Eliot=Mary Ann Evans) and maybe she is putting her point across in this book. In previous books, namely The Mill on The Floss, she added many of her own experiences, and I believe she has done the same in ‘Silas Marner’. In the way that he is treated in Raveloe and Lantern Yard. For instance in Raveloe, he is ignored and silenced from social events, and the same happened to Mary Ann Evans after she ran off with the already-married George Henry Lewes. And in Lantern Yard, Silas is judged by the parishioners and friends, the same as Mary Ann Evans was.

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After the introductions to Raveloe and Silas Marner himself, it is revealed why Silas was forced to leave Lantern Yard and how he came to live in Raveloe. And there is a moral question in lantern Yard that a man should be judged by a kind of ‘pulling straws’ method. I think in this way, Mary Ann Evans, is trying to put a point across, that you cannot judge anyone with ‘hocus-pocus’ as it were. Because you know that Marner is innocent, yet he is dealt with injustice, and I think she may also be hitting out at believers in ...

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