He regularly takes his collection of gold coins out and has an obsession with feeling them, counting them, stacking them but doesn’t like silver coins. “He spread them out in heaps and bathed his hands in them.” It is the only thing he has and accordingly he loves the gold coins almost as if they were part of his family.
Dustan Cass, most of the time referred to as Dunsey, is a spendthrift, perhaps because he is the son of the Squire. Every conversation Dunsey has is about money, one of these reasons is because he cannot repay a loan from his brother Godfrey and he cannot borrow any more from his father. He blackmails Godfrey with the threat that he will tell of an earlier marriage.
Dunsey sells Godfrey’s horse, but then kills it due to his own carelessness which is very much typical of his character. Then he thinks of Silas’s money and steals it but after convincing himself that taking the money didn’t matter because the reason that Silas wasn’t there was because he had fallen into the stone pit he ironically falls into the pit.
Silas is forced to go to the villagers with his grief of the lost gold and the villagers are very sympathetic towards him and search the entire village but find nothing. His home is now referred to as “his robbed home” his fire is no longer red and gold with warmth but becomes grey.
He now welcomes visitors and starts developing friendships. “Formerly his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty and the lock was broken.”
Godfrey gets engaged to Nancy Lammeter who is also an equally wealthy person after finding out of Molly Farren’s death after she froze to death in the snow.
The child with golden hair wanders into his home and lies in his hearth. As Silas walks back inside, his eyes nearsighted and weak from his years of close work at the loom, he sees what he thinks is his gold on the floor. Eppie was a gift of greater value than gold and Silas now returns his trust in God.
Dunsey’s body is found with Silas’s money and now that Godfrey knows Dunsey can tell no-one about his previous marriage he goes and confesses to Nancy himself. Godfrey meets Eppie after sixteen years and offers her a home, possessions, social position and wealth.
Nancy says to Eppie “You’ll be a treasure to me. We shall want for nothing when we have our daughter.” Eppie declines material wealth and position after Silas has reminded her she’ll “Stay among poor folks, and with poor clothes and things, when you might ha’ had everything o’ the best.”
Eppie has emotional and spiritual treasure in her life with her father and the love of Aaron Winthrop. Godfrey’s speaks of his loss much like a sadly missed opportunity “There’s debts we can’t pay like money debts, by paying extra for the years that have slipped by… Marner was right in what he said about a man’s turning away a blessing from his door: it falls to someone else.
George Eliot makes a very good point with “Silas Marner” wealth is not everything, your family, and how you choose them, is much more important. Silas Marner and Eppie are put in very different places, by George Eliot, in unusual situations so as to allow them opportunities to make real choices. And, neither of whom chooses the traditional, biologically determined family. Marner stays a responsibility free hermit until he takes on Eppie in a revelatory moment and Eppie chooses her foster father above her biological one though both have rightful claims on her. Perhaps Eliot "supports family values" but that is a secondary message to the less traditional message that one must choose one's family to begin with. This message is not just an extreme in a two-sided relationship, for it is the middle ground between its own two opposites, which include the possibilities of not having a family at all and going with the one you are biologically given. This novel is not a tale of black and white, right and wrong, it is more complex. “Silas Marner” teaches the values of honesty, kindness, and courage as it entertains, and is still quite a radical, intriguing vision of the world.
