But what causes Silas, a much loved member of the community, to be rejected by those who had thought so highly of him and to even to be driven out of the community? Silas is falsely accused of stealing of bag of gold from the senior deacon while on night watch over the ill deacon. William Dane is the culprit, as it is him who sets up Silas by planting his knife with the gold. Silas does not give up then, though, and believes God will clear him. But when the lots are drawn Silas is found guilty, he has to leave behind everything that he had loved, including Sarah, his fiancée. Even when Silas finds out that it was William who had set him up, he tells nobody, again showing he is an honest man. Silas is left with nothing at all, diminishing his faith in God and his trust in others. “Poor Marner went out with despair in his soul – that shaken trust in God and man which is little short of madness to a loving nature.”
After being forced to leave his hometown of Lantern Yard, Silas Marner then moved to Raveloe, a small, verdant, woody village tucked away in the backwoods of the Midlands, where George Eliot herself grew up. Raveloe is also relatively religious, but is Church of England. However, this does not make the people of Raveloe any less than narrow-minded than the community of Lantern Yard. “Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices” Raveloe is entirely different from the community of Lantern Yard, both in its landscape and its tradition. This is made clear when it says, “There was nothing here…that seemed to have any relation with that life centring in Lantern Yard.” Showing how different the two communities are, but there is also another difference for Silas, “It seemed to him that the Power in which he had vainly trusted among the streets and in the prayer-meetings was very far away from this land in which he had taken refuge, where men lived in careless abundance, knowing and needing nothing of that trust which for him had been turned to bitterness.” This shows that his sense of trust has completely dispersed, and that he wants to live in a world where he doesn’t need to trust anybody.
This brings me to the suspicions about Silas. Silas chooses to exclude himself from the community, building up a large amount of gold and only socialising for his work. He becomes almost dead to the world. The villagers decide that he is a very strange, enclosed man, but this makes them conscientious of who they think he really is. As they are incredibly narrow-minded, when they find him in one of his outer-body fits, they jump to the conclusion that he is somehow associated with the devil. “They had perhaps heard their fathers and mothers hint that Silas Marner could cure folk’s rheumatism if he had a mind, and add, still more darkly, that if you could only speak the devil fair enough, he might save you the cost of a doctor,” shows their suspicions effectively and also mentions Silas’ healing of Sally Oates. This was the first time that Silas had felt some sort of unity between his past and present life, perhaps the beginning of a return to his old self, but this to no avail and in fact made matters worse, “Thus it came to pass that this movement of pity towards Sally Oates, which had given him a transient sense of brotherhood, heightened the repulsion between him and his neighbours, and made his isolation more complete.”
Silas does have one thing to cling on to through his time in Raveloe – his gold. This is a great contrast between the way Silas lives in the village, isolated, and his love for his gold. It is almost as if the gold is a replacement for everything that he left behind in Lantern Yard, so much that he is obsessive about it, “He handled them, he counted them, till their form and colour were like the satisfaction of a thirst to him,” showing that his gold is virtually a craving to him.
This makes it all the more devastating to him when he finds his gold has been stolen. However, there is some consolation for his loss as this is the first time that Silas is forced to integrate with the community. When Silas first discovers his gold is missing, his immediate thoughts place the blame on Jem Rodney. Silas guesses Jem will be at the Rainbow pub, where most of the lower class villagers usually are. Once there the villagers are initially extremely surprised to see Silas there, but once they listen to what has happened they sympathise with him and are actually interested in finding out whoever has stolen the gold. This is an enormous step for Silas into being accepted into the society, as is shown in the quote, “And yet he was not utterly forsaken in his trouble. The repulsion Marner had always created in his neighbours was partly dissipated by the new light in which this misfortune had shown him.” This shows the people of Raveloe are beginning to alter their view of Silas.
Dolly Winthrop is possibly the most sympathetic towards Silas and suggests that Silas should become more involved within the community to gain the villagers’ trust, perhaps by going to church. However Silas does not see eye to eye with Dolly and his feelings are shown in the quote, “Poor Dolly’s exposition of her simple Raveloe theology fell rather unmeaningly on Silas’s ears, for there was no word in it which could rouse a memory of what he had known as religion.” This illustrates the point that Silas is not quite ready to accept religion again, especially as this is not the religion that he had known at Lantern Yard. We can perceive that Silas is not completely ready to release his feelings yet, as “the fountains of human love and divine faith had not yet been unlocked.”
The arrival of Eppie is almost certainly the pivotal moment of Silas Marner’s character development and of the community’s attitudes towards him. This is obvious almost immediately after Silas notices Eppie’s golden hair, as he “almost unconsciously uttered sound of hushing tenderness.” Silas at first thinks this could be a fragment of his imagination – his sister coming back to him in a dream, but he then realises it is something much different and feels something he has never before felt in his time in Raveloe. “He had a dreamy feeling that this child was somehow a message come to him from that far-off life: it stirred fibres that had never been moved in Raveloe.” This exemplifies my point that this is the first time Silas has felt any sort of pity to another since Lantern Yard. Silas’ determination to keep the child also revolutionizes the attitudes of the villagers towards Silas, causing a “softening of feeling for him which dated from his misfortune, that merging of suspicion and dislike in a rather contemptuous pity for him as lone and crazy, was now accompanied with a more active sympathy,” Showing the gradually changing opinion of the villagers and demonstrates how much they respect Silas for adopting the child, when he has no support and not a lot of money. In addition, the arrival of Eppie releases “an emotion mysterious to himself, at something unknown downing on his life.” Silas even goes as far as to say that Eppie “saves him”.
Another important change in Silas from the arrival of Eppie is his agreement to have Eppie christened and to eventually start going to church. Although Silas could not identify the religion of Raveloe at all with his old faith in Lantern Yard, he wanted the best for Eppie and that was, in the eyes of the villagers, for her to get christened. Again this shows the affection Silas has for Eppie and also his gradual acceptance of the society of Raveloe.
Sixteen years after the arrival of Eppie we see Silas walking out of church with Eppie for the first time in the book. All superstition over Silas has been completely erased and now “Nobody was jealous of the weaver, for he was regarded as an exceptional person, whose claims on neighbourly help were not to be matched in Raveloe. Any superstition that remained concerning him had taken an entirely new colour,” This shows that now the community have completely accepted Silas into the community and some even consider him to be exceptional, almost the opposite of what they thought before Eppie entered his life. Silas’ own character also changed during those sixteen years. Silas had taken to smoking a pipe as it was said to be good for his fits, which may not seem to have any significance but does show that he is listening the people of Raveloe and doing things to try to fit in with the community. This is shown in the quote, “a humble sort of acquiescence in what was held to be good had become a strong habit of that new self which had been developed in him since he had found Eppie on his hearth.” Another pivotal moment is when Silas opens up his mind entirely to Dolly Winthrop about his life in Lantern Yard, “as it grew more and more easy to him to open up his mind to Dolly Winthrop, he gradually communicated to her all that he could describe of his early life.” This is extremely important as this is the first time he has told anyone about his experiences in Lantern Yard, which shows now he is ready to move on with his life and come to terms with what happened there.
Although Silas is not quite ready to forget about what happened in Lantern Yard, and decides to visit one last time in the last chapter to put his past to rest. This gives a circular structure to the novel, connecting it back to the beginning. However the Lantern Yard Silas visits here is not the one he remembers, it has been changed completely by the industrial revolution, a sharp contrast to the lush green countryside of Raveloe. The prison is the only thing making it recognisable to Silas. Both Silas and Eppie can never imagine living there, as he says, “The old homes gone; I’ve no home but this now,” referring to Raveloe. This shows he has come to know Raveloe as his only home and he sums up his feelings towards Eppie and his trust on the last line of the chapter, saying, “Since the time the child was sent to me and I’ve come to love her as myself, I’ve had enough light to trusten by; and now she says she’ll never leave me, I think I shall trusten till I die.”
Silas is in no way a heroic character. He is not notably intelligent or courageous or unselfish. Silas changes greatly during the course of the book, yet part of him always remains “the same Silas Marner who had once loved his fellow with tender love and trusted in an unseen goodness.” That original love and trust seemed crushed by the troubles that happen to him, but they return with even greater strength. The changes in Silas' character are never arbitrary. They develop unsurprisingly from his past. The betrayal by William Dane costs Silas his faith in men, and the drawing of the lots seizes his faith in God. The loss of his gold again costs Silas his faith in men, yet he believes that Eppie is sent for his salvation, and through Eppie's influence he finds new faith in the goodness of other men and gains maturity and inner strength. George Eliot includes several morals woven into the novel, the most obvious being that of divine intervention. This seems to arise repeatedly during the novel, for example when Dunstan steals Silas’ gold and in the process falls into a pit or when Eppie is explicitly put forward as a substitute for Silas' treasure. Maybe these are just unlikely coincidences, but Eliot has definitely tried to intertwine some message of deciding your own fate into the story.
