How does Eliot create sympathy for Marner in chapters 1 & 2? Why is this important for the success of the novel?

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How does Eliot create sympathy for Marner in Chapters 1 & 2?

Why is this important for the success of the novel?

Silas Marner is a moral fable written by the Mary-Ann Evans under the pen name of George Eliot. It was published in 1861. It tells the story of the ways of an estranged old weaver, his struggles through life and society, descendence to and emancipation from mental slavery, desolation of faith, and human nature. Essentially, it is a moral fable showing how Good is eventually rewarded, whereas Evil is punished and forsaken. The novel is set within a time of deep change and radical religious belief; extending into that of cults. The author makes the reader feel deeply fond and empathetic for Silas, using devices and techniques to make us care about what happens to him, essential to the success of the novel.

Eliot opens the novel by immediately distancing the setting from the readers. She first establishes that she is writing in retrospect about Marner, with “in the days when…” as the opening line; and vivid description of past norms. The narrator repeatedly stresses that the time, physical setting, and characters are unfamiliar to us. Eliot evokes the pastoral English countryside of the early nineteenth century as the historical context, emphasising Raveloe’s distance from large towns and even large roads, an isolation that keeps the town mostly ignorant of the intellectual currents of its own time. The characters behave according to a rustic belief system that is distant and alien to us here in the 21st century, and even to the contemporary readers of George Eliot.

        Silas Marner isn’t written in proper chronological order, the first chapter introduces Marner living in Raveloe as a recluse “In the early years of this [nineteenth] century”, 15 years since arriving at Raveloe, and. This makes us wonder how, after 15 years; Silas Marner is still such a mysterious, solitary character. We are told that “Marner's inward life had been a history and a metamorphosis”. This statement arouses curiosity in the reader, and offers us the prospect of an insight into Marner's past, and an explanation as to why he currently lives in isolation.

        Eliot then jumps backwards chronologically to describe Marner’s time at Lantern Yard, a strange Religious cult-like sect common at the historical context of the novel; where it is explained to us how he was betrayed so easily by his best friend and all he knew, and how this single act of betrayal left him with nothing. This knowledge into Marner’s character helps explain why Silas will be untrusting and a recluse at first entry into Raveloe, but it begs us to ask why he still after 15 years hasn’t integrated.

        Eliot then brings the storyline back to the first arrival at Raveloe, and from then on continues chronologically through Marner’s life until the end.

Marner is handed by Eliot the profession of being a weaver, which in those days carried with them a suspicious and unholy air that aroused the attention of the ignorant townsfolk upon arrival. Using the historical context, the reader can understand why Marner, being a weaver, was described as looking like “the remnants of a disinherited race” and as an “alien looking man” to the villagers. He is superstitiously thought to have help from “The Evil One” to do his work typically by the backward people of Raveloe. Weaving would have been solitary work using a loom, which would have been a strange, foreign machine outside the industrial-revolution time towns and cities. This helps him immediately be ostracised and explains the immediate difficulty in socialising between the society of Raveloe and Marner, the now known local weirdo. The reader knows that Marner has had it difficult in the past and is now made alone against his choice, therefore inciting sympathy on his part.

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        There are immediately many “mysterious peculiarities” and suspicions developed about Marner’s character. He doesn’t go to church, he doesn’t attend the Rainbow pub, nobody knows where he came from, he treated Sally Oates from illness with the use of herbs, and he suffers from misunderstood cataleptic fits. All of these things establish Marner as associated with the Dark Arts and the Devil.

        Eliot describes further the village of Raveloe; and its relation to Marner’s already outcast self due to the backwardness of the village.

                “And Raveloe was a place where many old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices”

        Eliot describes ...

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