Silas Marner - Comparing his quality of lifebefore and after the arrival of Eppie.

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Laura Bickley    10E1  10H1                                                                          27/04/07

Silas Marner essay comparing his quality of life

before and after the arrival of Eppie.

  In this essay I intend to compare the differences in the quality of Silas Marner’s life following the events which altered his life.  There are two main major changes in the book- firstly when he moved from Lantern Yard to Raveloe and secondly when he lost his money and found Eppie.  Lantern Yard and Raveloe are two very different communities, having different beliefs and traditions, and Silas found it hard to adapt from one to the other.  The downfall of losing his precious gold seemed to be compensated by the unexpected arrival of Eppie, so in this essay I will describe how his loss of money was a good thing.

  When Silas lived in Lantern Yard he was respected and has a purpose in life- he had friends, family and was content.  People in the community regarded him as a respectable man-

‘Marner was highly thought of…believed to be a young man of exemplary life and ardent faith…’ (page 14).  The church he attended was most probably a non-conformist one or puritan, with no decoration or communion, only a formal prayer ceremony, so when Dolly Winthrop gets her son Aaron to sing a choir hymn in chapter ten he wasn’t unfamiliar with it because he had never ever had an interest in church, but because he had never sang hymns at Lantern Yard.  The ‘hammer-like rhythm’ came to his ears as

‘Strange music,’ (page 104).

  After Silas’s supposed best ‘friend’ William Dane framed him for murdering the senior deacon and stealing the church money, and also running off with Sarah, Silas’s fiancée, Silas was forced to move away, and so he came to Raveloe.  George Eliot describes Raveloe as a village where

‘Many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices,’ (page 14) and his once

‘Filled with movement, mental activity and close fellowship,’ (page 14).  Everything changed for him, his sense of belonging and feelings of love disappeared, as the tightly-knit community of Raveloe were wary of their new, strange neighbour.  He had the knowledge of herbal remedies passed down to him from his mother at Lantern Yard, looked different and was unfamiliar with the villages’ traditions so he isolated himself from society.  His only passion was to weave, not just for the pleasure of it but for the knowledge that when he has finished he would receive handsome awards- guineas.  Soon Silas became hungry for more money so neglected other aspects of his life- socialising, eating, going to church- to weave non-stop,

‘He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection…Silas’s hand satisfied itself with throwing the shuttle, and his eye with seeing the little squares in the cloth complete themselves under his effort.’ (Page 24).  So weaving for money became his solitary purpose in life, it dominated him and his gold, which he counted up every night, was everything to Silas-

‘At night came his revelry…he drew out his gold…spread them out in heaps and bathed his hands in them.’ (Page 29).  The gold was his only companions and he would never part with his guineas and only spent his silver coins instead.  He abandons his old interest of collecting herbs for remedies, far more engulfed in his new love- collecting gold.  On page 30 he is near some fields which remind him of when he used to gather herbs and other ingredients to make medicines-

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‘The once familiar herbs: these too belonged to the past, from which his life had shrunk away, like a rivulet that has sunk far down from the grassy fringe of its old breadth into a little shivering thread, that cuts a groove for itself in the barren sand.’  His life evolved around his loom.

  In chapter 4 Dunstan Cass, Squire Cass’s son resorts in stealing Silas’s gold when he ends up killing the horse (belonging to his brother Godfrey) which he intended to sell for the money Godfrey owed him.  While Silas was returning back from the village, Dunstan ...

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