Revisiting George Eliot's Silas Marner: Silars Marner the Disinherited

Abstract

This paper concerns how George Eliot's Silas Marner could also be read as a fiction containing political ideals despite its apparently peaceful, pastoral narrative, which is usually expected to be typically apolitical. To argue this point, such fictional elements as use of language, characterization, structure, image and symbols are revisited in new perspectives and ways that Eliot's critics have usually neglected or failed to observe. First, this paper explains how Eliot plays with such words as inheritance, disinherited, and inherited and how her use of these words might have reflected her progressive political vision. Next, how her treatment of major and minor characters reveals her disappointment with the gentry class and her awareness of problems with the class system, is also treated in such minute detail that the novel might loom as another novel having new interpretive potential. And next, the plot of Eppie's choice and the ending of the novel are also revisited to show the ways that the narrative structure might have to do with Eliot's political thought. Lastly, and probably most importantly, this paper bravely suggests how Eliot's creation of garden in the novel might be interpreted as her aesthetic act of the so-called, "political unconscious." In sum, although Eliot never discusses politics overtly in Silas Marner, it is important to remember that the novel was also produced in the Zeitgeist of democratic admiration(the novel was written a few years before the Second Reform Bill) along with her other novels and also that the contemporary reader might have been indirectly influenced by Eliot's democratic consciousness imbedded in the novel.