Impressions and Interpretations: Then and Now

[Laura]

Now that we're midway through the month, let's begin our discussion on "Silas Marner" by George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans. Here are some questions to answer and/or think about while reading the book. We will discuss the movie "A Simple Twist of Fate" in the next thread!

1) What are your first impressions of the title character, Silas Marner? What do you think of the community of Raveloe and Marner's place within it? What about the other main players like Godfrey Cass?

2) The author introduces the concept of luck, chance, or fate in a society where superstitious beliefs are pervasive. What do you think Eliot is saying about the possibility of chance acting on circumstances beyond one's control? What does the text suggest about superstition as lens through which characters understand others and interpret events?

3) As you read, reflect on how Eliot's original audience may have reacted to this story. Do you think it mattered then (or now) that Eliot/Evans published this work under a pen name? How might readers have reacted differently if her gender had been known? Are there any ways in which your knowledge of Eliot's gender influences your impression of the novel today?

As you answer #3, here is an article about the complexity of Eliot's life: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/2...

[Laura]

Here are my thoughts on the questions! I'll try to keep my answers limited roughly the first half of the novel to avoid spoilers...

1) Silas Marner strikes me as a very relatable character. Eliot does a good job of exploring his inner motives through his backstory and his resulting fixation with earning money. It's a remarkable feat to create a sympathetic miser, a man who loves money without necessarily being materialistic in nature. It seems like he is mainly focused on the money as measure of his time and his steady progress through his work, his main form of solace. I can imagine a modern-day Silas Marner finding solace in something repetitive, meditative, but challenging like, say, getting a high score at a game like Tetris. Marner seems to have a game-ified view of his earnings. I can understand his distress on having his arbitrary measure suddenly removed from his possession, on top of the violation and material consequences of being robbed.

I can also see why the people of Raveloe would have little means to understand Marner's strangeness as an outsider. It seems they are heavily biased toward him at first, but are willing to soften toward him as soon as he shows some vulnerability, which lets them see his humanity with compassion. This made me like the people of Raveloe much more, to see how they softened toward Marner and he toward them as he lost his treasure. I'm excited to see how the story progresses with the introduction of Eppie.

Godfrey Cass is less sympathetic, with his irresolution and poor character traits leading to the main conflicts of the plot. I hope to see him develop, though, and his relationship with Nancy seems to be the area in which he will find his way to decency. Nancy is also an interesting player in all this, as a sort of unknowing victim of Cass's double life. I'm enjoying the complexity Eliot brings to each character, with each one having a bit of moral ambiguity and no straightforward "bad guy," with the exception of Dunstan.

2) Chance is a big factor in the story, especially for Godfrey, who is willing to rely on chance to deliver him from his situation. In the case of Godfrey, he has put himself in this situation to begin with, and chance may be his way out. Silas, on the other hand, has been victim of circumstance, with the bad luck that someone would rob him on one of rare nights he left his home unlocked. From our perspective as a reader, however, we can see that he is in fact being put into his situation by the choices of a bad actor, which is what happened when Silas lost his fiancée and community to the betrayal of a good friend. Silas and Godfrey are both put into the situations by actions, but they (and the people around them) tend to view it as rather by the hand of fate. I think Eliot is exploring the ways in which we make sense of things that happen to us by attributing our circumstances and destiny to abstract concepts, as though these concepts are themselves acting intentionally. In the meantime, we see in the text that the circumstances are actually the result of calculated human decisions. Perhaps Eliot is saying that it's easier to understand things as happening through the hand of fate than to accept that people do harm to each other. Indeed, Silas is unwilling to acknowledge what his friend did to him in betraying him at Lantern Yard, and the townsfolk of Raveloe are quick to blame either an outsider or "unseen forces" for his bad luck, rather than consider that someone in their community may have done it.

3) In doing research for this discussion, I learned of a project launched a few years ago by the Women's Prize for Fiction. the "Reclaim Her Name" project, which released 25 books "originally published under male aliases, that will be republished under the female authors' real names." George Eliot is among the authors featured in this initiative. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/geo...
Publishing under a male pseudonym allowed Mary Ann Evans to escape stigma surrounding what women should write, and I do think her work would have been judged differently if it had initially come out under a feminine name. But I think what is interesting is that the "feminine" qualities of her writing and work did not go unnoticed. Her contemporary Charles Dickens is quoted as saying her writing possessed "womanly touches" such that he suspected her being a female writer. In terms of stereotypes, perhaps he was correct, because Eliot does pay attention to details and nuances that a male writer of the time may have been more likely to neglect. However, some scholars would argue that examining writers through the lens of male or female is reductive. (Prof. Grace Lavery of UC Berkley critiqued the "Reclaim Her Name" project. See: https://legacywomenwriters.org/2020/0...)
Overall, I believe Eliot's work stood out then and now because of her artistic genius, regardless of gender, but also because of what she brought to her writing as a woman of her era... I'll be thinking more on this question as we continue the discussion next time.