Silas Marner:
Suffering, Love, and Redemption
One of the most prevalent themes in human existence is the terrible toll that suffering can wreak on the manner of one's existence. Indeed, a good, happy, and honest person can quickly, though the course of adverse life events, become a shallow, negative, lurking shell of what he or she once was. Further, although society generally places little weight on the cause of one's "fall" into despair, it is the experience of suffering that divides true evil from a mere "faltering" from the path of right. This reality is exactly what George Elliot evokes in her novel, Silas Marner -- the horrible toll that suffering can exact on the individual and his personality -- as well as the power of the positive experiences of kindness and love to reverse those effects and ultimately lead to redemption.
When the reader first encounters the character Silas Marner, one notes the sad history of the man. We see that Silas is not much more than a hermit, working endlessly in a village not his own, exiled as a result of false accusations in his past, and wounded by the loss of his love to his false friend, William Dane (also his accuser). Thus, disheartened by life, as well as having lost faith in the justice of God and Man, he turns to the meager existence of work and wealth alone as the bedrock of his life. In fact, one sees from the tremendous lack of joy he experiences even from work as an indication of his profound disenchantment with all aspects of human existence. As Elliot writes, 'Formerly his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken."
Thus, given the tremendous low that the reader recognizes in Silas's soul, one cannot help but cringe at the next events when Dunstan takes the one thing Silas has left in the world -- his fortune. Interestingly, here the reader has a chance, in the character of Dunstan, to see real evil, or the absence of soul in Dunstan, as a contrast to Silas' mere emptiness as a result of his suffering. In other words, the reader can compare the two and...
Marner on the other hand, reveals that despite his social position, he is in fact a very noble individual; he chose to adopt and raise Eppie and to treat her with both love and care. His actions reveal him to be a moral and upright individual despite his social status. Elliot goes on to show that social order not only dictates the actions of individuals but it dictates morality and
Juliet knows there is no hope of reasoning with her father. Capulet's treatment of his daughter is symptomatic of his general lack of respect for women -- he tells the nurse to "Utter your gravity o'er a gossip's bowl" and will not listen to his wife when she tells him he is too 'hot' in his reproaches of his daughter (III.5). His attitude is why Juliet lies to him
One cannot build the right sort of house -- the houses are not really adequate, "Blinds, shutter, curtains, awnings, were all closed and drawn to keep out the star. Grant it but a chink or keyhole, and it shot in like a white-hot arrow." The stare here is the metonymic device -- we assume it is stranger, the outside vs. The inside, but for some reason, it is also
From these examples there is a varied sense of the realism of Eliot in both her prose and her poems. The realism of Eliot demonstrates a reflection of the era. The naturalist and realism movements were ingrained in the Victorian 19th century and yet the descriptive nature of Eliot's works make them in many ways timeless. The characters are enveloped with the reader into the surroundings of events of human
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