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BEARING WITNESS IN SILAS MARNER: GEORGE ELIOT'S EXPERIMENT IN SYMPATHY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2013

Kristen A. Pond
Kristen A. Pond*
Affiliation:
Baylor University
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Extract

There is a curious narrative moment near the middle of George Eliot's novel Silas Marner. Marner, on discovering the theft of his gold, runs to the Rainbow Inn, the village's popular gathering place, intending to broadcast the theft and demand justice. This is a climatic moment in the plot; as readers we turn the page with mounting anticipation: how will the villagers react to the strange weaver's first intrusion into this most sacred of spaces in Raveloe? The reader must immediately be disappointed, then, on turning the page and coming to chapter six. We do go inside the Rainbow Inn but leave Marner on the other side of the yet-unopened door; instead of an exciting confrontation between Marner and the villagers, we are made to listen to a meandering exchange of retold stories by a cast of unimportant characters. This narrative interruption within the novel echoes the much larger interruptions that surround the production and reception of this text. Silas Marner most literally interrupted Eliot's work on Romola. She says in her journal that the idea “thrust itself between me and the other book I was meditating” (Journals 87). The novel also disrupts most critical consensus about Eliot as a realist writer. No one seems quite sure what to do with this half fable, half realist work alongside such masterpieces as Middlemarch. In addition, the character of Marner interrupts what we have come to expect from Eliot's characters; whether an earlier hero like Adam Bede or a later heroine like Gwendolen Harleth, her characters have at least some endearing qualities despite, or maybe because of, their flaws. When one turns to Silas Marner, however, a reader can be hard pressed to find anything appealing about the peculiar weaver.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , December 2013 , pp. 691 - 709
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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