ESSAY
When George Eliot embraced romanticism, magic happened
The true Happily Ever After written by the Queen of Realism
George Eliot was a woman plagued by her own demons.
Having lost both her Methodist faith as well as the esteem of her beloved brother due to her love for a married man, a story she tells most hauntingly in The Mill on the Floss, her fiction was characterized by a ‘darkening gloom’ which found its epitome in her avowed masterpiece, Middlemarch, an intense religious meditation without a concrete object. Critics have selectively characterized her psychologically dense prose as sombre and pedantic, paving the way for the pastoral melancholy we have come to associate with Hardy’s Wessex.
There is no sparkling Austenian wit to be detected-instead, we are invited to probe societal conscience and the individual mind as well as its struggle within the confines of complex social mores. The poignant realism of her stories is illustrated by richly realized worlds in which single minutiae have been fleshed out, allowing for a sometimes soul-searing identification with the struggles the characters face, if not necessarily the protagonists themselves.
It is said that upon reading her work, the man she loved remarked that her books were rather depressing-Eliot is said to have broken down and to have explained that ‘she must take life as she finds it’.
More is the wonder that she wrote a novella contradicting that self-same notion.
Silas Marner may be the tale of an isolated weaver who lives as an outcast in a little village called Raveloe but it is also the life affirming story of how the self-same miser overcomes his despair after having his life-savings stolen from under his nose by finding and raising an orphan girl. It’s a classic tale of spiritual redemption and was most popularly realised as a feel good trope by Johanna Spyri in her childhood classic ‘Heidi’, where a similarly misanthropic old grandfather slowly opens up his heart after living with a little girl that comes to represent the late sunshine of his heretofore benighted life.
This was Eliot’s one and only attempt to ‘imagine a universe of law that tended, in spite of all human experience, toward human goodness’. By tamping down on her vein of natural pessimism, she was able to create a story with a gentle and benevolent feeling to it despite its overarching themes of isolation, betrayal and moral cowardice.
The somewhat bewitching atmosphere that speaks of mysticism within the novel is evocative of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a work that Eliot read and admired greatly. Hawthorne, who grew up in Salem, a place now synonymous with the witch trials, was a man well accustomed to a solitary life from childhood onwards, with a proclivity for taking midnight walks on his own. His gift lay in grounding his plot in everyday mire but shrouding it in the ‘ghostlike shadows of the past’-in The Scarlet Letter, the dark forest and the stark gallows are transfigured into a scenery of preternatural doom, which serve as a fitting stage for his story about the impact of an adulterous love on the parties involved and the inescapable force of spiritual guilt. Silas Marner was Eliot’s very own attempt to wed her realistic style to the selfsame mystical ambiance that made Hawthorne’s story appear like a literary fever dream.
Jonathan Quick in his paper ‘Silas Marner as Romance: The Example of Hawthorne’ argues that she achieved this effect by only roughly sketching out the world she introduces us to, a village idyll that remains as picturesque and nondescript as Belle’s home town. Here, he says ‘the art of the romance’ effectively substitutes the ‘rigorous logic of reality’, allowing mystery to seep into reality. For once, Eliot is not preoccupied with the reality of social injustice, but, through this method, sheds light on the inner mind of her characters and their respective moral struggles.
As such, we do not learn more about the particulars of the weavers long past youth in his strict Calvinist community nor do vestiges of his past blend into the present-the story is preoccupied with a series of co-incidences, ranging from the removal of Silas Marner to Raveloe, the stealing of his guineas and the finding of a child, an occasion that serves to lighten the man’s spiritual darkness.
It is important to mention that both The Scarlet Letter and Silas Marner are profound meditations on the loss of God. Both Hester Prynne, the adulteress and Silas Marner, the scorned miser, have been abandoned by their respective religious communities and are resigned to their exile from society. Both subsist in states of inner darkness-in Christian literature, this state of being has been termed ‘dark night of the soul’. Taken from the writings of St.John of the Cross, the term refers to a feeling of spiritual abandonment by God, a point at which he cannot be discerned by the relevant party-it echoes Christ’s despairing cry on the cross, moments before his death: ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’
‘Thou must gather thine own sunshine, I have none to give thee!’ (Hester)
“The little light he possessed spread its beams so narrowly, that frustrated belief was a curtain broad enough to create for him the blackness of night” (Silas)
Living in the midst of the era of scientific discovery and being immersed in rationalist philosophy, Eliot herself had lost her Methodist faith.Paradoxically, her novels deal with the quest for the spiritual-she herself admitted to admiring the positive social change occasioned by religion yet found a personal faith untenable. This is probably her most famous quote on the subject:
“Three words have often been used as the trumpet-call of men — the words God, Immortality, Duty — pronounced with terrible earnestness. How inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable was the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.”
The ethical idealism of faith was something she could get behind, however.
At the age of 12, she had undertaken to teach a Sunday school class and not much later got involved in clothing societies and relief work organisations.
Inspired by the philosophy of Feuerbach, who maintained that the idea of God was merely a projection of human consciousness, Eliot dreamed of instating a religion of humanity, focused ‘on a fellowship of man that will serve to elevate him both socially and morally’, convinced that God ‘was nothing more than the ideal of a goodness entirely human’.
Silas Marner is a perfect example for the shifting religious consciousness Eliot embodied-it is an allegory of historical progression from religious superstition in a cloistered community to modern-day materialism, represented by the hoard of gold, to the in-statement of the Religion of Humanity, represented by Silas and his daughter’s relationship as communion.
Eliot manages both to illustrate the nature of man’s inhumanity to man as well as his tenuous grasp on joy while shifting the tone with a rare vein of innocent humour, exemplified by the blunders Silas makes in raising a child for the first time and the wide-eyed innocence of his new friend, Dolly Winthrop, who helps him raise his daughter.It is a story shock full of the elements of betrayal and abject despair but suffused with the spirit of a fairy tale that allows the reader to enjoy the ultimately redemptive power of a shared humanity.
Characters are not resigned to their fate, for once, as Dorothea is- the modern day Teresa of Avila in Middlemarch, wins personal happiness but not the public recognition she sought her whole life.Silas himself, though ill-used by society and acknowledging ‘that there are dealings in this world’ gets to expunge his past in a world, where, for once, the arc does bend towards moral justice. It is a story written contrary to the authors own experience of life and was avowedly her favourite tale-a complex reflection on chance and providence that stands alone in her work for its redemptive power and spiritual freshness.
At a time when literature on the condition of man and his gradual alienation from society abounds, Silas Marner as a celebration of the re-invigorating force of love appears contemporary enough to warrant a closer reading of the ‘minor masterpiece’.
Sources
Kettle, A. (1951) An Introduction to the English Novel — Volume One: Defoe to George Eliot. New York: Andesite Press
Long, W.J. (2014) English Literature:Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World. New York: Ginn and Co.NY
Milner, I. (1966) Structure and Quality in Silas Marner. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 6, 717–29
Paris, B.J. (1962) George Eliot’s Religion of Humanity. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 29, 418–33
Svaglic, M.J. (1954) Religion in the Novels of George Eliot. University of Illinois Press, 53, 145–159
Quick, J.R (1974) Silas Marner as Romance: The Example of Hawthorne. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 29, 287–98