Home Quotes - Silas Marner by George Eliot | Silas Marner by George Eliot - English, Class 12 PDF Download

The white-washed walls; the little pews where well-known figures entered with a subdued rustling, and where first one well-known voice and then another, pitched in a peculiar key of petition, uttered phrases at once occult and familiar, like the amulet worn on the heart; the pulpit where the minister delivered unquestioned doctrine, and swayed to and fro, and handled the book in a long-accustomed manner; the very pauses between the couplets of the hymn, as it was given out, and the recurrent swell of voices in song: these things had been the channel of divine influences to Marner—they were the fostering home of his religious emotions—they were Christianity and God's kingdom upon earth. (1.2.1)

Silas loves his church because it's full of familiar people and voices. It's just like home to him, if home were a fire-and-brimstone Calvinist church. In any case, what this passage suggests is that religion is supported by the structure of home. Without home, religious faith collapses.

The fading grey light fell dimly on the walls decorated with guns, whips, and foxes' brushes, on coats and hats flung on the chairs, on tankards sending forth a scent of flat ale, and on a half-choked fire, with pipes propped up in the chimney-corners: signs of a domestic life destitute of any hallowing charm (1.3.4)

This first view of the Red House hints at what home looks like without women: it's all guns, beer, and disorder. The Red House doesn't need "hallowing charm"; it needs a woman's touch.

The disinherited son of a small squire, equally disinclined to dig and to beg, was almost as helpless as an uprooted tree, which, by the favour of earth and sky, has grown to a handsome bulk on the spot where it first shot upward. (1.3.25)

Godfrey doesn't want to tell his father about his secret marriage, because he's afraid of being disinherited. This metaphor, comparing a disinherited son to an uprooted tree, emphasizes the importance of place and home. Godfrey can't just pick up and move. He's tied to his father's land—and, let's be honest, his father's pocketbook.

Godfrey's was an essentially domestic nature, bred up in a home where the hearth had no smiles, and where the daily habits were not chastised by the presence of household order; his easy disposition made him fall in unresistingly with the family courses, but the need of some tender permanent affection, the longing for some influence that would make the good he preferred easy to pursue, caused the neatness, purity, and liberal orderliness of the Lammeter household. (1.4.38)

A house isn't a home without a woman at the hearth. "Neatness, purity, and liberal orderliness" are Nancy's characteristic. They're also the characteristics of Dolly Winthrop, Eppie, and, to some extent, Silas himself—but they're the exact opposite of Dunstan's slovenly drunkenness. Girls rule, boys drool.

I tell Nancy, it's a folly no woman need be guilty of, if she's got a good father and a good home: let her leave it to them as have got no fortin, and can't help themselves. (1.11.13)

Priscilla Lammeter is a coarser version of her sister Nancy, but unlike Nancy, she's perfectly content to tend to her father and her dairy. As men need women to make a home, women also seem to need men: without her man, Molly, Godfrey's first wife, ends up dead under a bush. But lucky Priscilla doesn't need to marry because she's already got a man (her father) to make a home for.

[…] as some man who has a precious plant to which he would give a nurturing home in a new soil, thinks of the rain, and the sunshine, and all influences, in relation to his nursling, and asks industriously for all knowledge that will help him to satisfy the wants of the searching roots, or to guard leaf and bud from invading harm. (1.14.49)

To up the variety of comparing people to insects, Eliot draws a lot of comparisons between plants and people. Uprooting destroys both, and here, Silas becomes the best sort of gardener as he seeks out all the information he can gain to make a good home for his little transplant. When Eppie grows up, she becomes a gardener too. Yep, there's definitely something going on with plants and gardens.

The presence of this happy animal life was not the only change which had come over the interior of the stone cottage. There was no bed now in the living-room, and the small space was well filled with decent furniture, all bright and clean enough to satisfy Dolly Winthrop's eye. (2.16.26)

If something is "bright and clean," you know a woman can't be far away. And look, there's Eppie! Eppie has brought new life to Silas's heart and also to his home. Although he never married, Eppie can act like a wife in making his house beautiful and inviting. Creepy father-daughter relationships? Totally a thing in Victorian literature.

A great change has come over the dark wainscoted parlour since we saw it in Godfrey's bachelor days, and under the wifeless reign of the old Squire. Now all is polish, on which no yesterday's dust is ever allowed to rest, from the yard's width of oaken boards round the carpet, to the old Squire's gun and whips and walking-sticks, ranged on the stag's antlers above the mantelpiece. (2.16.2)

Silas's cottage isn't the only one that's improved since we first met it. The Red House is looking pretty spruce these days, thanks to Nancy. The Squire's tools of manhood—whips, gun, stick—are up on the mantel being decorative, while Nancy's industriousness makes the house shine.

"And I don't want to be a lady—thank you all the same" (here Eppie dropped another curtsy). "I couldn't give up the folks I've been used to." (2.19.29)

Home is where the heart is. Given the opportunity to live an awesome life—well, awesome if all you care about is money—Eppie refuses. She can't bear to leave home, and, for her, home means living in close proximity to the people she knows and loves. A young plant can be moved, but a grown one has roots that go too deep.

Eppie had a larger garden than she had ever expected there now; and in other ways there had been alterations at the expense of Mr Cass, the landlord, to suit Silas's larger family. For he and Eppie had declared that they would rather stay at the Stone-pits than go to any new home. The garden was fenced with stones on two sides, but in front there was an open fence, through which the flowers shone with answering gladness, as the four united people came within sight of them.

"O father," said Eppie, "what a pretty home ours is! I think nobody could be happier than we are." (2.21.16-17)

Silas Marner ends with an ode to home. But "prettiness" is a weird adjective—for Eppie, a "pretty" home and a "happy" home seem to be one and the same. Can an ugly house still be a home? Or, here's a thought: is it pretty because she loves it and the people in it?