Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory - Analysis, Silas Marner by George Eliot | Silas Marner by George Eliot - English, Class 12 PDF Download

Spiders and Webs

It seems Raveloe is out of fly swatters, since the village is infested with bugs. In Silas Marner, insects, particularly spiders, appear all the time. Okay, not literal insects, but metaphorical ones.

Silas, the narrator says, "seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection" (1.2.3); he sits at his loom with "his eyes bent close down on the slow growth of sameness in the brownish web" (1.2.10); Eppie calls him away from "the repetition of his web" (1.14.33). Spiders represent all that is inhuman about work. When work is done without thought or love, it's mechanical, and mechanical work is insect labor.

Spiders also let Eliot take a jab at industrialization. By the 1860s, when Eliot wrote Silas Marner, almost all weaving and spinning was done by machine. The kind of work that people do at machines is what Karl Marx in 1844 called "alienated" or "estranged" labor—work that makes people unable to control their own destinies.

Farmers, for example, work for themselves (mostly). Their labor directly produces the food that sustains them. Artisans produce things. They make chairs, clothes, candles, wheels, one-of-a-kind products that they make from start to finish. But someone working at a machine only makes part of something, or makes a product in which he or she has no investment. To Eliot, that kind of work is insect-labor. It's dehumanizing.

The Loom

Silas is an artisan. Rather than a farmer like the villagers or a hunched-over factory worker, he works with his own loom in his own house. He's what English historian E.P. Thompson calls a "customer-weaver." By the end of the 18th century, customer-weavers were practically irrelevant, being replaced first by weavers working all together in a type of factory, as Silas used to; and then, just a few decades later, by real factories full of power-looms.

So the loom partly signals how precise Eliot was being in setting her novel at the beginning of the 19th century. Sure, the sound of the loom might have been strange to Raveloe—but it's a sound that almost no one in 1861 would have recognized, either.

The loom also represents the difference between monotony and rhythm. Eliot spends a lot of time talking about the rhythmic nature of Raveloe life, focusing in particular on the ritual of Christmas and New Year's. The yearly ball at the Red House, for example, "renew[s] the charter of Raveloe" through the ritual of allowing the villagers to sit in the doorway and watch the parishioners dance (1.11.61). These are ceremonies that happen every year. They follow, at least to some degree, the rhythm of the agricultural seasons. Eliot refers to this rhythm as the natural cheerful trotting of the winnowing machine, or the simpler rhythm of the flail" (1.1.2) and contrasts it to the "mysterious action of the loom" (1.1.2).

What's so mysterious about Silas's loom? It's not cyclical; it's just repetitive. He works at it "unremittingly" (1.2.3); "his ear filled with its monotony" (1.2.10); "he wrought in it without ceasing" (1.5.3). The ceaseless noise that you can hear at the beginning of this BBC version represents the unchanging rhythm of his life. Back and forth, back and forth in the same path over and over: like Silas's circuit from loom to gold to bed, the sound of the loom is inhuman and frightening because it never changes.

Bread

Lardy-cake—okay, so it's not technically bread—is a traditional (and delicious-sounding) concoction of animal fat, flour, sugar, and spices. So basically it's like a donut.

Dolly Winthrop brings Silas some as a sympathy gift after his money is stolen, and there's something special about this cake: it's covered in mysterious letters. As Dolly says, "there's nobody, not Mr Macey himself, rightly knows what they mean; but they've a good meaning for they're the same as is on the pulpit-cloth at church." (1.10.25). Silas clears things up: the letters are "I.H.S.," although he doesn't know that they stand for the first three letters of Jesus' name in Greek (Ἰησοῦς).

The inscription of Jesus' name on the bread elevates the humble lardy-cake from delicious snack into something like Communion. In the Christian ritual of Communion, a congregation—or even just a few people—shares bread and wine as a memorial of the Last Supper, the meal that Jesus and his disciples shared just before the Crucifixion. In some traditions, the bread and wine are literally transformed into the body and blood of Christ; in others, they serve as a memorial of the Crucifixion and a symbol of the shared community of Christians.

In any case, Dolly offers the lardy-cake in a kind of Communion, attempting to bring Silas into the communal life of the village. Only Silas doesn't eat the bread. He does something that might even be better: he breaks off a piece and offers it to Aaron. This simple act transforms the lardy-cake into a symbol of religion more powerful, maybe, than the actual ritual of Christmas, which Eliot only describes as being held among "abundant dark-green boughs" and including the long Athanasian Creed. The villagers like the ceremony, but it hardly touches them. They leave unchanged, heading back "to eat, drink, and be merry" (1.10.56).

Gold

Silas runs to The Rainbow after he discovers that his pot of gold has been stolen.

Yes, Eliot goes there.

To give her some credit, it's a little more complicated than that. For Silas, gold at first symbolizes the achievement of earthly goals. It literally is a symbol to him rather than an end in itself: "money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good" (1.2.5). This is kind of an interesting comment on symbols, in fact, since Eliot seems to be exploring what it means when we treat things as symbols rather than as, well, things.

Because eventually gold stops being a symbol for Silas, when it magically transmutes into a real, living girl. As Silas reaches forward to take what he thinks is his lost gold, "instead of the hard coin with the familiar resisting outline, his fingers encountered soft warm curls" (1.12.8). That's when gold taken on more of a symbolic meaning in the novel, as Eppie comes to symbolize Silas's gradual absorption into common life.

This is a little confusing, but, if we're right, it's pretty cool: When gold is a symbol to Silas, it doesn't symbolize much of anything for the novel. But when it stops being a symbol for Silas by becoming Eppie, it starts to be a symbol for the novel, and Eppie (although supposedly a real live human) is more of a symbol than the actual gold. Weird, right? Eliot seems to be working through something about the very nature of literary symbolism and how characters in novels are both symbols and people.

The Hearth

When little Eppie toddles up to Silas's hearth, you know that something important is about to happen. The hearth (the area in front of a fireplace) is central to Eliot's vision of idyllic country life. Eliot explains how Raveloe is different from Lantern-Yard by describing it as a place "where men supped heavily and slept in the light of the evening hearth" (1.2.1). The hearth represents security, comfort, warmth, and abundance—and not just of food. Hearths ought to be full of children (no wonder deaths by fire were so common before the 20th century), and so when Eppie settles down uninvited on Silas's, good things are about to start happening.

In contrast, Godfrey's hearth—like his sense of responsibility—is cold and empty. He imagines himself "with all his happiness centred on his own hearth, while Nancy would smile on him as he played with the children" (1.15.3), but by letting Eppie be raised on someone else's hearth, he pretty much ensures that he'll never have children of his own.

Only it doesn't seem to be entirely his fault. He's brought up "where the hearth had no smiles" (1.3.38), because his mother is dead and his dad is a jerk. Without that smiling hearth at the center of his childhood, it's a miracle that Godfrey doesn't end up dead at the side of the road, or, as in Dunstan's case, at the bottom of a quarry. Only marrying Nancy—who brings order and peace to his hearth—saves him.

The hearth also seems to be connected to Raveloe's weirdly pagan version of Christianity. Silas is so attached to his hearth that, like a survivalist preparing for the end of the world, he insists on continuing to cook on it even after Godfrey offers to buy him a modern oven and grate. "The gods of the hearth exist for us still" (2.16.30), the narrator says. In Raveloe, the humble villagers might as well be Romans worshiping household gods rather than modern, free-thinking Christians (like Eliot herself, who actually lost her faith after spending time studying the life of Jesus). Home, Eliot suggests, is where the hearth is—but maybe that hearth is something that only exists in the idyllic world of the past. That's kind of a depressing way to think about home.

Allegory

Silas's rebirth doesn't take place on Christmas.

See, that's actually important. The main story of Silas's redemption—betrayal, the arrival of a child, and then the reintegration into the community—is pretty much exactly the story of Christian fall and salvation. The soul is cast out of God's company because of sin and then is brought back through Jesus, who is born as a human on Christmas. In that sense, Silas's story is a clear allegory of salvation.

But it doesn't take place on Christmas. It takes place just after Christmas, or, as the narrator says, "about the Christmas of that fifteenth year" after Silas comes to Raveloe (1.2.11). That's a clue telling us to be careful about dismissing Silas Marner as pure allegory. Allegory is only part of the story. Godfrey and Nancy inhabit a completely different type of novel—one where symbols can't be broken down so neatly, and one where the right moral decision isn't so easy to make.

In fact, you might say that Eliot is thinking about the very nature of allegory. How satisfying are allegorical stories? Is it possible to write a complex, sophisticated novel based on an allegorical story? What happens when you try to make an allegory story seem real? (Hint: you get something a lot like Godfrey's narrative arc.)