by George Eliot, 1861
While this story has some of the wit and satire that I enjoy in George Eliot, it’s mostly so moralistic and sentimental that I found it tiresome to read.
Eliot’s description of village life initially sets things on a promising track. She sees it as devoid of any knowledge beyond the village or any imagination to think further. And her later description of life among the gentry, especially at the squire’s ball, show the limits of their self-satisfaction and pettiness. Eliot lampoons them with her descriptions of their lives and her comments on them.
However, her descriptions of characters of a lower social status show them as stereotypes of good honest folk with humorous foibles. They may tell endless pointless stories in the pub in their funny dialect, but they support each other and save each other from harm. And when the young ones who are clearly destined for each other declare their love, everyone celebrates.
Only Silas is drawn with any depth. His mates in the city robbed him and stole his girlfriend, so he retreats to the village where he builds a small fortune in gold to replace the love that is missing in his life. When he loses the gold and finds an orphan child to care for, his feeling is restored and he re-enters the world of warm human relations. While his lost gold was a secret and solitary pleasure, raising orphan Eppie brings him into the community and restores his peace of mind. This is schematic and superficial, but has at least a little psychology behind it.
The other character who has a surprising development is Nancy, a daughter of the gentry who marries the decent young landowner, Godfrey. While their intended marriage was threatened by a secret complication in Godfrey’s life, they eventually overcome the obstacle, although they have no children of their own. Nancy is portrayed as a superficial, if good-hearted, young woman with conventional views, but when they talk about adopting the orphan Eppie, she shows a surprisingly thoughtful and open response. This seems to reflect Eliot’s own very unconventional life as a woman in nineteenth-century England.
It’s hard to believe that high schools used to assign this novel as classic English literature when surely any reader beyond the age of 12 would be able to say that they could find more depth of character on a television sitcom. After the pleasure of reading Middlemarch, with its wit, complex characters, social and political complication, Silas Marner is a disappointment.
