Silas Marner

Silas Marner is a weaver. Early on in his life, he is wrongfully accused of stealing gold from a local priest and leaves his community, having lost all faith in God. He settles down in a new village and becomes a weaver. Spending days on end at his loom, his only joy is counting his gold, which is earned from weaving. At some point, his gold is stolen, and he spends several more miserable years as a miser, until out of the blue, a small child arrives at his door in the middle of the night. The child is taken in and named Eppie. She is the illegitimate daughter of Godfrey Cass, who is a local mover and shaker, and an opium addict.

Years pass, Godfrey gets married, and his wife Nancy is unable to have children. So, naturally, Godfrey comes to claim Eppie as his own, after sixteen years, and Eppie tells him that she would rather stay with Silas than be his daughter, even though being his daughter means that she can have all of the creature comforts that she wants. Silas is overjoyed, his gold is mysteriously returned to him, and the novel predictably ends with much rejoicing.

Through the whole book, I couldn't help but feel bad for Silas, because the majority of his life was joyless. He viewed the entire world as a scary place that was out to hurt him through his dull brown eyes, and took refuge in spinning, as it was something that he understood and didn't require him to interact with the world at large. Obviously, this all changes for him when Eppie arrives, because he has to learn how to care for a toddler and ensure that she is raised correctly.

The novel reads and ends somewhat like a fairy tale, starting with the words, "In the days when spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses..." And like most fairy tales, this story has a very obvious set of morals.

I couldn't help but think about the whole idea of Silas leaving home and then eventually raising a child as his own, especially because this weekend, I went to Phillip's house for a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving. There was a relatively large group there of people who were all somehow connected to Phillip, whether they were friends of a friend of a friend that was in town visiting from Texas, or a former coworker or a college friend. Although many of the people there didn't know each other well, we all had a great time, and my stomach hurt from laughing so much. Even though we might be isolated either geographically or emotionally from the things that we are used to or the places and people that we grew up with, God provides us with our own makeshift family, whether it's in the form of a Pre-Thanksgiving Day gathering or the illegitimate child of an opium addict wandering up to our doorstep. And just like in Silas Marner, this makes us all rich in a way that cannot be reflected in a bank balance or pile of gold.

Overall, Silas Marner was a good story, but a tad on the predictable side. The morals of the story are fairly obvious and the characters were easy to identify with, even though this book was set in the 1800's. The one thing that made me sort of crazy was the dialogue, because the book is set in a backwater English countryside village in the 1800's, so the characters all speak with very choppy grammatically incorrect English for pages on end, which took me some time to get through because I was so caught up in trying to figure out what the words were, that I wasn't stringing them together to come up with what the characters were actually saying.

Moral of the Story: Love is more important than money. In the end, God will provide you with both....even if you lose faith.

About the author: George Eliot is actually a woman. Her real name was Mary Anne Evans