Community, Religion and Chance: A Thematic Reading of George Eliot's Silas Marner

Abstract

This dissertation aims at analysing George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861), examining its main themes and how they are addressed in the two spatial settings of the novel, namely the urban Lantern Yard and the rural Raveloe. The eponymous protagonist’s life is divided between these two districts, which have two completely opposite views of life, both of which strongly influence Silas’s existence. There will be an introductory chapter discussing two of the most debated critical issues concerning Silas Marner, that is to say its literary genre, which can be described as hybrid, and its “dualistic” structure. The second chapter, instead, will introduce the two communities, explaining their characteristics and those attributes which, instead, sanction the exclusion and alienation from them. The chapter will also deal with Silas’s experiences of inclusion and alienation in both places and with Silas’s conception of work as a mean of alienating himself. Chapter three will analyse the diametrically opposite religious views of both communities and the impact both have not only on the life of each community, but also on Silas and on his growth. The last chapter will consider the role of chance within the novel and how each of the main character interpret the events which befall them. The final part of the dissertation will deal with history, either for what concerns the way in which characters consider their past, but also for what concerns the limited human understanding of present events.