FINAL CONCLUSION
'Silas Marner' explores the origins of folk myth in a rural community at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As a natural historial of religion, George Eliot is seeking to refine her ideas in a world she is most familiar with and where myth-making can be seen at its most primitive. There are several features of life in Raveloe that bring out this anthropological side of the novel. First, the community is remote in time annd space, providing the narrator with vestiges and remnants of a distant past to be deciphered: ´Such strange lingering echoes of the old demond-worship might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent listener among the grey-haired peasantry´(p. 6). And beyond this echoes, there are vestiges of an even more remote, mythical past to which the novel reaches out: `In teh early ages of the world, we know, it was believed that each territory was inhabited and ruled by its own divinities´ (p. 16). Though superseded, such myths are an internal part of the genetic, evolutionary history trough which we come to understand ourselves. ´The gods of the hearth exist for us still; and let all new faith be tolerant of that fetishism, lest it bruise its own roots´(p. 142).
Secondly, the novel creates a world full of mysterious gaps and uncertainties. Beyond Raveloe is an inexplicable region from which strangers manifest themselves like apparitions, or into which people disappear without explanation. Some things come (a child), others go (the gold). A dominant image is that of a lighted candle or lantern surrounded by encroaching darkness. Within the community, too, there are social gaps between the landed parishioners and their tenants that are accepted as unbridgeable and eternal,`The Raveloe imagination having never ventured back to that to that fearful blank when there were no Osgoods´ (p. 23). And this particular mistery is sharpened by a new developement in George´s Eliot fiction, the double pot of Silas and Godfrey Cass, which reflect this social divisions and in which the interconections are minimal and mysterious. A further gap is the narrative hiatus of sixteen years between the two parts of the novel, whose significance becomes full apparent only in the climating debate.
To underline the indeterminacies of this fictional world even further, George Eliot endows the central character with catalepsy, `the chasm in his consciousness´ (p. 110), which baffles both the brethren of Lantern Yard and the rustics. But the challenge of the novel is to depict a world unaccountable at many levels so that the crucial strategies by which people make sense of their lives might be explored in the most fundamental way. This is what separates the major characters, Silas and Godfrey, from the community. Whereas Raveloe relies on its shared beliefs, that mixture of superstition and religion which finds expression in its publics rituals, the protagonists experience a series of sudden dislocations that make them revise repeatedly their ways of looking at life. The history belongs to the developing cause and effect of fictional narrative; the metamorphosis to legendary story. 'Silas Marner' combines them so that they illuminate each other.
The prisoner in solitary imprisonment, Silas Marner, the author and the reader, are all brought together in the inescapable need to create meaning and purpose in a vacuum. And one of the best places to examine the relationship between the need and its expression is in those primitive communities untouched by critical self-consciousness. The novelist enters this untaugh state of mind, and then, through the disrupted careers of the protagonists, separates form and feeling, before finally reuniting them in order to examine and redefine their relationship.
The final decision, the veredict in the trial, however, is left to Eppie, the living evidence of that sixteen-year time-gap in the novel, and the confirmation of one man´s blessing and the other´s nemesis. The princess in exile chooses to stay with his foster-father by reaffirming, in suitable biblical rhythms, the covenant Silas had made in adopting her. `And he´s took care of me and loved me from the first, and I´ll cleave to him as long as he lives, and nobody shall ever come between him and me´ (p. 172). The domestic reality out of which this state comes is vividly dramatized, as Silas and Eppie, always conscious of each other, touch and hold hands in their cottage. It is a complex and moving scene, which recuperates the whole of the double narrative: two views of the world, painfullyevolved, confronting each other.
In my opinion, Silas thinks that Eppie´s hair is the gold that had been stolen to him. From the moment that he finds the child, he feels like having recovered his own gold. So i think that he considers Eppie as the treasure that he had lost before, and somehow he forgets his gold till he finds it again. Finally, I think he would have been happy although he wouldn´t have found the gold because Eppie was his inspiration and she kept him alive. So it is very clear that the ending makes everybody happy but Nancy and Godfrey, who have lost a child due to the thoughts of the first one.
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Creada: 08/10/2000 Última Actualización: 28/10/2000