George Eliot’s “Law of Love”

The Law of Love

George Eliot introduces a naïve and trusting character, Silas Marner, to demonstrate through him how life, with its many strange and unexpected turns, can defeat the purposes of the most cultivated minds while endowing unsuspected gifts to humble souls.  Godfrey, who had been eager to guard his self-significance through premeditative deceit, finds at the end – much to his bewilderment – that his ingenuity wrought him sorrow while the simple-minded Silas finds gold in his lot.  Silas Marner, a man who had been violated by the urban clergies and thus was in an inward recluse in a small town of Raveloe, rebuilds his trust in mankind and finds happiness both by raising Eppie and through healthy associations with the townspeople.  George Eliot, by giving Silas Marner a happy ending, demonstrates that there is a higher moral order.  While religious laws and its fanaticism destroy an innocent man, the moral laws higher above all things, redeem and compensate the wrongly accused, not by the canon of sectarian authorities, but by small, genuine, and loving gestures of simple-minded commoners. 

Silas Malner’s broken faith in man and God shatters his ability to trust.  Though he is a man of a modern city, he is least inclined to worldly avarice and most abiding to his peculiar religious sect.  He has an almost worshipful devotion to his best friend, William, and he also has a woman dear to his heart, Sarah, who is promised to be his wife.  His unassertive nature causes him to lean heavily on these two.  However, these very two people succeed in rending the man’s every fiber of trust.  William falsely indicts him of theft.  Soon after the event, Sarah loses faith in Silas and in time disowns him to marry William.  Inevitably, such a traumatic incident makes him seriously question God’s existence.  The pain would have been more bearable if God weren’t so seemingly aloof to his desolation.  To not witness his just God standing in judgment over his offenders and exculpate accusations made against him is beyond his religious comprehension.  Not only does he lose confidence in abstract ideologies (“false ideas”) and the meaning of religion, but he also starts to doubt all emotional and subjective beings – mortal or immortal.  Thus, this event shakes his belief system in God to nothingness and shatters his trust in man to impassiveness. 

After the initial shock hits him, his battered and fragmented senses lead him to take a remedial step – a self motivated exile for him to subsist.  It commences at Raveloe, a town most foreign to Silas Marner.  The narrator states that it is an “ exile in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories” (12).  The town provides a safe haven for Silas’ wounded soul by effectively blocking his past memories of pain and by allowing his exhausted senses to rest in haziness. 

The malignant weight of the incident sedates him to an inanimate state where his irrational attachment to money overtakes any normal human associations with the neighbors.  He does not desire or expect any friendship. “He invited no comer to step across his door-sill, and he never strolled into the village to drink a pint … or to gossip” (4).  He is not about to rebuild the trust he once had towards human beings.  He rather puts his trust in some objects that are oblivious to human emotions – shillings and guineas.

Though Silas does not know at the time, Raveloe is perfectly equipped with human and communal elements to cure him from apathy.  The community holds all the keys to unlock him from the “false ideas” of men (11).  As “Silas began now to think of Raveloe life entirely in relation to Eppie,” he sees firsthand that salvation comes not by mere meditation (as in Lantern Yard) but, rather, it comes by practical means (133).  He experiences how conversing with ordinary people about ordinary things, such as child rearing, possess certain power to allay his pain and ultimately heal him.  Raveloe, the town which “for fifteen years, he had stood aloof as from a strange thing, with which he could have no communion” starts to have a different significance to him (133). 

Silas’ dedication towards Eppie stirs the heart of the townspeople to turn to Silas and allows Silas’s heart to turn to the townspeople.  “Silas Marner’s determination to keep the ‘tramp’s child’ ” softened the people’s feeling towards him (122).  His broken-heartedness from the loss of his money coupled with his need to care for the new replaced gift, Eppie, pierces an opening in his heart to be more receptive to help, guidance, and wisdom, which all come to him from plain-minded rural folks.  If Dolly Winthrop holds one of the bigger keys to unlocking his inwardness, the other members of the town hold some of the smaller keys to unlocking his solitude: each and every member, collectively playing their role in restoring and reinstating the broken man’s heart, mind and soul.  Just as life with Eppie teaches him that a man’s most cherished companion cannot be lifeless objects (guineas and shillings) but rather, needs to be a meaningful person to obtain the utmost happiness – similarly, his association with the people of Raveloe helps him see that some of life’s most important treasures are a result of the interactions between human beings.

Dolly Winthrop, who represents the best of Raveloe, holds the main key that unlocks his introversion.  Dolly, in many ways is who Silas Marner was in Lantern Yard.  She is every bit what a true Christian should be.  She is a lady who knows no sophistry or sophistication but has instead simplicity and sincerity.  Though her mind is limited, her heart is infinitely loving.  However, her trusting and pious nature is the very thing that Silas would run away from if he hadn’t needed her help.   As it becomes evident to Silas that he lacks the knowledge of rearing a two-year old child, Dolly’s ever-willing warm hands are the very first two hands that he reaches out to.  Thus, Dolly’s unfeigned acts of love win an entrance to Silas’ seclusion.

Dolly Winthrop not only generously extends temporal aid to Silas but also probes deeper in an attempt to salvage the souls of both him and Eppie.  With her kind tenaciousness, she easily triumphs in convincing Silas that he needs to attend church for Eppie’s sake, for he has a strong conviction that Eppie “must have everything that was good in Raveloe” (133).  “Silas…appeared for the first time within the church, and shared in the observances held sacred by his neighbors” (127).  For Silas, this is a paramount undertaking because for him to go back to his once abhorred religious establishment  signifies his union with the past has begun.  Attending church in Raveloe forces him to meet the reminders of his past, and such a setting provides an atmosphere where the job of extricating his psychological confusion can begin.  Dolly, acting in a timely manner, is responsible for bringing Silas to the threshold of his emotional and spiritual healing. 

Eppie’s presence in his life helps him awaken from his subconsciously begotten haziness.  As Silas learns to truly love the child as his own and as he feels the love back from her, he begins to reconnect with life in spiritually progressive ways.  In the past, the guineas and shillings had bound him to a regressive state of mind.  Now, in his attempt to provide the needs of a child who reveres outdoor, he is frequently invited to the divine nature; he takes in a slice of healing each time he takes “Eppie beyond the Stone-pits to where the flowers grew” (128).  “Eppie was an object compacted of changes and hopes that forced his thoughts onward…carried them away to the new things” (127).  Life with Eppie is active, stimulating and healing.  As his senses emerge back to a conscious level, the dark chapter of his life fades and he becomes capable of creating a new reality – a life with Eppie. 

As Eppie becomes the prime purpose of his existence, he makes sure that ultimately everything is done on his own terms.  The growth of happiness in his life makes him fearful and watchful of anything that might weaken or harm the source of it, the bond he is establishing with the child.  Unlike his younger years in Lantern Yard, he turns into a more vigilant and independent character.  He is no longer passive and abiding to rules set by others.  “But I want to do things for it myself, else it may get fond o’ somebody else, and not fond o’ me,” he says to Mrs. Winthrop.  Eppie, to him, was the only meaningful source of human love, so “he trembled at a moment’s contention with her, lest she should love him the less for it” (129).  Such apprehension leads him to politely but firmly express his disagreement with that of Ms. Winthrop’s belief about child discipline.  Being a father to Eppie propels him to develop assertiveness and self-assuredness that he lacked previously. 

As a true guardian of Eppie’s innocence, he strives to implant only the pleasing aspects of life to Eppie.  Silas Marner is a man who is well acquainted with grief but does not allow grief to be part of his new life by consciously moving its forces and sources away from Eppie’s milieu.  Any negative consequences deriving from his belief that “Eppie must be happy always” are borne by him.  “So Eppie was reared without punishment, the burden of her misdeeds being borne vicariously by father Silas” (132).  Though Silas had tasted bitterness in his life, he refuses to be bitter; his such mental attitude indirectly manifests its effect as Eppie’s childhood radiates with happiness – a blessing by her noble father. 

Silas and Eppie, together, build their home to be a heaven on earth.  Silas, with patience and diligence, implants faith and security in the abandoned child; he instills in her a concept of unconditional support by almost never disapproving of her. “She knew nothing of frowns and denials” (132).  While Eppie learns to have faith in her supportive father, in return, she teaches him trust by trusting him (though she knew he was not her birth father), and love by expressing rich affections and sharing her uncensored emotions to all matters of life.  In such a way, Eppie and Silas – both abandoned beings by their loved ones – nourish and grow together, forming one another into a creation of transcendental beings – ennobling one to an angel and another into a saint.  It is a magical transformation saved only for the purest in heart and mind.  Two beautiful minds, in unison, build their residence, Stone-pit, to be a home of trust, peace, and happiness that others pay solemn respect to – even the most prominent Squire Cass.

The author seems to imply that what Silas has desired from the very beginning is human companion, not gold.  Gold represents just a passing substitute for what he fails to obtain in Lantern Yard.  The fact that he does not feel angry about the stolen money is a strong evidence that his disenchantment has not stemmed from his lost of money but rather from his loneliness.  The incident inflicts indescribable pain to him because he had considered the money as his loyal companion that was within his grip – not as a real monetary value but as a controllable object.  He considers the absence of money as if it represents a missing member of his household.  “The loom was there, and the weaving…but the bright treasure…was gone: the evening had no phantasm of delight to still the poor soul’s craving.”  “And all the evening, as he sat in his loneliness…moaned very low” (76). 

Furthermore, Silas’ “open door” symbolizes his receptiveness and his desire to have a companion.  His desperate hope that his lost companion, the gold, may return forms a strange habit in him – “a habit of opening his door and looking out from time to time” (110).  It is a habit that “can hardly be understood except by those who have undergone a bewildering separation from a supremely loved object” (111).  In essence, he is knocking on the doors of heaven for a blessing.  That is why he is quick to realize that the child he finds is for him to keep.  Likewise, he is quick to discern that the money may not come back since it has turned into a child.  The narrator reveals his thoughts to this miraculous event: he “trembled with an emotion mysterious to himself…he could only have said that the child was come instead of the gold – that the gold had turned into the child” (124).  Thus Silas eagerly and thankfully welcomes his gift with an open arms.

He receives his gift (Eppie) because he is worthy.  Unlike Godfrey, Silas is not preoccupied with planning every step of his life; he only reacts to it.  His is humble but not weak in character.  Though, he is simply reacting to the anguish and loneliness he feels due to the stolen money, contrary to Godfrey, he makes life’s most important decision decisively.  In such a manner, Silas unconsciously commits himself to a special blessing.  “She’ll be my little un,” said Marner, “She’ll be nobody else’s” (125).  He willingly and ardently has claimed a child who people thought to be an orphan.  In effect, he has replaced the second attack of misery with a redemptive angel  “who came and took men by the hand” because Silas has committed himself to the responsibility and sacrifice of rearing an angel (133). 

Squire Godfrey symbolically loses his gold by not claiming Eppie to be his child. He is depicted as a person who is guilty of deceit in order to protect his self-significance.  Godfrey’s dignity decreases as he fluctuates cowardly in an indecisive manner before his ordeal.  His premeditative mind that risks life’s highest priorities leads him to abandon his paternal duty.  As a result, Godfrey’s prominence shrinks as he and his wife are unable to produce offspring to continue their legacy.  The couple’s barrenness metaphorically suggests that there is a moral law that governs and punishes the deceitful.  Godfrey realizes his sin and his due punishment when he says, “I wanted to pass for childless once, Nancy – I shall pass for childless now against my wish”(174).  Godfrey’s punishment doesn’t end at this.  His worst punishment is the fact that now he has to live with the pain knowing that not only his daughter denies him but detests him.    

Eppie’s ultimate choice of Silas as her father instead of Godfrey illustrates George Eliot’s belief that not only moral laws dictate a person’s fate, but also suggests that common folks are more akin to nobility and thus happier.  Eppie reveals a strong conviction that the life she is accustomed to is superior over the new life that Godfrey offers, because it is more in harmony with nature and humanity.  As it becomes clear that Silas has won a daughter over Godfrey by successfully building and protecting his relationship with Eppie with love, his plainness in character reshapes into an extraordinary figure.  Silas’s humble rank exalts to a majestic honor as he earns the respect of the townspeople by showing courage, commitment, and persistence when he had been confronted with life’s most severe ironies and challenges.  Silas has endured the aftermath of loving – even betrayal.  However, the experience does not deter him from choosing “love” over anything else in life – Eppie.  In the end, the supreme order rewards his demeanor according to “law of love”; that is, to obtain love’s blessings, one must do love’s bidding.