As a result of betrayal, Silas Marner of George Eliot's so-titled novel becomes a man in the body without incurring any of the duties normally associated with nineteenth-century working-class adults . Eliot creates these unusual circumstances by framing our titular hero so that it appears to his companions that he has stolen money. In doing so, he effectively rejects the innocent Marner from his community and causes him to lose his fiancée. At this crucial moment in Marner's life, just as he is about to fully assume the role of man, on whom his neighbors, future wife and probable children depend as such, he is excised and does not successfully complete the transformation. As a result, he moves to a new place, Raveloe, with the same carefree lack of responsibility as a boy, who is clearly unable to behave like the man he seems he should be. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay By denying Marner the possibility of a traditional family from the beginning, Eliot immediately brings forward the issue of family values. A question he answers throughout his novel. Jeff Nunokawa, in his essay The Miser's Two Bodies: Silas Marner and the Sexual Possibilities of the Commodity, states that Eliot "simply" shows "support for family values" (Nunokawa 273), and that she "encourages" them through her narration (Nunokawa 290). As evidence, he cites quotes from the text that depict, as he puts it, “men [living] without women… in an arid region” (Nunokawa 273). Cleverly, he references Eliot's line: "The maiden was lost... and then what was left to them?" (Nunokawa 273). Furthermore, Nunokawa goes on to label the novel's moral implications as those of a "straightforward dichotomy," saying that Eliot delivers to his reader "the evil of the gold" in direct contrast to "the goodness of the little girl [Eppie]" (Nunokawa 274) . I don't disagree with Nunokawa's easily supported primary assertion that men who lack women in Silas Marner are not happy. However, I don't think Silas Marner's advocacy of family values ​​is as simple as Nunokawa makes it seem. Indeed, Eliot's position regarding the family unit is threefold. Nunokawa's reduction of Silas Marner to a "dichotomy" ignores the middle ground that Eliot ultimately recommends as the key to a life with a happy ending. To prove this, I must first show that none of Silas Marner's families (with the exception of Silas's) are totally happy. Agreeing with Nunokawa, I'll start with the simple melancholy of Squire Cass's all-male family. Eliot candidly tells his reader that “the Red House [the squire's residence] was without the presence of the wife and mother who is the source of wholesome love and fear in the parlor and kitchen” (Eliot 22). Immediately, Eliot prepares his reader for an unhappy and incomplete group of inhabitants. The one scene between father and eldest son is both awkward and rude, and shows the attitude of life inside the motherless house. The novel's only scene between two brothers, Godfrey, the elder, and his younger brother, Dunsey, mocks the concept of "brotherly love", describing it as actual blackmail through brotherly knowledge (Eliot 24). Raveloe's next highly respected family, the Lammeters, comes to mind. The complementary sisters scene takes place between the two daughters of this clan, Nancy and Priscilla. Their interaction is as ridiculous as the interaction between Godfrey and Dunsey was perverse. In the same way it makes fun of communication between siblings by transforming true family feelingsinto something different. Where the Cass' "brotherly affection" arises from a deeper hatred and distrust, Eliot describes the Lammeters' "brotherly affection" as purely superficial. Nancy "will never have anything," Priscilla explains, "without my having my own equal, because she wants us to look like sisters" (Eliot 91, emphasis added). The focus for them is on the family bond they appear to have, not what they actually have. Furthermore, overall, the Lammeters lack the "healthy wife and mother" just like the Casses, as Mrs. Lammeter "died before the girls were grown up," Mr. Macey tells us (Eliot 49). Even when Priscilla becomes a self-sufficient housekeeper who takes care of her father, her happiness does not reach its peak and she feels that she misses the children. “I wish Nancy had been lucky enough to find a child,” she tells her father, “I should have had something young to think about then, besides lambs and calves.” (Eliot 175). Although she and her father live as a harmonious couple like Marner and Eppie, they are not as happy. Godfrey's two families are no exception to this trend; each contains serious problems. He completely rejects his first wife, an opium addict, and his daughter. So, Godfrey's second wife, Nancy, is mostly barren (except for one who died) and he cannot happily reconcile himself to that gap, as Nancy tells her sister. Nancy's happiness is ruined by her husband's anguish and too much free time. The most they can get is “the quiet mutual gaze of confident husband and wife” (Eliot 168). The value of family is there, but it doesn't create an enviable scene. Dolly and Ben Winthrop's family is the only fully intact family depicted in Silas Marner. Clearly, Eliot intends to represent that unison as their youngest son, Aaron, is depicted sitting on each of his parents' laps at different points in the narrative. First in a sort of Jesus-Mary pose at Marner's house, a "'picture of a child'" (Eliot 82), and then as a father with his son "between his knees" at the Red House (Eliot 101). However, Dolly, this balanced, devoted and respectful mother, like all the others, does not feel entirely satisfied. “If it had not been a sin for the boys to wish that they should be made different,” he tells Marner, “I should have been glad that one of them was a little jealous” (Eliot 121). Even here, where family values ​​and solidarity are entirely present, Eliot refuses to grant complete happiness. Nunokawa's idea that Silas Marner "supports family values" turns out to be incorrect not only in the study of almost all the families that Eliot illustrates in the novel. , his idea that the novel's message is so dichotomous as to be "supported or condemned" is also inaccurate. To reveal this it is necessary to consider the most basic elements of the story, which, upon closer examination, all have three points, not simply two. The most obvious examples of this are the elements of time and space. The novel is clearly divided into three time periods, based on Marner's habits. The first is set in his early years before the Fall, the second presents him as a lonely miserly spider, and the third reveals his happy life with Eppie. Godfrey's life can also be divided into three parallel parts: him as a rich boy, him as a deceitful husband and father, and him as Nancy's socially valued husband. Likewise, three places dominate the psychology of the novel: Lantern Hill (at the beginning and returned at the end), Stone-pits and Red House. This is not all. Terence Cave states in his introduction to Oxford World's publication of this text that there are "three strands of religious belief in Silas Marner" (Cave xii). These include the two obvious formsof Christianity, respectively the apparent and explicit religion of the citizens and that of the villages. The first is the "church gathered at Lantern Yard" (Eliot 8), defined by Cave's notes as "a nonconformist sect... of evangelical Christianity" (Cave 181). Secondly, the dominant religion in Raveloe into which Silas and Eppie are baptized. And finally, easily ignored by critics who want to polarize the novel, is the animistic undertone present throughout. “One of the most striking examples…of the villagers' animistic beliefs,” Cave writes, is “the way an appearance at the Rainbow…interrupts a discussion about ghosts” (Cave xii). Silas Marner's cataleptic attacks are another example of Eliot's abstention from dichotomies. During his trances, Marner escapes the typical classifications of what an individual can be, that is, alive or dead, divine or human. Mr. Macey believes that during these occasions, “Marner’s soul broke free from his body” (Eliot 46). According to Macey, Marner can separate from himself without being permanently dead in Lantern Yard "it was believed by him and others that the effect [of trance] was seen in an ascent of light and fervor" (Eliot 8). Here, although he is generally just one of the citizens, when he wears a privileged position he is affected by it. Even the typically Victorian two-strand plot is not "dichotomous" in the way Nunokawa wants to define Silas Marner. This is because, as Dr Small said in a lecture on the Victorian novel, there is also a teleological impulse aspect to these same novels. That is, the ending brings the two plots together to create a complex, resolving conclusion that is neither one plot nor the other, but rather a third that stands alone and has no gaps. Most importantly, there are two scenes in the novel where arguments occur, and both illustrate the radically tripartite worldview that Eliot is trying to convey. The first of these scenes takes place at the Rainbow Bar and contains three separate battles, each with similar conclusions. As the scene begins, the men at the bar argue about a cow. This ends when Mr. Tookey proclaims, “There may be two opinions, I hope” (Eliot 46). With this he obtains the consent of many other comrades present, including Mr. Macey. A second topic follows almost immediately, regarding the church choir. The host puts an end to this by echoing Tookey's sentiment, saying, "there are two opinions; and if mine were asked, I would say they are both right" (Eliot 46). Of course, although these characters, Tookey, Macey, and the landlord, declare the apparently mutually exclusive correctness of two contrary claims, they are actually asserting yet a third opinion: that of perspectivism. The third heated discussion that takes place that night concerns the existence of ghosts, which is interrupted by a physical manifestation of that same in-between, a shocked Silas Marner, who looks on with "strange, otherworldly eyes" like an "apparition" ( Eliot 53). , and yet at the same time quite real and alive, painfully so. Like the first two battles, this third also ends with the triumph of the middle path; both sides are right, and the angle that is able to highlight it is the most right. Since this is how the Rainbow Bar's arguments end within the novel, this could reasonably be the ending with which Eliot herself wants her readers to be convinced. This three-part discussion scene is mirrored almost exactly in the next open-ended discussion scene. between Eppie's two fathers which takes place in Stone-pits. In this, Eliot's implicit blocking (if his work were ever staged) also creates the triangle. First there is the marked point where. 273-390.