George Eliot's 'Silas Marner': How a Man's Life is Influenced By his Environment

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject German Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Paderborn (Germanistik und vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft), course: Europäischer Realismus, language: English, abstract: George Eliot's Silas Marner, 'that charming minor master piece' (in Eliot 252) as F. R. Lewis calls it, was published in 1861 by John Blackwood. Her publisher explains: 'Silas Marner sprang from her childish recollection of a man with a stoop and an expression of face that led her to think that he was an alien from his fellows' (Eliot VII). This man was a weaver like Silas Marner. In making him the protagonist of her novel, George Eliot emphasizes his strangeness by adding short-sightedness and cataleptic fits to set him off from the people around him. The difficult process of this outsider's integration into society is the theme of the novel...