Some Thoughts on George Eliot's Silas Marner

As a young man, Silas Marner was betrayed and ostracized, leaving him with deep psychic wounds. His consciousness of the world narrows to a routine of weaving and lovingly counting a small but growing horde of money. From anything connected to the past,

... his life had shrunk away, like a rivulet that has sunk far down from the grassy fringe of its old breadth into a little shivering thread, that cuts a groove for itself in the barren sand.

The money serves as a beloved object and safe, if very poor, substitute for a connection to other people. Regarding Marner's work as a weaver, Eliot writes:

Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.

Without love, you often see obsessive behaviors, addictions, and compulsions take root.

Marner's life and heart expand again after he adopts a child whose mother he has found dead near his home. (The immediate environs of Marner's home are depicted as a place where death is near, especially in the dark, underscoring his vulnerability but also making him reminiscent of a Hades-like figure with his horde of precious metal.)

Lucy Snowe from Charlotte Bronte's Villette is a fascinating narrator

Lucy Snowe, the narrator for Charlotte Bronte's Villette, starts her story in her godmother's house, where she's visiting. She's a teenager at the time and inhabits the house like a shadow. She says next to nothing about her birth family, which is unusual; all we know is that she's English. She observes other people closely, and she enjoys some quiet pleasures, unnoticed. Soon after this visit, she makes vague reference to events that lead her to fall out of touch with her godmother, and the tragedies and hardships that leave her alone in the world as a young woman. (No details on what exactly happens.) She winds up working in a French school, and her thoughts about her circumstances are realistic and complex.

Part of why I find this narrator fascinating is that she can be frank and blunt. But then she'll turn away suddenly, holding back information and withdrawing from the reader's sight. She is outwardly reserved - many people think her so - while emotions can run rampant in her. She isn't an unreliable narrator in the sense that she has sinister motives or strong delusions, but she's disconcerting. She understands how much she's confessing, and wants to keep some things to herself. Sometimes, she'll introduce a detail or observation that jars the reader out of the complacent belief that they've got the characters fixed in their mind. The reader is kept at an uneasy distance while still being absorbed in the narrative.

Agnes Grey - Revenge of the Governess!

I didn't know anything about Anne Bronte before reading Agnes Grey, except that she's the overlooked Bronte sister. But by the end of the book I figured she'd worked as a governess and that it had not gone well. This book might have given her a little power. On paper, she could enjoy some mastery - trotting them out, all the wealthy vulgar fools who spoil their children and mistreat their governess (a governess who, in the book at least, earns a happy ending to make up for all the unappreciated labor and neglect).

Agnes is a clergyman's younger daughter, and when her family falls into financial straits, she offers to work as a governess. Her older sister and parents doubt her and try to discourage her. She's the baby of the family and has led a sheltered life. She romanticizes the job, imagining that it involves a lot of gentle teaching and chiding and comforting.

In the first family she works for, she gets a bunch of unmanageable brats dumped on her. The parents offer her no support and blame her for the children's faults, so she's helpless in dealing with them. The second family that hires her gives her teenaged daughters to work with. There's little she can do to teach them. Outside the schoolroom, they sometimes spend time with her when they're out of other options. Otherwise, they ignore her. Neglect, loneliness, invisibility - Bronte writes these feelings confidently. The only upside to Agnes being ignored is that she enjoys a few opportunities to spend time with a local curate. She falls in love with him, and he's actually a decent man. (No Heathcliff here.)

Three Short Stories Exploring Profound Loneliness

Title: Death of a Traveling Salesman
Author: Eudora Welty
Where I read it: The Oxford Book of the American South

R.J. Bowman, a traveling salesman, lives in a string of impersonal hotels with no one to help care for him when he's sick. His life hasn't made an impression on anyone. After almost driving his car off a cliff in a backwoods area, he finds himself, shaken and unwell, in the home of two people who live primitively. But even in that impoverished home, he discovers intimacy - an unspoken, simple closeness between people.

These people cherished something here that he could not see, they withheld some ancient promise of food and warmth and light.

Although they're hospitable to him, he remains outside the circle of domestic warmth. And he wonders why he doesn't have such warmth in his own life. It's a simple thing, found even in the most remote places, so why not in his life? What he's seeing is basic to life but absent from him; how is he still alive?

Title: The Museum
Author: Leila Aboulela
Where I read it: The Anchor Book of Modern African Stories

Shadia, a Sudanese woman, attends a graduate program in statistics in Aberdeen. Throughout the story, she suffers from a lack of connection to anyone. What she misses most about home aren't the people (including a fiancé who talks at her over the phone); it's the familiar places and experiences of day-to-day living she's homesick for.

It's not as if home is in all ways attractive to her. At home, there are people - like her mother and her fiancé – who try to pin her down, make sure her life fits a certain mold. (At one point, she mentions childhood visits with her father, who had left her mother years before, and how she enjoyed those visits because he kept mixing her up with her sisters; she could pretend to be different things with him, because he didn't have a fixed idea of who she was or should be.)

At the same time, Scotland is alien to her. In the course of the story, she develops a tentative friendship with a classmate, Bryan. Bryan's interest in her leads him to try to understand her culture and do some things that would make him more appealing to her. However, there's the possibility that Bryan, who hasn't traveled much but really wants to get out of Aberdeen, is attracted to her because she's exotic and represents an escape. How much about her can he understand?

At the end, he tries to shows his willingness to understand by inviting her to a local museum where there's an exhibit on Africa. But it's a jarring visit for Shadia, because the exhibit focuses on the exploits of European visitors and the kinds of animals one would see on the African continent. Where are the people? There's nothing of life at home that she recognizes.

Shadia's life is in a state of suspension between cultures, and no one seems to know who she is and what she really wants (and it's not as if she's clear on that herself). She misses home, but there are traps waiting for her there - stifling relationships. Could she make a home in Scotland and also open Bryan's eyes more? Or would that be too difficult, maybe even impossible for her?

Title: The Prospect from the Silver Hills
Author: Jim Crace
Where I read it: The Art of the Story

The main character struck me as already odd and alone when he starts his isolated job. He works as an agent for a company that's prospecting for precious stones and valuable metals in a remote region. His job is to examine samples of earth that have been dug out to see if there's anything promising in them.

But what does it mean that he's odd, and how does this oddness intensify? He imagines a wife and family for himself. He doesn't fit in with the work crew, who initially make some attempts to socialize with him. And how he experiences the land is increasingly at odds with how the company wants him to see it. He develops a sensual appreciation of what's dug out of the earth, and he restores it in unique, aesthetically pleasing ways.

A stone of apple-green he removed and walked with it into the valley where in a cave there were lichens of the same colour. A fistful of grit he scattered in the grass so that it fell amongst the leaf joints like sleet.

His sense of what is valuable no longer has anything to do with what other people find valuable. He's concerned with what looks good, what fits, and whether a place seems whole and restored.

He sees things in the land that no one else sees. He's cut himself off from other people and established his own world and his own system of values. That's his loneliness, his madness and vision. It highlights some of the arbitrariness in the values other people assign to things. Maybe this lonely man saw no way to find the things he valued within established society, so he made a world of his own - and, through isolation and sleeplessness and his own vision, he found a home permanently there. Until he's one with the hills, like a figure in folklore, not entirely human.

(As I was writing about this last story, it brought to mind Virginia Woolf's "Solid Objects," which I wrote about here. There's a similarity in the characters' obsessions about what they find in the earth, and the increased disconnect from society and its values.)

One reading of 'Wild Geese'

From Mary Oliver's 'Wild Geese', I love these lines towards the end -

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination

But how does the poem get to that place?

'Wild Geese' starts with -

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You do not have to be good. Is it really a matter of having to be good? In regards to goodness I don't think it's a matter of having to be but a matter of choosing to be that's most crucial. And actually acting in that way, immersing yourself in life instead of sitting in front of a mirror in a remote room wondering, "Am I good? Am I worthy?" And gazing fixedly at the troubled reflection you see.

Then the next line, implicitly linking goodness with what seems to be an unendurable amount of self-flagellation.

Repenting is not a mindless wallowing or indulging in self-affliction. It's interesting to consider, though, how focusing on one's guilt becomes harmful after a certain point, a self-obsession that impedes one's ability to be active and purposeful (both generally in life and in the specific actions undertaken to redress one's wrongs).

And then -

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

That can't be all there is to life. Though it's a part of contentment - those moments when you just want to enjoy some harmless pleasures, or be loved and cuddled and embraced with affection, or find a warm quiet place to lick your wounds - it's still not everything, it's not the best answer to living life wholly and well.

That's not where the poem leaves us either. Immediately after those lines, there's talk of despair:

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

But what lifts us out of it?

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Here the poem lifts away from the self and towards great broad things - the rhythms of the world, the language of nature, the sweep of rain and cry of birds. Beyond your own body, the sense of your own isolation and the limits of your pleasures is a whole world; enough of the inordinate self-scrutiny, navel-gazing, obsession with personal faults. Look around - send the mind and senses outwards. When we contemplate the world, study it, hear it, we live a richer life. We become better, and better understand where and how we belong.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--