“I've Been Robbed!’: Breaking the Silence in Silas Marner

Margaret Keenan and I have collaborated in recent years, leading discussions about trauma and mastery in the poetry of Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds, and more recently in the novels of George Eliot. Although our collaboration produced the ideas that follow, I express them in a singular voice.

In returning to Silas Marner more than twenty years after having written George Eliot's Creative Conflict (Emery, 1974), my purpose is to show that psychoanalytic ideas about trauma and mastery can enhance our understanding of Silas, of his creator, and of ourselves. I use the word trauma broadly (but not lightly) to include devastating loss. About the word mastery I have some reservations because, as I shall try to show, it does not illuminate the most crucial moment in Silas's development.

Because Eliot gives such detailed attention to Silas's withdrawal, we can recognize it as a common response to traumatic loss. Silas's isolation, his hoarding, and his deadened senses are attempts at mastering loss, but they keep him numbed and incapable of healing. When events repeat the trauma, however, his old wounds reopen, providing the possibility of a new outcome. This time, by acknowledging the intolerable pain of loss to himself and others, Silas begins to heal.

On the outskirts of Raveloe, “not far from the edge of a deserted stone pit,” lived Silas Marner, a weaver. He seemed, “like the spider,” to weave “from pure impulse, without reflection” (Ch. 1). His hermit life, a self-imposed exile, cut him off from all close connection with people. However, it had not always been so. Formerly living in another part of the country, Silas had been a member of the religious community of Lantern Yard. There, his best friend falsely accused him of robbery, his fiancee rejected him, and the entire congregation condemned him. Afterward, he took up residence in a stone cottage outside the unfamiliar town of Raveloe, his thoughts “arrested by utter bewilderment.” The repetiti