Hierarchy, Genre, and Why Anyone Thinks Silas Marner is Literature

In “The English Apparatus,” Robert Scholes contends that one of the major problem with English departments is their hierarchical approach to texts, wherein they value literature over non-literature and value the “interpreting” of literature over the simple “reading” of non-literature, and value the interpreting/reading of either text over the production/writing of them (5-6).  Literature, to English academics, is what is “good or important” and non-literature is whatever is “beneath our notice” (5).  The distinction, as Scholes sees it, seems to be that non-literature is more useful; it “justifies itself functionally” (6).  Essentially, Scholes seems to be suggesting that English departments are interested in fiction and not in non-fiction, and not really in writing either—though they would probably prioritize composition over creative writing.

While this argument bears some weight even today (though it is worthwhile to note how many non-fiction readings are being assigned for this class, even if they are to promote thinking about…literature), Scholes’s literary/non-literary binary immediately made me think of another hierarchy that English departments perpetuate: one in which certain genres of fiction are considered more “literary” than others.  The argument for this hierarchy seems to be the same, that literary fiction is “good and interesting” and fantasy novels and teen novels and some science fiction novels are not.  (Again, this is changing.  Dr. Corey Olson, self-proclaimed “Tolkien Professor” is trying to make serious study of fantasy an academic reality, but institutional biases do still exist.)

So, in thinking about genre and this hierarchy, I wonder what makes George Eliot’s Silas Marner a classic (aka serious literature that bears interpretation).  Scholars are very quick to note that it “feels like a folktale,” not typically a classification used in conjunction with literary merit (Hughes 184).  On one level, it is easy for me to see why.  Because Silas Marner’s story and language seem so simple, so straightforward, I have had consistently had trouble relating it to any of the readings we have been assigned each week.  Yet that does not necessarily mean there is “nothing there,” that folktales deserve to be on the bottom of the literary hierarchy.  It may just mean that Silas Marner, a story with a near-hermit protagonist who lives in an extremely isolated village set sometime in the nineteenth century, simply is not overly interested in computers and datasurveillance.

A quick search of the MLA International Biography reveals that scholars have found things to “interpret” in Silas Marner (so hopefully the book's status as a classic is not just due to the thought process, "Well, all Eliot's other books are classics so this must have literary merit, as well!").  Some scholars are actually interested in the book's genre.  Others are interested in its portrayals of gender, in its structure, in its psychology, in its ideas of community.  Does this mean Silas Marner is not actually a folktale (or, more precisely, very like a folktale)?  Or does it imply that folktales can be “literature?”  Or that our definition of “literature” is ambiguous and subjective?

Silas Marner itself does not have a lot to say directly about texts (again…my problems relating the book to the assigned readings!), but it does have something to say about definitions and how personal experiences can trump them.  At the end of the novel, Godfrey Cass comes to claim his daughter Eppie from Silas, who has raised her as his own daughter since she was an infant.  Godfrey and his wife Nancy think that Eppie’s duty is clear, that “there’s a duty you owe to your natural father…when your father opens his home to you, I think it’s right you shouldn’t turn your back on it” (174).  Eppie, however, does not think it is that simple, that her “father” is just the man who helped in her conception.   Her father is Silas, the one who means something to her emotionally: “’I can’t feel as I’ve got any father but one,’ said Eppie impetuously, while the tears gathered” (174).

Obviously, defining “father” probably is more straightforward than defining what is meant (what Scholes means!) when the claim is made that literature includes things that are “good” or “important.”  In both cases, however, there is room for subjectivity, for personal experience in setting the terms of the definition.  Scholes observes that there is no longer any room in the classroom for the idea that texts reveal some type of universal truth or that they appeal to some universality of human nature (12).  However, this does not mean that we have to eliminate the idea that “literature” contains some type of “meaning.”  Maybe we can recognize that different texts speak to different people, that we can never make a comprehension list of what is “literature” and what is not because, whatever the book (or the genre), there is probably someone in the world who can find something that is “good” or “important” to them in it.

Otherwise, Scholes (and English departments) may need to come up with definitions of “literature” that do not include words that imply subjective value judgments.

Works Cited

Eliot, George. Silas Marner. New York: Signet Classics, 2007. Print 
Hughes, Kathryn. Afterword. Silas Marner. By George Eliot. New York: Signet Classics, 2007. 184-190. Print. 
Scholes, Robert. “The English Apparatus.” Textual Power. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985. 1-17.