Reading the Specific Language of Silas Marner without Context

In “The Context of Humanism,” Claire Colebrook argues that highly specific language, far from enabling readers to understand an author’s work exactly how he or she intends it to be read, can actually distance readers from the author’s meaning if the context of the specific words and references is lost.  She cites, for example, contemporary rap lyrics, which frequently namecheck other rappers and songs—names which will likely be unfamiliar to listeners in the future (712).  “This is how language operates,” she explains, “the more communication I want, the more general I have to be” (711). 

This argument prompted me to consider how George Eliot constructs Silas Marner.  The novel is often considered myth-like, allegorical, fairy-tale-ish, or, as Kathryn Hughes writes, “like a folktale, a narrative that lies deep in the unconscious, ready to be revived by those opening words ‘Once upon a time in a land far away’” (184).  At the same time, however, Silas Marner also receives some serious critical attention as a complex novel, and as a work of realism. (Terrence Dawson references an increase in critical discussion in the blurb I posted.)  So how is it possible for a book to be both allegorical and realistic, and how do language and context play a role in this?

Eliot essentially builds a world that is in a historical time period but not entirely of it, balancing a mix of generalities and specifics.  The novel opens by situating the action “in the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farm houses—and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread lace, had their toy spinning wheels of polished oak” (1).  This description gives readers an idea of when the story occurs, but not an exact date, and it does evoke the vague “once upon a time” sense Hughes mentions. 

At other times, however, the book does offer more detailed descriptions.  For example, the narrator states that Marner “worked at his vocation, in a stone cottage that stood among the nutty hedgerows near the village of Raveloe” (2). Readers are thus given a specific place name, as well as hints as to where Raveloe might be located, based on information like the native plant life.   Such details continue to crop up throughout the novel, especially as the seasons change.

These details appear to be exactly the type of “specific language” that Colebrook is worried about requiring too much context.  Indeed, Kathryn Hughes’s reading of the novel suggests that Silas Marner will seem most general to those without specific context knowledge.  She explains that readers really can give the story a fairly certain date, setting it between 1793 to 1815 based on “remarks made both by the narrator and Squire Cass” (185).  She furthermore asserts that the novel “is actually intent on showing a particular patch of the Warwickshire countryside at a precise historical moment” (185). 

Hughes may be right that the details of Silas Marner correspond very closely to a fixed time and location in English history, but if other readers do not notice this specificity, or if it at times takes a lot of work (or context) to locate it, it is because the specifics are ultimately unimportant to the themes of the novel.  The details add to the realism of the book, as they help readers to visualize the setting and convince them Eliot is describing a place that could exist (whether it does or not).  Yet none of messages of the novel (assuming it has some, since it has so often been called allegorical), are contingent on the specifics.  Silas Marner could be relocated to another place or another time and the essence of the story would be the same because it does not matter that Silas Marner lives in a town called Raveloe; it matters that he adopts an orphan and gains a place in a community where he had formerly been isolated.

Eliot’s use of specifics, then, is not comparable to that of the rappers whom Colebrook mentions.  The words in Silas Marner are not the “utterly context bound” words Colebrook is worried about losing meaning over time (711).  Eliot successfully balances generalities and specifies, but does not attach the themes of the novel to the specifics, which allows it to be read without much context.  That, perhaps, is secret of the stories we call fairy-tales.

Works Cited

Claire Colebrook. "The Context of Humanism." New Literary History 42.4 (2011): 701-718. Project MUSE. Web. 13 Oct. 2014.

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.