Toxicity in Silas Marner

Chen’s “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections,” covers a lot of ground, touching on lead poisoning, queerness, race, and her personal experiences being treated as toxic on the street.  The wide range of topics can seem noncontiguous, a fact Chen herself acknowledges by noting the essay “seems at first to float outside queerness,” until it reaches section two (265).  However, the breath that Chen can cover in the essay also nicely highlights how widely applicable her theories of toxicity can be.  Chen writes:

“Toxins — toxic figures — populate increasing ranges of environmental, social, and political discourses. Indeed, figures of toxicity have moved well beyond their specific range of biological attribution, leaking out of nominal and literal bounds while retaining their affective ties to vulnerability and repulsion: so an advice columnist might write Keep a healthy distance from toxic acquaintances, while a senator up for reelection decries the ‘toxic’ political atmosphere” (266).

If I were teaching an undergraduate class in which the students were reading Chen and Silas Marner together, I would like to use this statement about general ideas of toxicity to start the discussion.  This way, the students would be able to think about toxicity at least partially on their own terms, rather than trying to read Chen directly onto Elliot and saying, “Well, Chen says X thing about toxicity and queerness, so where in Silas Marner can I find X thing being demonstrated?”

We would start out brainstorming characters or scenes in the book that we think demonstrate toxicity.  Three things I hope would come up:

1. The opening scene where a young Silas Marner is accused by a friend of stealing money.  His religious community draws lots to determine if the accusation is true, then expel him from the community when the lots declare him guilty.
2. Eppie’s mother, Molly, a poor opium addict who dies on her way to publicly declare the wealthy Godfrey Cass is her husband.
3. The factory that has been built in the place where Silas Marner lived as a young man.

Once we had our list of toxic people and places, we would write them each as a heading on the board, then brainstorm what seems particularly toxic about them.  Some things we could note (though probably in fewer words on the board!):

1. Silas’s religious community sees immorality as toxic, since they must literally distance themselves from it.  Conversely, one could argue that the community, which judged him unfairly, was toxic to Silas because his expulsion leads to the depression that characterizes him for much of the book.  The friend who framed Silas for the theft could be the “toxic acquaintance” alluded to in the Chen quote because he destroyed their friendship.
2. Assuming this is the same class in which we read the Armstrong article and Silas Marner together, I would like the class to draw parallels between Armstrong’s argument about women who do not properly fit into Victorian society and toxicity.  Note that Eppie’s mother, a drug addict and someone who seems to be a single mother (since her marriage was secret and to someone far above her social status) must die.  The community wants nothing to do with her and the book has no way of fitting her into the happy ending.  The drugs themselves are also toxic to Eppie’s mother and contribute to her death.
3. The factory is literally emitting toxic fumes into the air.  The density of the buildings is also problematic, as Eppie says, “I’m like as if I was stifled…I couldn’t ha’ thought as any folks lived I’ this way, so close together.  How pretty the Stone Pits ‘ull look when we get back!” (179). 

After we have some major thoughts about what makes each person, place, or thing toxic, we would discuss what each does or does not have in common and what a definition of toxicity might be.  Most likely, we would conclude that anything can be toxic, that what one considers toxic might depend on one’s point of view, and that toxicity is generally considered to be contagious in some way (even if not literally so).

This would also be a good place in the discussion to talk about Chen’s definition of animacy: “Animacy is built on the recognition that abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between can be queered and racialized without human bodies present, quite beyond questions of personification” (265).

There is not much opportunity for racialization to occur in Silas Marner, a book of small cast and therefore little diversity in just about any sense of the word.  However, we could expand the concept of animacy to discuss how concepts and inanimate objects are othered, how toxicity is generally something associated with women or with the unnamed “faraway” place Silas came from and can only briefly return to for a supremely unsatisfying visit.  We might additionally discuss what the effect of othering a town that seems to be literally a couple days’ walk away vs. what the effect of othering a different continent is.

Overall, I hope this lesson would encourage the students to think about the general theoretical ideas being proposed in the Chen article are and how they might apply to a primary text.