When the squire's wife Nancy fails to produce a child of her own and the truth about the missing gold is unearthed, the squire is forced to bring his own secret into the light. Marner adopts the young girl in the absence of any other parental claim and brings her up, with the pecuniary assistance of the local squire, so that she regards him closer than any blood father. After the gold he has frugally amassed suddenly disappears he is mysteriously blessed in the form of a golden bundle of treasure who wanders into his cottage one snowy night. Mind you, he is fortunate in managing to fashion a living out of weaving at a time when industrialisation left the majority of weavers and knitters short of work.
Marner huddles himself up, keeping apart from the locals other than selling his woven goods to them, and thus he acquires a reputation as something of a witch with his trance like gaze resulting from cataleptic fits.
Silas Marner comes to Raveloe after being banished from a close-knit chapel community as a result of being falsely accused by a friend who steals his girlfriend to boot.
The narrative centres on the misfortunes of a lowly weaver at the beginning of the nineteenth century living as an outcast, whose life eventually collides with a wealthy landowner and his seemingly altruistic benefactor. With ultimately its optimism and fair balance of life's trials and joys it is possibly more rewarding and life affirming than her bleak tragedy of `Mill on the Floss' or the hopelessness of intelligent women in the all encompassing English novel `Middlemarch'. Nine years before Steve Martin's 1994 `A Simple Twist of Fate' in a garishly modern Virginia/Georgia setting (no slight intended on the beauty of those fine States, but the tale is a frog in a barn in this locale) came Giles Foster's distinctly English and faithful adaptation for the BBC of one of George Eliot's own favourites.
0 kommentar(er)
