Question

Answer the following question in 120 – 150 words:
How does the perception and attitude of the villagers of Raveloe towards Silas Marner change from the beginning to the end of the novel ?

Answer 1

Silas Marner had taken refuge in Ravelow where he began to live a life of seclusion as a weaver. His small fortune of gold soon had become an obsession which was further enhanced by his life of solitude and monotony as a weaver in the small community of Ravelow. He had nothing left from his old life but the gold that he was slowly accumulating. In Raveloe, he seemed like an oddity coming from an industrialized setting into the farming community of the hamlet. Silas was deeply affected by the trauma of being shunned by his own community and having to live in an alien setting, it destroyed his spirit and then he took to weaving as a means to deaden his senses to the world. He was friendless in spite of efforts to the contrary and came to be regarded as almost a sinister figure. For years Silas kept on weaving and lost any motivation to go out into the world. He became alienated and isolated in the midst of a robust community. His cottage thus represents the cage that every man had begun to inhabit in an increasingly industrialized space of that era. Man was becoming an island, breaking off from the tightly woven fabric of society and becoming alienated mentally, the cottage was the prison he had exiled himself to.