A Few Thoughts on a Woman Named George Eliot

I cannot remember if my English teacher in 1958 told  us that George Eliot was Mary Ann Evans. I do know I walked around a long time believing George Sand was a man! (Smart of   Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin to take a two-syllable male pseudonym.)

George Sand

George Eliot

I clearly remember reading Silas Marner in sophomore English. A heavily-laden slog until chapter 12. In the paperback I have, this chapter begins on page 92 of 157 pages. It is a winter’s night on New Year’s Eve. A woman with a child in her arms stops and empties a phial of Demon Opium, soon wants only to sleep, and her baby girl crawls away through snow to the open door of the local weaver’s cottage. The addicted and aggrieved mother had been on her way to the Squire’s house to confront him about his eldest son Godfry, the father of her child. For the sake of the plot, she freezes to death!  And Silas Marner, whose gold had been stolen, now has a child and names her Eppie. (The name brings to mind the pen carried around by those with fatal allergies.) And this child is a life-saver…for the isolated and bitter Silas.

Part two of the novel begins sixteen years later and leads to a fairy-tale ending. This is odd because George Eliot intended her novels to educate and modify human nature. She wrote, “I have had heart-cutting experience that opinions are a poor cement between human souls: and the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writing, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of  being struggling erring human creatures.” (Known today as ING..ITUS, and best avoided as a semantic plague.)

In an earlier blog I mentioned the  novel, Silas Marner, which was in the textbook for sophomore students in San Antonio in 1968. How could this Victorian novel work with students whose English was limited.  On the novel’s first page is one paragraph that continues on to page two. Here is one sentence from it.

“To the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery: to their untraveled thought a state of wandering was a conception as dim as the winter life of the swallows that came back with the spring;  and even a settler, if he came from distant parts, hardly ever ceased to be viewed with a remnant of distrust, which would have prevented any surprise if a long course of inoffensive conduct on his part had ended in the commission of a crime; especially if he had any reputation for knowledge, or showed any skill in handicraft.”  Dios mio, I hear those students calling out!

A big idea in Silas Marner is exile and displacement, which my students had experienced (so many from Mexico) and yet how to wade through more than fifty words, one colon, two semi-colons, a welcome period, and then slog all the way to chapter 12, as I had done a decade earlier.

Still and all, I’m glad the RILL book club selected this novel.  After a 64 year absence, I’ve read Silas once and will read it again before our first meeting on February 26^th. I have read The Mill on the Floss by Eliot and her last novel, Daniel Deronda from 1876.  Last night I discovered Middlemarch in a cabinet downstairs.  I’d forgotten I had this Penguin of 908 pages, 868 of which are the novel in small print!  What to say?  La vida tan corta!  Life too short!

Until next week and Lolita, for reasons I’ll explain…