Silas Marner: Narration as Work-Discipline

Abstract

George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) provides a convenient point of entry for the problems posed by unproductive labor at the beginning of the 1860s for reasons that will be familiar to the novel’s critics. As an allegory of economic relations, it posits narrative as a compensatory relation for unresolved social tensions that constructs new connections between author and reader. In this way, the novel offers narration as a new form of socially productive work that conjures unproductive labor while remaining distinct from it. Of course, critics are divided as to the efficacy of such narrative work. Although Susan Graver, Mary Poovey, Richard Mallen, and Courtney Berger offer disparate readings of the novel, they largely view Eliot’s narrative project in a Habermasian light, accepting Eliot’s gambit that language is a space of clear communication for the making of community. Indeed, Graver tellingly calls Eliot’s view ‘community as communication’.¹ By contrast, critics such as Gillian Beer, Susan Cohen, Sally Shuttleworth, and Hao Li focus on the problems of discontinuity posed by the text and their effects on its constructions of society, personal psychology, and history.²