Sins that Rend, Forgiveness that Binds
The virtues of the commoner, according to George Eliot
God keeps an eternal ledger of our sins, that we can be sure of. Our time on earth, on the other hand, is often absent of the timely accountability for which our sins might deserve. How our lives and the world in their natural course come to punish us for our sins is carefully charted by George Eliot in Middlemarch and Silas Marner.
Middlemarch, or fully Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life, is exactly what the title suggests: a novel that could have been the product of Middlemarch’s town historian who also happens to be a world-historically talented writer. The plot introduces us to seemingly every resident of the small, fictitious, 1830s Middlemarch, England, but the true underpinnings of the plot revolve around Nicholas Bulstrode, the most powerful man in town with a murky background who possesses enough capital to pull the strings in town affairs. As the plot unfolds, it is slowly revealed that Bulstrode’s money came from a previous marriage where he became husband to a wealthy woman who already had a daughter. The daughter’s whereabouts, however, are unknown, but the woman wants to find her to pass on the fortune. Bulstrode successfully locates the daughter, but keeps this information to himself until his wife dies so that he can keep the money. Middlemarch being a mass of entangled relationships intimately familiar to any reader from a small town means that Bulstrode’s secret has the potential to set the quaint town aflame.
The “original sin” of Silas Marner, also at a similar time period in England, is committed by Godfrey Cass. Despite being the son of the foremost family in Raveloe, he is easily swayed and lacks decisiveness in a way that seemingly restrains him from living up to his coming inheritance. We find him somehow already in the throes of a secret marriage to a woman who used to be beautiful but has since been ravaged by an opium addiction. To complicate things further, they already have a baby. A little after the eponymous protagonist (Silas Marner) loses his beloved stash of gold, the secret wife comes to town with daughter in hand to exact her revenge on Godfrey, only to die just outside of Marner’s cabin; the baby crawls through the open door and Marner’s dulled vision thinks that the baby’s blond hair is his lost gold returned.
As far as Godfrey is concerned, his wife’s death is his emancipation; he proceeds to marry Nancy, the woman of his actual desires. The bodies are buried forever—until they aren’t: Godfrey’s brother was the one who stole Silas’s gold, and his body is discovered at the bottom of a dried well, having fallen in the night of the act. The uncovering of this decades-old crime leads Godfrey to the essential realization that life will ensure that accountability eventually makes its way to him, too. He approaches Nancy and finally confesses that he is the biological father to Silas Marner’s adopted Eppie, and that the mother, his former wife, was the woman found dead that night.
In this way, Eliot’s writing is deeply moral. Independent of or in addition to the punishment God exacts in the afterlife, life on Earth will naturally ensure that a sinner is punished eventually. Bulstrode learns this when his former accomplice, now alcoholic, wanders into Middlemarch, an appearance of all his past transgressions embodied. While actual details of Bulstrode’s past life have not made it out, people are aware that this strange alcoholic claims to know things that could destroy Bulstrode’s life. When Bulstrode basically lets the man die of alcohol withdrawal under his watch, the town puts two and two together and makes the proper conclusions anyway, and Bulstrode’s reputation is ruined—he cannot escape punishment.
The clear sense of morality is present even in Eliot’s style. A characteristic of her writing is the remarks and observations about life and human nature that pepper her prose. “The gods of the hearth exist for us still; and let all new faith be tolerant of that fetishism, lest it bruise its own roots,” writes Eliot about Silas’s desire to keep things in the cottage as it was the day when Eppie crawled in.
“Favourable Chance is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. Let even a polished man of these days get into a position he is ashamed to avow, and his mind will be bent on all the possible issues that may deliver him from the calculable results of that position,”
says Eliot in a diatribe on how people would rather gamble on a chance than tell the truth. “Let him… Let him…,” she goes on. Perhaps the most famous one, and deservedly so, comes in the last sentence of Middlemarch: “for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” A sentence worthy of bookending the 700 pages that came before it.
Although Eliot occasionally veers close to over-romanticizing or “orientalizing” the English peasantry, her charming descriptions are not without substance. The accumulation of these remarks and the stories together put forward a moral vision that celebrates the commoner: the commoner seems to get things right more than the cultured, educated, landed gentry. When Godfrey explains his tortured reasoning in his confession by telling Nancy, “But you wouldn’t have married me then, Nancy, if I’d told you,” Nancy, whose mind is the product of common, rural life, replies with the moral clarity that Godfrey and other aristocrats seem to lack in all their enlightenment. “But I wasn’t worth doing wrong for—nothing is in this world. Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand—not even our marrying wasn’t.” “I’m a worse man than you thought I was, Nancy,” is Godfrey’s only rebuttal.
Neither can we evade the responsibilities our sins carry, nor are we doomed to our worst mistakes. The most moving moments of the two books consistently come at demonstrations of magnanimity and forgiveness. Nancy forgives Godfrey, and in a passage that surpasses all others between these two books and their hundreds of pages, Mrs. Bulstrode forgives her husband after being told the truth,
“this imperfectly-taught woman, whose phrases and habits were an odd patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her…. He burst out crying and they cried together, she sitting at his side. They could not yet speak to each other of the shame which she was bearing with him, or of the acts which had brought it down on them. His confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent. Open-minded as she was, she nevertheless shrank from the words which would have expressed their mutual consciousness, as she would have shrunk from flakes of fire. She could not say, ‘How much is only slander and false suspicion?’ and he did not say, ‘I am innocent.’”
Eliot reminds readers that the common folk among us and their common ways carry out an existence closer to life’s highest forms and righteous ideals than the rest of us. “Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.”