"Cliff Notes - Silas Marner" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

limited background, Godfrey's neglect, and her addiction? Or do
you think she, like Godfrey, is morally to blame for taking the
easy way out?

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SILAS MARNER: THE MEN AT THE RAINBOW

In classical Greek tragedies, a group of citizens called the
Chorus comments upon the action of the main characters. The
group of men who meet at the Rainbow serve this function in
Silas Marner. Their conversation defines the Raveloe values and
gives you a sense of how the main characters fit into the
society. The scenes of the gentry at the Red House party in
Chapter 11 define another part of Raveloe society. But the men
from the Rainbow also appear here, as spectators. They are the
base of country wisdom that Eliot uses as a moral standard.

This is a fully fleshed-out social group, with a whole range
of personalities. There's Dowlas the know-it-all farrier, the
sarcastic wheelwright Ben Winthrop, the easy-going butcher
Lundy, the old codger Mr. Macey, the deputy clerk Tookey who's
the butt of their jokes, and the landlord Mr. Snell who
moderates and keeps the peace. Think about groups of people you
socialize with--don't they interact in typical roles like
this?

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SILAS MARNER: SETTING

The opening of Silas Marner suggests a world of legend and
myth--a pastoral countryside untouched by the modern world,
where figures are larger than life. But gradually Eliot
establishes that this story occurs in the first years of the
nineteenth century, during the Napoleonic wars, when George III
was King of England. This is slightly before Eliot's own
childhood. It's also before the Reform Act of 1832, which many
Englishmen felt marked the end of an era (as Americans today may
regard the bombing of Hiroshima or the Vietnam War). It
represented for her an age of innocence.

The landscape is the farming country of the English Midlands
where George Eliot grew up. The villagers of Raveloe live in
isolation only because of their old-fashioned customs--they
really aren't that far from the rest of civilization.
Upperclass characters, such as the Casses, frequently travel to
neighboring towns. In general, the two classes in Raveloe
inhabit different worlds. The Rainbow pub is the center of the
common folks' world, and Squire Cass' Red House is the center of
the gentry's world. The Raveloe gentry are representatives of
an ancient British social class--the "squirearchy," well-off