Isolation and community — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Isolation and community
Themes
What you need to know
How Eliot explores loneliness and isolation, in Silas, Godfrey and Molly, against the community of Raveloe that slowly takes Silas in across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'were to the last regarded as aliens by their rustic neighbours', 'an unknown region called “North’ard”', 'this Lethean influence of exile', 'made his isolation more complete', 'This strangely novel situation of opening his trouble to his Raveloe neighbours', 'There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe; but it was often of a beery and bungling sort', 'Living so lone here, you lose your count', 'shutting him close up with his narrow grief', 'it’s a lone thing—and I’m a lone thing', 'the little child had come to link him once more with the whole world', 'there was no repulsion around him now, either for young or old', 'he had brought a blessing on himself by acting like a father to a lone motherless child', 'it was the part of his neighbours to wish him joy'.
The Rainbow inn and the New Year's Eve dance as pictures of village community, with its gossip, rank and rough kindness.
Loneliness beyond Silas: Godfrey alone with his secret, Molly dying alone in the snow, and Nancy's private grief.
Edexcel's novel question has two parts, and neither marks context: part (a) on the printed extract marks language, form and structure (AO2); part (b) on the novel elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1), not language analysis. Use context only where it explains a reading, and say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
