Writer's methods — Silas Marner — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
Writer's methods
Writer's methods
What you need to know
How Eliot's form, structure and language create meaning: a narrator who comments on her characters and on human nature, two parts set sixteen years apart,
the parallel stories of Silas and Godfrey, symbols such as the gold, the hearth and the Stone-pit, Raveloe dialect, and realism shaped like a fable or fairy tale.
The narrator: an 'I' who speaks to the reader and reflects on human nature, as in 'I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words'.
Structure: two parts sixteen years apart, and parallel plots that meet when Eppie toddles to Silas's hearth, with Godfrey as Silas's foil.
Symbolism: the gold and the golden-haired child, the hearth, the loom, the Stone-pit and the furze bush, as in 'the gold had turned into the child'.
Dialect: Raveloe speech at the Rainbow ('It isn’t the meanin’, it’s the glue') and in Dolly's talk, against the narrator's formal prose.
Imagery: insects, spiders and a shrunken stream for Silas's narrowed life ('like a rivulet that has sunk far down from the grassy fringe of its old breadth'), and growth, light and flowers for his recovery.
Realism and fable: village life told in close detail, within a fairy-tale pattern of loss, a gift on the hearth and a happy ending, and the Wordsworth epigraph.
Eduqas's essay on this novel marks context as much as response and analysis: weave context into the argument, and treat the printed extract as a starting point, ranging across the beginning, middle and end of the novel.
