Silas Marner

The draining of the stone pit reveals the truth in many ways. Most obviously, the discovery of Dunsey’s skeleton and the missing gold provide the evidence needed to solve a crime that took place 16 years ago. The evidence is an awkward fit for the people of Raveloe. In the aftermath of the crime, they were desperate to blame an outsider for the theft. They spent a great deal of time convincing themselves that a peddler from outside the community was responsible for taking the gold, even after Silas told them that this was likely not true. Instead, the reveal of Dunsey’s skeleton forces the community reckons with the truth: The criminal was not just a member of the Raveloe community, but also someone from the so-called social elite who position themselves as rightful rulers of the land, which highlights the theme of Community as Rejection or Acceptance. Community is such a powerful force that acceptance can shield someone from blame while rejection can cast automatic guilt. Dunsey’s disappearance was a convenient situation for the people of Raveloe. They made up stories to explain where he had gone, secretly pleased that such a disreputable man vanished from their lives. Dunsey’s existence was a challenge to the legitimacy of a social order that imbues the rich upper classes with power and authority over everyone else due to the circumstances of their birth. This social arrangement was difficult to envision with Dunsey in charge, so his disappearance —followed by Godfrey’s taking over his father’s duties—made everything much more tolerable for the people of Raveloe. The skeleton forces a reckoning with an inconvenient truth, however, as they can no longer claim that Raveloe is free from crime or immorality, nor that the upper classes are inherently more morally inclined. The draining of the pit reveals an awkward truth about the social hierarchy in Raveloe that many of the residents are not yet ready to address.

For Godfrey, the reveal of the skeleton is a symbolic indication that all secrets will eventually be made public. He feels the old anxiety that defined his life when Dunsey was still alive. Like the skeleton, he is worried that someone will drudge up the truth about his first marriage and ruin his reputation. Godfrey has resolved to tell the truth on numerous occasions, but he has repeatedly failed. He works up the courage to tell his wife, and then he goes to Silas and Eppie to tell them that he is Eppie’s father. Godfrey’s arrogance is such that he never imagined a world in which Silas would not immediately hand over the girl to him in a quick and easy exchange. His assumption is the product of his arrogance and his privilege; he has spent a lifetime getting exactly what he wants from the people of Raveloe, and he is shocked that they have the power to deny him. Once he returns home, however, Godfrey's desire to tell the truth vanishes. His initial fear goes away, and he backtracks, planning to put his confession in his will so that the secret will only be revealed when he will no longer be affected. Just as he pulled back moments before confessing to his father, Godfrey walks back his grand conciliatory ambitions and replaces them with a half attempt informed by his cowardice.

Silas tries to take meaningful action in a way that Godfrey could never do. After receiving his gold, he decides to return to Lantern Yard to find the answers that have troubled him for so long. He wants to know whether his exile was manufactured by his best friend to determine whether or not he was truly betrayed. Silas’s life changed in Lantern Yard, and he has carried these traumatic experiences with him ever since. To Silas, Lantern Yard occupies a huge space in his thoughts, and he struggles to forget these painful memories. When he travels north, however, he discovers that the old chapel has been turned into a factory. The community that exiled him—and thus tainted all the memories and emotions he built there—has been subsumed into the inevitable wave of modernity. The chapel was vital to Silas but, in the wider scope of the world, meant nothing. No one in the town remembers the chapel. Silas wants an emotional confrontation and a moment of catharsis, but the demolition of the chapel denies this to him. Instead, he is given a metaphor. The chapel and everything it meant could be wiped away easily, so much so that no one in the neighborhood remembers anything about it. The erasure of the chapel gives Silas permission to let go of the past. Just as the chapel was removed, he can remove the memories from his mind. He is unburdened and relieved, able to look to the future without being weighed down by the past.