The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [147]
After many years of this embittered, miserly existence, Marner's life suddenly becomes intertwined in dramatic fashion with that of another family in the parish. Squire Cass of Raveloe has two sons. The elder, Godfrey, is a weak man, enamoured of the eligible Nancy Lammeter, but unable to propose because he has already been secretly and foolishly married to a girl of humble origin in a nearby town. He has also fallen into the blackmailing clutches of his younger brother, Duncan, an unscrupulous ne'er do well. Led by a series of typically reckless and selfish errors into desperation for money, Duncan finds himself one foggy night outside Marner's cottage. The door is open, the `old miser' has gone out. Duncan cannot resist the temptation to steal his hoard of gold, and then disappears.
Silas returns and discovers his loss and it is as if he has been robbed of his life. As the first shock of what has happened fades, his neighbours begin to look more indulgently on him, as a poor hopeless creature, slightly crazed. He sinks into selfpitiful brooding. The Christmas season comes, everybody else is busy celebrating, it begins to snow and Marner's despair reaches its lowest point.
On New Year's Eve, a strange pathetic figure picks her way through the darkness and driving snow past Marner's cottage. It is Godfrey Cass's rejected wife, clutching their baby daughter, with which she plans to confront her husband and his family in the middle of their festivities. Weak and deranged by opium, she sinks down into the freezing snow to die. The little girl wanders off towards the light from the cottage door, finds it open and sinks down asleep in front of Marner's fire.
When he returns to the room it is some time before he notices the child, and when he does, it is her golden curls shining in the firelight which catch his attention. As if in a hallucination, he imagines that it is his lost gold which has been returned to him. But he then discovers that it is a little girl and the sight of the innocently sleeping child stirs in him feelings he has not known in all the years since he came to Raveloe, `old quiverings of tenderness, old impressions of awe at the presentiment of some Power presiding over his life.
Eventually the child's mother is found dead, and to everyone's astonishment Marner insists on keeping the little girl who had arrived so miraculously in his life. He has christened her Eppie, and we soon see what a transformation her coming has produced in him. `Unlike the gold which needed nothing and must be worshipped in close-locked solitude ... Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine and living sounds and living movements.'
As the years go by and Eppie's life unfolds, Marner's `soul, long stupefied in its cold, narrow prison, was unfolding too and trembling gradually into full consciousness'. He becomes open, friendly and liked by all: `the little child had come to link him once more with the whole world. After 16 years, when Eppie has become an attractive young woman, a pond near their cottage is drained and Duncan Cass's skeleton is found, with the bags containing Marner's lost gold: all is explained, and all is restored to him. Eppie agrees to marry a suitable young man of the village, but only on condition that they can both remain living with her beloved `father, in the cottage which since her arrival has become surrounded by a beautiful garden. The story ends with Eppie exclaiming to Silas Marner `I think nobody could be happier than we are'.
Each of these nineteenth-century novels describes its hero going through what is essentially the same kind of inward drama. In each we see:
(1) a hero who, as a young man, falls under the shadow of the dark power;
(2) as the poison gets to work, it takes some time to get the upper hand and to show its