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Setting
Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Winter Swallows:
Eliot uses a simile about migrating birds to suggest that rural working class people in the 1800s are uncomfortable with change and have a limited worldview. The author writes that the people of Lantern Yard's knowledge of the world outside their village is as minimal as their understanding of the secret lives of swallows:
To the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery: to their untravelled thought a state of wandering was a conception as dim as the winter life of the swallows that came back with the spring; and even a settler, if he came from distant parts, hardly ever ceased to be viewed with a remnant of distrust, which would have prevented any surprise if a long course of inoffensive conduct on his part had ended in the commission of a crime [...]
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Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—A Thirst for Gold:
In Chapter 2, Eliot compares Silas Marner's desire for gold to his need for sustenance using simile, personification, and sensory language. Silas has been hoarding his earnings for so long that just having the pot of gold coins and watching the pile grow is the most satisfying thing he does:
Unlock with LitCharts A+He began to think it [the money] was conscious of him, as his loom was, and he would on no account have exchanged those coins, which had become his familiars, for other coins with unknown faces. He handled them, he counted them, till their form and colour were like the satisfaction of a thirst to him; but it was only in the night, when his work was done, that he drew them out to enjoy their companionship.
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Explanation and Analysis—The Hymn-Book:
In Chapter 2, Eliot compares Silas's spiritual and religious life before Eppie's arrival to a child's understanding of a parent's love. When the narrator describes Silas's initial view of the Christian faith and its places of worship, she says:
Unlock with LitCharts A+A weaver who finds hard words in his hymn-book knows nothing of abstractions; as the little child knows nothing of parental love, but only knows one face and one lap towards which it stretches its arms for refuge and nurture.
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Explanation and Analysis—Silas the Spider:
Silas's extraordinary and seemingly inherited talent as a weaver sets him apart from the other people of the small English villages, making more ordinary folks uneasy. Eliot uses an insect simile to align Marner's professional expertise and his disassociation from his community, saying in Chapter 2 that:
Unlock with LitCharts A+He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection.
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Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Natural Dullness:
Eliot uses the motif of a lack of mental sharpness to characterize the lazy, ineffectual, and immoral Dunstan Cass. in the middle of Chapter 6, the author uses a simile to compare Dunstan's mind to the imaginary "mind of a possible felon":
Unlock with LitCharts A+A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic. And Dunstan’s mind was as dull as the mind of a possible felon usually is.
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Chapter 10
Explanation and Analysis—Like the Ant:
The novel's protagonist is compared to many objects and creatures from the natural world in Silas Marner. These similes help the reader to understand the simplicity of Marner's approach to life and link him to the novel's rural scenery. For instance, when Marner discovers his gold has been stolen in Chapter 10, Eliot aligns Marner's total loss of direction and his sense of loss to that of a "baffled" insect:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Marner’s thoughts could no longer move in their old round, and were baffled by a blank like that which meets a plodding ant when the earth was broken away on its homeward path. The loom was there, and the weaving, and the growing pattern in the cloth; but the bright treasure in the hole under his feet was gone; the prospect of handling and counting it was gone: the evening had no phantasm of delight to still the poor soul’s craving.
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Chapter 11
Explanation and Analysis—The Blackbird's Whistle:
In Chapter 11, George Eliot uses a simile to link English folk music to the natural world and to the book's broader senses of locality and of "home." Just before the New Year's Eve party at the Red House, Mr. Lammeter hears an old fiddler playing a tune called "Over the hills and far away" and says:
Unlock with LitCharts A+There’s a many tunes I don’t make head or tail of; but that speaks to me like the blackbird’s whistle. I suppose it’s the name: there’s a deal in the name of a tune.
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Chapter 14
Explanation and Analysis—The Summer-Shed Leaf:
Eliot describes the memorial service for Molly, Eppie's mother, in Chapter 14, employing a powerful simile to link this seemingly meaningless event to the grand plan of destiny in Silas Marner:
Unlock with LitCharts A+But the unwept death which, to the general lot, seemed as trivial as the summer-shed leaf, was charged with the force of destiny to certain human lives that we know of, shaping their joys and sorrows even to the end.
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Explanation and Analysis—Natural Pairs:
When Dolly Winthrop comes to help Silas with the newly-arrived Eppie in Chapter 14, she attempts to comfort him with a simile about the world's natural cycles of give and take, ebb and flow:
Unlock with LitCharts A+‘Ah,’ said Dolly, with soothing gravity, ‘it’s like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest—one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor where. We may strive and scrat and fend, but it’s little we can do arter all—the big things come and go wi’ no striving o’ our’n—they do, that they do; and I think you’re in the right on it to keep the little un, Master Marner, seeing as it’s been sent to you, though there’s folks as thinks different.
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Chapter 17
Explanation and Analysis—Foreshadowing Beauty:
At the end of Chapter 17, Nancy is standing by the door of her cottage anxiously awaiting Godfrey's return. In this scene, Eliot foreshadows the startling nature of Nancy's upcoming discussion with her husband; he is about to disclose finding Dunstan's skeleton and the truth about his relationships with Eppie and Molly. The author gives the reader a sense of foreboding by juxtaposing images of the sublime natural world with the language of death and shadow:
Unlock with LitCharts A+She continued to stand, however, looking at the placid churchyard with the long shadows of the gravestones across the bright green hillocks, and at the glowing autumn colours of the Rectory trees beyond. Before such calm external beauty the presence of a vague fear is more distinctly felt—like a raven flapping its slow wing across the sunny air. Nancy wished more and more that Godfrey would come in.
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Explanation and Analysis—Nancy's Simplicity:
Nancy Lammeter is one of George Eliot's more straightforward principal female characters. She is unbending, direct, and takes her Christian values seriously. Because of this, Eliot describes how her husband Godfrey views her through a simile suggestive of natural clarity, "the flower-born dew," in Chapter 17:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Godfrey was not insensible to her loving effort, and did Nancy no injustice as to the motives of her obstinacy. It was impossible to have lived with her fifteen years and not be aware that an unselfish clinging to the right, and a sincerity clear as the flower-born dew, were her main characteristics; indeed, Godfrey felt this so strongly, that his own more wavering nature, too averse to facing difficulty to be unvaryingly simple and truthful, was kept in a certain awe of this gentle wife who watched his looks with a yearning to obey them.
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Part 2, Conclusion
Explanation and Analysis—A Golden Lily:
On her wedding day Eppie's "golden" coloring and personality seem to be metallic, as the author compares her to a gilded flower in the Conclusion:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Seen at a little distance as she walked across the churchyard and down the village, she seemed to be attired in pure white, and her hair looked like the dash of gold on a lily. One hand was on her husband’s arm, and with the other she clasped the hand of her father Silas.
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