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 [...]
This simile contributes to the pastoral atmosphere of the novel, limiting the edges of the world to a small, uncomfortable sphere. Eliot writes that anyone new these people meet will almost never avoid being "viewed with a remnant of distrust." It doesn't matter how long they live in Lantern Yard: if an outsider ever committed "a crime," it would only confirm the long-held suspicions of their neighbors.
This simile is almost paradoxical and takes some attention to fully understand. Eliot's sentences in Silas Marner are even longer and more complex than they are in her other books. This is partly because the passage in which this reference to swallows occurs is one long sentence with many clauses and digressions, so finding its meaning takes thought and attention. It's also confusing because the idea that migrating birds have a mysterious, secret life is a charming and romantic one: but the villagers, Eliot tells us, don't like mystery. What seems charming and pleasant to the reader would be confusing and unpleasant to the people the simile describes.
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:
He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection.
Spiders are usually negative images when they show up in literature, but this association to a bug is a positive one. Spiders are fast, expert weavers, and the picture of the intricate intertwining of a spider's web would have been a familiar one for every reader of Silas Marner. Like a spider, Silas uses his "web" of cloth to separate himself from the world. Sitting surrounded by his work, he is like a spider waiting for disturbances in the center of its web. Also like a spider, Silas is instinctively, supernaturally good at weaving. It seems to flow from him like the spider's web, coming directly from his body without effort, "impulse," or "reflection."
The concept of "impulse without reflection" is also indicative of the early stage of Silas's Christian development. He has faith in something, but not the time or the inclination to reflect and internalize the lessons his life has taught him. Like the spider—which Eliot implies has no thoughts of its own—he lives his life instinctively and without pausing to consider the wider world around him.
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:
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.
Like a baby, who "knows nothing of parental love" but the feeling of its parent's closeness, Silas "knows nothing of abstractions." By this Eliot means that Silas thinks of the church itself—its physical boundaries, its rules for living, and its contents—as being the entirety of religion. At this early point in the novel the church in Lantern Yard is only a building to Marner, a representation of physical shelter and comfort in which a very limited faith is practiced. This simplistic understanding is like that of a very young child. Babies only want the "refuge and nurture" of a parent and don't understand their "abstractions"—their thoughts, feelings, or even their love. Silas doesn't grasp the concept that the church's reach and "God's love" extends beyond the building and beyond its prescriptive regulations; therefore, he feels separated from God's influence in his everyday life in Lantern Yard.
The "hard words in his hymn-book" mentioned here expand on Silas's ignorance of the "abstractions" of Christian doctrine and its ideas of the nature of God. Eliot compares these doctrinal "abstractions" to the complex language of hymns, because both are challenging to understand without deep reflection.
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:
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.
The money has ceased to be just a pile of physical objects to Silas; the coins themselves are precious to him individually. Each coin is a friend. Eliot says he would "on no account" trade or exchange them, as he feels that the money is self-aware, and the pile's growing size brings him comfort. The reader can sense how intensely he feels about his treasure as he fondles and coos over it, craving its presence. It is of note here that Eliot contrasts a very tangible, touchable thing (coins, not "wealth") with thirst, a need of Silas's physical body. This association between the real and the psychological pervades the whole passage. Three verbs describing obsession appear one after the other—"handled," "counted," "drew"— all words which refer to both mental and physical action. Through this tactile language, the reader sees that accumulating and protecting the gold has consumed Silas body and soul.
The way that Eliot personifies the gold in this passage also emphasizes the weaver's loneliness. Silas's work isolates him from the world, and his reliance on the gold for "company" is a sad substitute for human love. When Eppie enters the story as Silas's replacement "treasure," she brings him happiness and real companionship. She is a real solution to Silas's problem, whereas the gold only made his detachment from society worse.
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":
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.
Dull people, Eliot tells the reader, have a hard time remembering that something was originally a bad idea once they have seen that it might get them something they want. Dunstan isn't just dull, he's also very self-centered and self-satisfied. For these reasons, when the terrible plan to coerce money out of Silas "flatters a desire" of his, he forges ahead with it without further consideration.
Rather than being thorough and descriptive as it is elsewhere, the narrator's own dull, simple language in this segment reflects the character it describes. It's a delicious little moment of Eliot's snark. The reader is brought into a catty moment of evaluating Dunstan with the narrator, making that narrator's "presence" very strongly apparent.
Dunstan is unable to judge the consequences of his actions and often seriously misbehaves. In this scene he has just abandoned Wildfire, Godfrey's horse, which he was lent after threatening to blackmail his brother and which he has recklessly caused to fall and die. This doesn't really matter to Dunstan—although it's both cruel to the horse and very inconvenient for Godfrey—as he's far more focused on his own motives. Instead of being worried about his brother, he immediately switches back to his only topic of interest: himself.
Dunstan's self-interested dullness is revealed to be his downfall in every way possible as the novel goes on. Near the end of Silas Marner he's found decayed to a skeleton in a dried-up quarry pond. He dies of another mistake of dullness: he falls into the hidden well in a stone-pit because he couldn't see in the dark. Dunstan's "dullness" is so ingrained that it also seems to be catching. After the younger Cass brother has made off with his gold, the old weaver then sits by his hearth reflecting on his loss. Rather than being the warm center of his home, however, the hearth has become a "dull fire" because of Dunstan's crime.
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:
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.
Ants, like Silas Marner, are associated with total devotion to work and with stockpiling supplies and nesting materials. When his gold disappears, the old weaver is "baffled by a blank," like an ant whose journey to the nest is physically interrupted. He cannot understand the scene in front of him. Without the gold, he has no purpose. The author lists all the materials of his work: the loom, the weaving, and the "growing pattern in the cloth" as still present. However, the "hole in the ground" which Silas the "ant" has been filling with the fruits of his labors is empty and yawning.
Through the theft of his gold, Silas's psychological comfort and his imaginary companionship are also stolen. He is mentally reduced to the status of a lost insect. Even the thought of replenishing the gold doesn't help, as Eliot says in the same chapter that "The thought of the money he would get by his actual work could bring no joy." Before he adopts Eppie, losing the gold leaves him utterly abject and directionless.
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:
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.
Mr. Lammeter's comparison of this "tune" to a blackbird's whistle places it in the same category as the other "natural" sounds audible in Raveloe. This provides local color, making the reader think of birdsong and the sweet sound of a violin, and links folk music to the natural world of the novel. The simile suggests that the tune "speaks to" Lammeter like the blackbird's song does, even though they are both wordless. They both emotionally affect him in a specific way, reminding him of home.
It's interesting that he says there is a "deal in the name" of a tune, as if the name "Over the hills and far away" shapes the tune itself. Mr. Lammeter says that he can't "make head nor tail of" most music, emphasizing his limited worldview. However, even though the name of the tune is "Over the hills and far away," he feels that this one "speaks to him," as it is like the sound of a bird he knows well.
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:
‘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.
Dolly makes several comparisons which present natural cycles as pairs in this passage: the "night and the morning," the "sleeping and the waking," and the "rain and the harvest." Each element of these pairs is essential to the other. Every action or process, she implies, comes with an equal (and sometimes opposite) reaction or process. In the book, Silas has lost his gold, but in the gold-haired child he may have found something worth more than the product of all his "strive and scrat." Dolly implies that because of these other causal pairs, Silas should have faith that things happen for a reason.
This is also a commentary on the way destiny works in the novel. The narrator implies through Dolly's words of comfort that Silas has (however unknowingly) "traded" his bag of gold for this adorable, "angilic" child. Whether he wanted to or not, his destiny has exchanged one treasure for another.
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:
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.
Molly's death, the narrator implies, is as unimportant as a "summer-shed leaf." There are lots of leaves on the trees in the summer, so one falling is unimportant and can pass "unwept." The "summer-shed leaf" is a thing that dies too early, just like Molly. It's also a leaf that isn't doing its job of sustaining the tree properly, just as Molly is an ineffectual mother for Eppie and a less than ideal wife to Godfrey.
The "summer" in which the "leaf" falls and the winter in which Molly dies are opposites, but are drawn together in this passage as a reference to the seasonal cycle of the natural world. As Molly dies of hypothermia in a snowstorm, this simile also signals the passage of time and the fragility of human life. Though it seems unimportant, her "fall" is actually the catalyst for the rest of the novel's drama surrounding familial love and paternity.
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:
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.
Nancy is as sincere and "clear as the flower-born dew," meaning that she is sparklingly unblemished by the events of her life. She "clings to the right," or to good deeds, as morning dew naturally clings to the flowers each day. Eliot indicates that she's not very smart or well-educated, as in the same chapter the narrator mentions that her mind is "not courted by a wide variety of subjects." In a sense, the purity of her personality is partly due to this ignorance: Eliot's narrator also mentions Nancy's always "living inwardly" and reflecting on how she could have done things differently. Her focus is on her inner life, not the events of the outside world.
In Christian imagery "dew" is often associated with new beginnings and with purity. Nancy's goodness in the novel comes from within, much like this "dew" appears to do. Her "clear," straightforward character also makes her husband Godfrey's moral flexibility (described above as his "wavering nature") seem even weaker than it would otherwise.
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:
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.
Images of "calm external beauty" and beckoning rural scenery dominate the first half of this passage. Although the vista is stunning, it's quickly marred by the "vague fear" that Nancy begins to feel. The raven's presence at the end of this quotation casts a shadow over the rest of the passage. Rather than being comforting, the gorgeous landscape only makes her unease with her current situation more acute. The "placid" churchyard, the "brightness" of the grass, and the "glowing autumn" of the Rectory contrast with the macabre simile of the "slow wing" of the raven that immediately follows them. The shadows of the gravestones "across the bright green hillocks," in hindsight, seem sinister, and the "glowing colors" of the leaves actually reflective of the death of summer foliage.
The raven is a symbol of death in all of Eliot's novels and in a great deal of the literature that precedes them. The bird is so recognizable as a harbinger of death that its mere presence is enough to chill Nancy deeply. Eliot uses these juxtaposed images of life and death to foreshadow the startling news Godfrey is about to convey to her about Molly and Eppie. Nancy feels that something bad is coming before she can even really know it, and so does the reader.
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:
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.
Eppie's golden hair as a baby and the white snow in which Molly dies are very strong images from the beginning of the novel. When the narrator recalls them here, the bride also being "pure white" and "gold" brings this imagery full circle. These colors, previously associated with the tragic beginning of Eppie's life, are partially redeemed by the joy of this day. Lilies also symbolize the remembrance of the dead and are often present at English funerals. In this way, Eppie's wedding gown marks the absence of her mother, although her chosen family surrounds her.
Lilies are symbols of purity and rebirth in mythology, and are heavily featured in British legends, biblical stories, and paintings of natural splendor. The "gold" on a real, living lily is the orange pollen on the stamens inside. Just as Eppie's blond hair isn't really "gold," lily-pollen is golden only figuratively. This sensory language gives a reader the vivid image of the vibrant ochre and delicate cream colors inside a lily, while still clearly referring to a bride in a wedding gown.
