The Primitive Mind of Silas Marner

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Issue Date
2008-01-01Author
Neill, Anna
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This essay investigates the peculiar phenomenon of catalepsy in the context of Eliot’s narrative realism. The primitive mental state depicted in Silas Marner and those reduced social forms that it engenders together obstruct the operation of sympathy—a key feature of Eliot’s organicist aesthetics. Catalepsy, with its sudden and inexplicable reduction of the organism to purely automatic functions, at once bars the narrator from the character’s consciousness and prevents an intuitive study of mind-world through the organs of sympathy that, in Eliot’s other novels, complements the scientific exploration of nature’s still unknown laws.
Description
This is the published version, also available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/elh.0.0029.
Collections
- English Scholarly Works [308]
Citation
Neill, Anna. "The Primitive Mind of Silas Marner." ELH (English Literary History) 75 (2008): 939-962. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/elh.0.0029
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