The Primitive Mind of Silas Marner

Abstract

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.