NON-AFRICAN PROSE; GEORGE ELIOT: Silas Marner Comment on the friendship between Silas Marner and William Dane

Answer Details

In George Eliot's Silas Marner, the friendship between Silas Marner and William Dane belongs to the early Lantern Yard phase of Silas's life. It is a friendship of apparent closeness that turns to betrayal, and it is the event that shatters Silas's faith and drives him into the long isolation from which the rest of the novel rescues him.

In Lantern Yard, Silas and William Dane are bosom friends within their strict Nonconformist chapel community. They are so inseparable that the brethren jokingly call them David and Jonathan, after the famous biblical friends. Silas is trusting, sincere and devout, and he looks up to William, believing him to be an even more spiritually assured Christian than himself. Silas's faith in his friend is complete and unsuspecting.

Eliot quietly signals that William is not what Silas believes him to be. He is self-righteous, censorious and inwardly cold, given to a smug confidence in his own salvation. Beneath the pious exterior lies envy and calculation. His character stands in sharp contrast to Silas's simple, honest devotion.

The friendship is destroyed by William's treachery. When the deacon whom Silas is nursing dies, the church's money is found to be stolen, and suspicion falls on Silas. William, who is engaged to no one at first, has actually coveted Sarah, Silas's fiancee, and he engineers Silas's downfall. Evidence, Silas's own knife found in the dead man's drawer, is used against him, and it is strongly implied that William himself planted it and committed the theft. The brethren draw lots to determine guilt, and the lots fall against Silas.

The betrayal is total. Silas is branded a thief and expelled from the community he loved. William then marries Sarah, the woman Silas was to wed, completing his triumph. Silas, betrayed by his closest friend and abandoned by his betrothed, loses his faith in both God and man. The false verdict, arrived at through the drawing of lots, convinces him that there is no just God, and he flees Lantern Yard a broken man.

The friendship and its betrayal are the hinge of the whole novel. They explain Silas's flight to Raveloe, his withdrawal from human society, and his descent into miserly gold-hoarding as a substitute for the love and faith he has lost. The treachery of a trusted friend is what deadens his heart, so that the later restoration of that heart, through the child Eppie, becomes the moral centre of the book. William Dane's cruelty also introduces Eliot's concern with the difference between hollow, self-righteous religion and genuine goodness.

Conclusion. The friendship between Silas Marner and William Dane begins as an intimate bond likened to David and Jonathan but ends in the cruellest betrayal, as William frames Silas for theft and steals his betrothed. This treachery destroys Silas's faith and sends him into the isolation that shapes the rest of the novel, making the false friend the instrument of Silas's long spiritual death.