The Triangular Silas Marner As a result of betrayal, Silas Marner of George Eliot's so-titled novel becomes a man in body without incurring any of the duties normally associated with nineteenth-century working-class adults . Eliot creates these unusual circumstances by framing our titular hero so that it appears to his companions that he has stolen money. In doing so, he effectively rejects the innocent Marner from his community and causes him to lose his fiancée. At this crucial moment in Marner's life, just as he is about to fully assume the role of man, on whom his neighbors, future wife and probable children depend as such, he is excised and does not successfully complete the transformation. As a result, he moves to a new place, Raveloe, with the same carefree lack of responsibility as a boy, who is clearly unable to behave like the man he seems he should be. By denying Marner the possibility of a traditional family from the beginning, Eliot immediately raises the question of family values. A question he answers throughout his novel. Jeff Nunokawa, in his essay The Miser's Two Bodies: Silas Marner and the Sexual Possibilities of the Commodity, states that Eliot "simply" shows "support for family values" (Nunokawa 273), and that she "encourages" them through her narration (Nunokawa 290). As evidence, he cites quotes from the text that depict, as he puts it, “men [living] without women… in an arid region” (Nunokawa 273). Cleverly, he references Eliot's line: "The maiden was lost... and then what was left to them?" (Nunokawa 273). Furthermore, Nunokawa goes on to label the novel's moral implications as those of a "straightforward dichotomy," saying that Eliot delivers to his reader "the... center of the paper... because it is the center." land between its two opposites, which include the possibility of not having a family at all and following the one given to you biologically. Silas Marner is not a black and white, right and wrong story, it is more complex and aims to depict at least three angles - if not more which, for now, I have not managed to reveal. Bibliography Carroll, David, "Reversing the Oracles of Religion," Casebook Series on George Eliot, Ed. R.P. Draper London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1977. Cave, Terence, "Introduction to Oxford World Classic's Silas Marner" (see following entry for details.)Eliot, George Silas Marner Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.Nunokawa, Jeff, "The Miser's Two Bodies: Silas. Marner and the Sexual Possibilities of the Commodity," Victorian Studies, 1993, Spring, see 36. pp. 273-390.