Genres of work: The folktale and Silas Marner

New Literary History

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 513-533

  Stewart, Susan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950680388     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2003.0037     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Karl Marx with Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Amherst, N.Y., 1998), p. 37: "The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the means of subsistence they actually find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. Hence what individuals are depends on the material conditions of their production."
2. See also Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1998), p. 29ff; hereafter cited in text as HC
3. See Georg Simmel, "Female Culture," in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London, 1997), pp. 46, 50
4. See Titus Burckhardt, Sacred Art in East and West: Its Principles and Methods (London, 1967), p. 54. As he explains, a "craft initiation" can be a "cosmological initiation": "The goal of a realization attained by way of art or artisanship was 'mastery'; that is to say a perfect and spontaneous command of the art, a mastery in practice coinciding with a state of interior liberty and veracity."
5. Aristotle, Politics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1941 ), 1253b30-1254a18, pp. 1131-32. In these passages Aristotle also draws a useful distinction between instruments of production and of action: "The shuttle, for example, is not only of use; but something else is made by it, whereas of a garment or of a bed there is only the use. Further, as production and action are different in kind, and both require instruments, the instruments which they employ must likewise differ in kind" (1254a, p. 1131)
6. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn (New York, 1969), p. 91; hereafter cited in text as S
7. See Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (New York, 1979), p. 6
8. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, tr. Laurence Scott (Austin, 1968)
9. For a discussion of inequality and marriage in the fairy tale, see Michel Butor, "On Fairy Tales," in Inventory: Essays by Michel Butor, ed. and tr. Richard Howard (New York, 1968), pp. 215-16
10. See Jennifer Schacker-Mill, National Dreams: Folktale Collections and the English Mass Reading Public, 1820-1860 (Philadelphia, 2001). Schacker-Mill discusses the translation and edition of the Grimms published by Edgar Taylor and David Jardine in 1823. English versions of Perrault's 1697 tales, entitled "Histoires et Contes du Temps Passé" with the legend on the frontispiece: "de Ma Mère l'Oye," had appeared as early as 1729
11. Cited in Katherine Briggs, The Fairy in Tradition and Literature (London, 1967), p. 10; hereafter cited in text as FT. Briggs quotes extensively from Pierre de Loyer's A Treatise of Spectres or Straunge Sights, Visions and Apparitions appearing sensibly unto Men (1605), pp. 7ff: "Now these Lares were domestical or household gods; because (as Seruius said) in ole times the dead bodies were usually entered and buried in their houses: and therefore those Lares (that is to say) the soules of the dead, were adored and worshipped euery one particularly in that house, where their bodies were enterred." Regarding the dog's skins, De Loyer says "But hee might have added this rather (if he had beene a Christian) That as Dogges are naturally enuious: So these Lares or Diuels of this kinde, do beare enuy and malice to maukinde." De Loyer concludes that they are sometimes good Praestites and sometimes bad Hostilios
12. Plutarch, "The Roman Questions," no. 51, in Moralia, vol. 4, tr. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), pp. 83-84
13. Isabel Rath borne, The Meaning of Spenser's Fairyland (New York, 1937), p. 158: "It is customary to distinguish between the fairies of folklore and the fays of romance, and to emphasize Spenser's larger debt to the latter tradition. The distinction is somewhat misleading because the fays of romance did not spring full grown from the heads of medieval men of letters, and there is some likelihood that the romances in which fays appeared seemed less artificial to Spenser's generation than they do to us, because of the persistence of similar stories in living oral tradition." Rathborne also mentions "that the fairies had already been identified both with the pagan gods and with the spirits of the dead. The underground fairyland thus becomes the classical Hades. Pluto and Proserpina appear as king and queen of the fairies in Chaucer's 'Merchant's Tale.' In the Middle English romance of 'Sir Orfeo,' the classical story of Orpheus and Eurydice is assimilated to the type of a Celtic fairy tale. Queen Heurodys is carried off, not to Hades but to a fairyland under the earth" (159)
14. David MacRitchie, Fians, Fairies, and Picts (London, 1893)
15. See Katherine Briggs, The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature, pp. 11-37
16. Nancy Arrowsmith with George Moorse, Field Guide to the Little People (New York, 1977)
17. and MacEdward Leach, "Fairies," in Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, ed. Maria Leach (New York, 1949), pp. 363-65; hereafter cited in text as F
18. Annie Dubourdieu, Les origines et le développement du culte des pénates à Rome (Rome, 1989)
19. George Eliot, Silas Marner, ed. David Carroll (London, 1996), p. viii; this edition, based on the 1878 edition, is hereafter cited in text as SM
20. See, for example, Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: A Life (London, 1996), p. 251
21. "My father was a weaver first of all. It would have been better for him if he had remained a weaver. I came home through Lancashire and saw an uncle of mine who is a weaver still. I mean to stick to the class I belong to." See Catherine Gallagher's discussion of this passage in The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction 1832-1867 (Chicago, 1985), p. 257
22. See Margaret Baker, Discovering the Folklore of Plants (Buckinghamshire, 1996), pp. 60-61. Baker cites other pagan and Christian names as well for digitalis: goblins' or witches' thimbles; snoxums; Our Lady's gloves; dead man's bells or fingers; ladies fingers; fox fingers
23. See Stith Thompson. Motif Index of Folk Literature (Bloomington, 1958)
24. James Stern, ed., The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales, tr. Maragaret Hunt (New York, 1944), p. 834; hereafter cited in text as CG. For versions of specific tales, I have also used The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, ed. and tr. Jack Zipes (New York, 1987)
25. See also Nancy Arrowsmith with George Moorse, Field Guide to the Little People, p. 62
26. Brian Branston, The Lost Gods of England (London, 1957), pp. 34, 59
27. For a discussion of the "changing faces of coins" in Silas Marner, see Kate E. Brown, "Loss, Revelry, and the Temporal Measures of Silas Marner: Performance, Regret, Recollection," Novel, 32 (1999), 241. Brown's study examines the manifold relations between time and mourning in the novel
28. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), pp. 297-300
29. Heidegger writes in his thoughts on the thing that "to discover the nature of nearness we give thought to the jug nearby. We also catch sight of the nature of nearness. The thing things . . . the thing is not 'in' nearness, in proximity as if nearness were a container. Nearness is at work in bringing near, as the thinging of the thing" (Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstader [New York, 1971 ], p. 177), Wölfflin suggests that "we always project a corporeal state conforming to our own onto the object of interpretation" (Heinrich Wölfflin, quoted from "Prologomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur," in Kleine Schriften, 13-47, in Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art [New Haven, 1982], p. 100)
30. For a discussion of these tales see J. A. MacCulloch, The Childhood of Fiction: A Study of Folk Tales and Primitive Thought (London, 1905), pp. 26-29; hereafter cited in text as CF
31. George Eliot, "The Natural History of German Life," in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York, 1963), pp. 269
32. hereafter cited in text. The essay, first published as a review of two books by Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl, Die burgerliche Gesellschaft and Land und Leute, the first two parts of Riehl's Naturgeschichte des Volks, first appeared in Westminster Review, LXVI (July 1856), 51-79
33. For a discussion of the place of habit in Victorian culture more generally in light of Dickens's fiction, see Athena Vrettos, "Defining Habits: Dickens and the Psychology of Repetition," Victorian Studies, 42(1999/2000), 399-426. Vrettos cites, among other Victorian treatises concerned with habit, G. H. Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind
34. For a theoretical discussion of the relation of states such as catalepsy to singularity, see Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, tr. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, 1993), p. 86. Although Deleuze is talking about such states in the context of the "monads" of baroque thought, his concluding point that states of near-death or catalepsy involve "microperceptions or representatives of the world as little folds that unravel in every direction . . . these . . . minute, obscure, confused perceptions that make up our macroperceptions, our conscious, clear, and distinct apperceptions" is useful for considering how Silas grows into a larger sense of consciousness and morality out of his initial openness and vulnerability, or exposure, to sense impressions without judgments in his cataleptic states