Deleuzian Ethics in Silas Marner: Becoming, Event, and Reconfiguration of Relations

This study examines Silas Marner beyond its conventional interpretation as a narrative of moral recovery or Christian redemption, approaching the novel as an exploration of ethical becoming through Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. Silas’s isolation is understood not as a moral deficit but as a specific assemblage of life formed after his detachment from religious and social territories. As Chapter IV shows, his existence—organized around gold, labor, and repetitive temporality—constitutes a stable yet closed arrangement in which change is suspended, until the theft of the gold operates as an event that disrupts this configuration. Chapter V analyzes Eppie’s arrival as a further event that reorganizes Silas’s life through relational transformation rather than moral compensation. The constellation of Silas, Eppie, and the community is sustained not by blood ties or normative family ideology but by practices of care and repetition. From a Deleuzian perspective, ethics in Silas Marner emerges not as judgment or rule-following but as the question of which relations expand the possibilities of life, repositioning Eliot’s novel as a site of ethical experimentation.