 CHAPTER 6: Summary
Silas enters the tavern where the conversation is quite animated. It begins with an aimless argument about a cow, followed by a story by Mr Macey about the person who had bungled the words of a wedding vow, a story that everyone in the tavern has heard many times before. Macey says that the parson’s lapse set him thinking about whether the wedding was therefore invalid and, if not, just what it was that gave weddings meaning in the first place. Just before Silas appears, the conversation lapses back into an argument, this time about the existence of a ghost who allegedly haunts a local stable. The argumentative farrier, Mr Dowlas, does not believe in the ghost and offers to stand out in front of the stable all night, betting that he will not see the ghost. He gets no takers, as the Rainbow’s landlord, Mr Snell, argues that some people are just unable to see ghosts.
Q1.The Rainbow Inn provides a slice of life of the Raveloe community. Comment.
Ans. The conversation Silas interrupts in the tavern provides Eliot with an opportunity to show a slice of life of the Raveloe community. Almost all of the action thus far in the novel has taken place in the private sphere, within characters’ homes. The tavern provides a public counterpart. The Rainbow is the primary meeting place for Raveloe’s men, where members of all of the town’s social classes meet and mingle. Unlike the church, the other significant public space in the town, the tavern is a participatory atmosphere. Everyone is invited to chime into the arguments and stories. There is, however, a strict hierarchy that is encoded in the interactions we see at the Rainbow. The higher-class patron’s order spirits-and-water to drink, the lower-class patron’s beer. The higher-class patrons sit near the fire, the lower-class farther away. Even the two rooms of the inn itself are arranged in to separate social classes. The evening’s conversation provides examples of the often superstitious beliefs that bind its participants together. In describing the conversation in such painstaking detail, Eliot furnishes not only a vivid rendering of the dialect of the lower class but also a portrait of their beliefs. The topics of conversation are trivial and the participants are made to seem slightly ridiculous. However, they do occasionally touch on important ideas. MrMacey’s story concerns the importance of language, and Mr Snell’s point about some people’s inability to see ghosts touches on the subjectivity of experience. In simultaneously making light of the denizens of the Rainbow and showing that they possess a certain unschooled curiosity. The conversation, however, is a ritual to stave off boredom. These nightly gatherings at the Rainbow are repetitive. Mr Macey has told the same story to the same audience many times before. Though this boredom and ritual seem meaningless, they are an integral part of the rural life Eliot presents.
 Q2. What is the impact on Silas of the two robberies?
Ans. The theft of Silas’s gold forces him to involve himself in the life of the town. This is the second theft that had taken place so far in the novel. The original theft, which drove Silas out of Lantern Yard, made him an outcast from his tight-knit community and deprived him of any faith except in money. The second theft, Dunsey’s, eventually reverses both of these effects. Eliot writes that Silas’s gold had “gathered his power of loving together into a hard isolation like its own.” Its loss makes Silas venture out into the community to ask for help.
