"It Is Enough": St. Ogg and Caring Through the Gap

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay argues that the understudied micronarrative of St. Ogg in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss serves as a hermeneutic key to the significance of the novel's affectively perplexing conclusion. In this way, it also offers a productive, if difficult, model for ethical action in the world beyond the text. Integrating Talia Schaffer's insights on the ethics of care with narratological analysis and personal reflection, I show that care—as an action, not an emotion—can both catalyze and result from the narratively informed recognition of the gaps in one's knowledge about the lives of others. In the tale of Ogg's beatification—a passage regularly overlooked by critics of the novel—he aids a stranger precisely because he recognizes that he does not understand the reason for the needs she expresses. "It is enough that thy heart needs it," Ogg declares, and he is divinely rewarded when he accepts her unknowability and provides the material care the stranger requests. In this process, which I call "caring through the gap," Ogg's narratively informed awareness of his lack of knowledge stimulates, rather than stymies, his care-action. Caring through the gap is further developed as a flexible, intersubjective narrative process in the wrenching final scene between protagonists Maggie and Tom Tulliver. By refusing an affectively satisfying conclusion, Eliot's novel enacts the realist truth that giving and receiving care is ethically meaningful, even—perhaps especially—when resolution remains elusive. This dynamic also illuminates how the adaptable process of caring through the gap becomes urgently relevant in today's divided social worlds.