48 pages • 1 hour read
Claire KeeganSmall Things Like These
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Otherness and Belonging in a Closed Culture
New Ross, a small town where public institutions are run by the Catholic Church and everyone knows everyone else’s business, is a difficult place to be exceptional. Its residents, who are primarily economically struggling Catholics, can remain safe or even occasionally advance their positions by conforming to the status quo and staying on the right side of the right people. There is a high premium on belonging as a means of social capital. Conversely, being different or “other” can endanger a person’s reputation and livelihood. Furlong struggles with this dynamic as he faces difficult ethical choices and comes to terms with his own background throughout the novel.
Economic independence is one way individuals in the novel can maintain their difference without being defamed or ostracized. Mrs. Wilson, a Protestant widow who lives outside the town in a large, aristocratic house and farms her own land with the assistance of Catholic workers Ned and Sarah, has the economic and social means to liberate herself from the dictates of Catholicism and patriarchy. Ironically, although Mrs. Wilson’s power is aligns with the historical oppression of British colonial rule in Ireland, in the mid-20th century’s conservative Irish Catholic republic, her land is the site of utopian experiments in freedom and generosity. Thus, she becomes the crucial intermediary who stops Furlong’s unmarried mother from being punished by the community. She makes exceptions to societal norms not only for Sarah but also for her son, who enjoys Mrs. Wilson’s protection and is spared the worst of the stigmatization of being born to an unmarried mother. Instead, with “the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say” (67), she nurtures Furlong and helps him gain community acceptance.
Furlong uses the protection, funds, and education that Mrs. Wilson offers him to become one of New Ross’s upstanding Catholic citizens, but he still harbors a sense of himself as an outsider. This stems, in part, from the mystery of his paternity. His name, William, seems to be “after the [Protestant] kings” that colonized Ireland, and both Ned and the villagers encourage the rumor that Furlong’s father was a Protestant. This fiction, which contrasts with the simple and obvious truth that Ned fathered the child, works to Furlong’s advantage, as it lends him the aura of being an exception to the general rule about “legitimacy.” Had the truth of his paternity been known, he would have suffered greater slights; Furlong’s community does not always hold outsiders, including Protestants, to Catholic standards of marriage. While it emerges that Furlong has no Protestant blood, he is a protestant in the literal sense, as he challenges the status quo.
Precarity and Privilege in Patriarchal Society
Gender plays an important role in determining which characters experience privilege versus precarity in their attempts at living successful lives in New Ross. This dynamic is complicated by socioeconomic status, which can override established patriarchal norms that privilege men over women in New Ross’s Irish Catholic society.
As the primary male character in the novel, Furlong represents an intersection of precarity and privilege based on his gender and socioeconomic status. Though men enjoy more privilege than women in his community, Furlong may be overconfident that his status as a privileged outsider will protect him and his family when he enters the convent, which is run by nuns who stigmatize women like Furlong’s mother. His connection to a stigmatized woman—his mother—lowers his esteem in the church community’s eyes and puts limits on his conduct. His encounter with Sarah imbues Furlong with the sense that he can be her savior just as Mrs. Wilson was his. However, Furlong’s socioeconomic privilege is only vicarious, whereas Mrs. Wilson’s wealth offers her unconditional protection. Her socioeconomic status mitigates the community’s negative bias against Mrs. Wilson’s gender and Protestantism. Both Eileen and the café owner, Mrs. Kehoe, understand this and seek to check Furlong’s desire to rescue Sarah, looking “at him in the way hugely practical women sometimes looked at men, as though they weren’t men at all but foolish boys” (59). The combination of the words “hugely” and “practical” is an unusual one, as practicality is by nature a measured trait. It suggests that Furlong considers his wife and Mrs. Kehoe are pragmatic to a fault, but the townspeople’s negative reaction to Furlong’s rescue of Sarah proves them right. As working-class women in a church-run patriarchal society, they have even less institutional power than Furlong and, therefore, are even more at risk if they upend cultural norms.
Eileen recognizes that Mrs. Wilson is socially and economically independent of the church and can do as she wishes, but she knows that this is not the case for the town’s Catholic women like herself, who risk being ostracized for resisting the church’s authority. Moreover, women face greater risks than men if their bodies attract notice, as they are sexualized regardless of their behavior or consent. This is why young women who are curvaceous or experience puberty early are remanded to the convent; the church punishes women— especially young women—for failing to obscure themselves, even when doing so is outside of their control.
Although Furlong acts on women’s behalf, both as a father and as a rescuer, he is not immune to misogynist beliefs that reinforce patriarchal norms. He at times likens women, including his wife and daughters, to “witches” with their “canny intuitions” (17) and their seeming powers of mindreading and divination. Indeed, there are even times when “he’d almost feared Eileen and had envied her mettle, her red-hot instincts” (17). The word “mettle,” meaning a person’s resilience, is etymologically linked to the hard, resistant material of metal; coupled with the reference to “red-hot instincts” (17), this makes female powers more tangible, precise, and dangerous than his own esoteric ideals. It also shows that any kind of female power in a patriarchal society can be seen as transgressive, regardless of its intent.
Society’s Conflation of Gender and Morality
Both the church and Furlong hold models of what it means to be a good woman. According to the church, a good woman is obedient, chaste, and diligent. Provided that she does not commit the mortal sin of premarital sex or show other signs of disobedience, she can achieve belonging and acceptance through hard work, modesty, and agreeableness. The church defines a mortal sin as one that leads the sinner to hell. This should apply for both men and women who engage in premarital sex, but in traditional Catholic society, the church only considers women who have premarital sex to be morally tarnished.
At the beginning of the novel, Furlong likes that his daughters are becoming “good” women in the Catholic model, as he admires “the sight of Joan singing with the choir, how she looked like she belonged there, with all the others” (19). Here, Joan’s position in the choir is significant, as it shows her achievement of distinction through conformity. Furlong, a man who felt socially ostracized as a boy by not knowing his father’s identity and being the child of a single mother, marvels at Joan’s ability to achieve total belonging within a socially sanctioned group.
If, according to the Catholic Church, a good woman is one who obeys and conforms, a “bad” woman is one who stands out through behavior that transgresses established roles for women, such as acting flirtatiously, being defiant, or becoming pregnant outside of marriage. The Magdalen laundries and mother-and-baby homes reinforce Catholic norms by imprisoning the transgressors, denying them personhood, and rendering their deviations invisible to the rest of the society. Erasing or punishing women who stand out implies that both “good” and “bad” women are expected to make themselves indistinguishable from others and avoid attracting notice.
Women like Eileen and the Furlongs’ daughters, who strive to embody proper moral conduct, are constantly aware of the precariousness of social acceptance. The novel demonstrates this by the physical symbol of the wall that separates the Magdalen laundry from the girls’ school—a thin barrier between damnation and redemption. They guard against their fears of falling into the “damned” group by gatekeeping and reinforcing the powers that ensure the distinction among different types of women. This is done both by being obsequious to the convent and by telling themselves comforting myths about the girls who are punished, such as Eileen’s interpretation that the girls in Magdalen laundry “hadn’t a soul in this world to care for them,” and “all their people did was leave them wild” (31). Eileen, who carefully raised her five daughters as “good” Catholics, spins this explanation to deny the reality that women are made vulnerable by patriarchy and the church’s power. Voicing the church’s binary categorization of women enables her to feel protected by it.
Furlong, however, as the son of an unmarried mother, does not associate female goodness with chastity. Instead, like Mrs. Wilson, he maintains that his mother and those like her are as good and as deserving of opportunities as his wife and daughters. For him, the supreme feminine virtues are the generosity and open-heartedness embodied by Mrs. Wilson. When Eileen fails on these accounts, due to her desire to protect her daughters, Furlong fantasizes about his neighbor, who is an image of fecundity with her waist-length, cinnamon-colored hair, her breasts “loose, under the cotton” of her nightdress, and her pouring “hot milk over bowls of Weetabix for the children” (35). Furlong fixation on the woman’s breasts and milk sexualize her maternal characteristics and position her as the opposite of his wife in her welcoming behavior to strangers and her warm, candlelit kitchen. While Furlong imagines “what it might be like to live there, in that house, with her as his wife” (35), he does not pursue an affair with this woman but seeks to embody her virtue of kindness to strangers as he helps Sarah and opposes the nuns. To Furlong, the nuns, who exploit the vulnerable, are the worst kind of women. Furlong, thus, feels that he must fill the void of what he views as feminine generosity himself now that his mother and Mrs. Wilson are no longer there; he sees the women in his life as selfishly focused on protecting their own, not understanding that reaching out to save other women puts the well-being of the women in his own home at risk.
