Small Things Like These

“Mothers, so used now to ducking their heads and running to the clothesline, or hardly daring to hang anything out at all, had little faith in getting so much as a shirt dry before evening. And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary.”

This description of how New Ross’s residents manage the cold gives an impression of dwindling faith. The mothers, “so used to ducking their heads,” a gesture that can literally mean avoiding the rain, or more metaphorically, keeping a low profile so that they do not get into trouble, think that the odds of good weather—and, by extension, luck—are so little in their favor that they do not hang their clothes out to dry. Their “little faith” in a good outcome is mirrored in the fact that fewer people than before kneel to say the rosary. The cold that “cuts the knees off those” who do is a violent image that connects the oppression of the weather to that of the Catholic Church and the theme of Privilege and Precarity in Patriarchal Society.

“Furlong had come from nothing. Less than nothing, some might say. His mother, at the age of sixteen, had fallen pregnant while working as a domestic for Mrs. Wilson, the Protestant widow who lived in the big house a few miles outside of town.”

The clichéd phrase to “come from nothing” indicates that a person is from a poor, obscure family who is unable to help them make their way in the world. This highlights the theme of Otherness and Belonging in a Closed Culture. However, Furlong coming from “less than nothing” indicates a state of shame and secrecy that is worse than poverty. The phrase “fallen pregnant” is a passive construction that has the quality of a curse rather than an action. Furlong’s mother’s lowly state as a Catholic domestic employee is contrasted with that of her employer, Mrs. Wilson, who is Protestant and lives in one of the remaining aristocratic “big houses” in the country. Living a few miles outside of town symbolizes Mrs. Wilson’s separation from the expectations that govern those within the town’s parameters.

“Sometimes Furlong, seeing the girls going through the small things which needed to be done – genuflecting in the chapel or thanking a shop-keeper for the change – felt a deep, private joy that these children were his own.”

Furlong’s paternal pride over his daughters is atypical in the patriarchal society he lives in. The fact that his delight in them is a “deep, private joy” indicates that he knows better than to brag about them. However, the “small things”—a phrase that echoes the title—that make Furlong proud of his daughters are feminized gestures of servility and compliance. Acts such as genuflecting, the action of going down on one knee in Catholic worship, and thanking a shopkeeper indicate that Furlong is proud of his daughters for knowing how to get on with people and adhere to societal norms and expectations.

“While making the rounds, Furlong seldom listened to the radio but he sometimes tuned in and caught the news. It was 1985, and the young people were emigrating, leaving for London and Boston, New York. A new airport had just opened at Knock, in Mayo. […] The crowds down in Cork and Kerry were thinning out but some still were gathering at the shrines, in the hope that one of the statues might move again.”

This extract departs from the narrative’s usual close focus on the happenings in New Ross to zoom out and show the town’s state in the context of the rest of Ireland. The emphasis on the year situates the narrative in a particular point when Irish emigration is rampant. The emphasis on young people leaving gives the impression of the country being left behind. The “thinning” crowds at the religious shrines of Cork and Kerry indicate that the Catholic faith is not as dominant as it was before, and the country is in a sort of limbo between past and future. Still, the notion that some are still waiting for the miracle of moving statues and to have their faith proven indicates the extent of the religion’s hold on Ireland over time.

“The times were raw but Furlong felt all the more determined to carry on, to keep his head down and stay on the right side of people, and to keep providing for his girls.”

Furlong’s attitude at the beginning of the novel is one of grim determination and compliance with the status quo. The phrase to “stay on the right side of people” is repeated in the novel and indicates that one’s social position and one’s family’s opportunities depend on their currying favor with others in the town. The vagueness of the term “people” gives it more power, as it encompasses the notion of general public opinion while also referring to those in power.

“They could be like young witches sometimes, his daughters, with their black hair and sharp eyes. It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind.”

The simile likening Furlong’s daughters to witches is a sharp contrast to his former vision of their compliance and represents Society’s Conflation of Gender and Morality when it concerns women’s conduct. The black hair and sharp eyes that they inherited from his wife take on a sinister bent and conform to the cliché of a witch. The supernatural powers of mind-reading and clairvoyance that Furlong projects onto women are terrifying to him as a man because he does not understand them. Although Furlong does not realize it in this moment, the witch is another form of female transgressor who challenges the status quo, like the “fallen” women in a Magdalen laundry.

“Mrs. Wilson had rubbed the top of his head and praised him, as though he was one of her own. ‘You’re a credit to yourself,’ she’d told him. And for a whole day or more, Furlong had gone around feeling a foot taller, believing, in his heart that he mattered as much as any other child.”

Mrs. Wilson’s affection toward Furlong “as though he was one of her own” gives this shunned child a sense of legitimacy. However, by praising his academic abilities and saying he is a credit to himself, she gives him the confidence that he will be able to thrive due to his own powers rather than to his connection with her. The confidence she imbues in him manifests in the physical sensation of feeling taller and believing he is as good as any other child. That this occurred for “a whole day or more” indicates that the feeling was temporary, rather than a permanent boost to his self-esteem.

“The weather had turned dry and colder, and people remarked on what a picture the convent made, how like a Christmas card it almost was with the yews and evergreens dusted in frost and how the birds, for some reason, had not touched a single berry on the bushes there; the old gardener himself had said so.”

The picturesqueness of the convent, which looks “like a Christmas card” with its attractive red berries and frosted greens, indicates the high esteem in which the citizens of New Ross hold it. The surreal feat of the berries on the convent bushes remaining uneaten by birds, which is reinforced by the rumor mill started by the old gardener, gives the impression of double standards for the facility and everyone else. While the townspeople are plagued by bleak, miserable cold, the nuns live in an enchanted winter scene.

“There was other talk, too, about the place. Some said that the training school girls, as they were known, weren’t students of anything, but girls of low character who spent their days being reformed, doing penance by washing stains out of dirty linen, that they worked from dawn til night.”

This passage highlights Society’s Conflation of Gender and Morality. The gossip about the nuns’ activities at the convent turns out to be an accurate report, giving the impression that the Magdalen laundry is an open secret. The rumor mill reflects the Catholic Church’s metaphor of washing stains out of linen as a form of penance, even as it acknowledges the exploitation involved in working “from dawn til night.”

“He’d carried on to a small, lighted chapel where he found more than a dozen young women and girls, down on their hands and knees with tins of old-fashioned lavender polish and rags, polishing their hearts out in circles on the floor. As soon as they saw him, they looked like they’d been scalded.”

The sight of the exploitation at the laundry comes upon Furlong all at once. The reference to “old-fashioned lavender polish and rags” indicates his feeling that he has come across a scene of old-world labor and punishment. The use of the hackneyed term “polishing their hearts out” indicates Furlong’s tenderness toward them and the intensity of their labor. Their looking at him as though they were scalded indicates the state of their seclusion and the shock of finding a male visitor from the outside world.

‘“Well, there’s girls out there that get in trouble, that much you do know.’ The blow was cheap but it was the first he’d heard from her, in all their years together. Something small and hard gathered in his throat then which he tried but felt unable to voice or swallow. In the finish, he could neither swallow it down nor find any words to ease what had come between them.”

When Furlong tells Eileen about the Magdalen laundry, she insists that the girls who go there are distinct from the ones they are raising. She indicates that their daughters are not like Furlong’s mother who got “in trouble.” Furlong experiences her pronouncement as a form of physical pain and is on the brink of tears. Ultimately, this fragment in his throat that stops his speech becomes a barrier between them. This marks a turning point after which their relationship becomes increasingly strained.

“Weren’t Mrs. Wilson’s cares far from any of ours? […] Sitting out in that big house with her pension and a farm of land and your mother and Ned working under her. Was she not one of the few women on this earth who could do as she pleased?”

When Furlong brings up Mrs. Wilson as a model of Christian charity in her treatment of his own unmarried, pregnant mother, Eileen retorts that Mrs. Wilson’s social and economic standing set her apart from everyone else. The image of her “sitting out in that big house” creates an image of Mrs. Wilson’s separation from the society that oppresses the rest of them. The hyperbole of Eileen’s stating that Mrs. Wilson was “one of the few women on this earth” who can act as they please indicates how distant and inaccessible her autonomy seems.

“Of late, he was inclined to imagine another life, elsewhere, and wondered if this was not something in his blood; might his own father not have been one of those who had upped, suddenly, and taken the boat for England? It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.”

This passage marks a turning point in Furlong’s attitude; He goes from being grateful for his wife and daughters to imagining other lives. On a metaphorical level, this indicates his frustration with the pressures of Otherness and Belonging in a Closed Culture and his questioning whether things must be as they are. The act of suddenly leaving for England indicates a betrayal of Ireland and its ideals, and Furlong imagines that this happened with the father who left him; thus, in imagining leaving himself, he is connected to a line of rebels.

“He couldn’t properly see and was obliged to go back to the lorry, for the torch. When he shone it on what was there, he judged, by what was on the floor, that the girl within had been there for longer than the night.”

When Furlong senses signs of life in the coal shed at the convent, he goes back to his lorry for a torch. While Furlong initially expected a dog was in the coal shed, he finds a girl locked inside. Keegan relates her presence in a matter-of-fact way, following Furlong’s torch across her excrement—“what was on the floor.” The torch is a metaphor for truth and seeing clearly, as Furlong finally does.

“What have I against girls? […] My own mother was a girl, once. And I dare say the same must be true of you and half of all belonging to us.”

While the nuns and Eileen are keen to make a distinction between different types of girls, pitting them into virtuous and sinful categories, Furlong’s speech does not distinguish between the two. In mentioning that his unmarried mother and the righteous Mother Superior were united by once being girls, Furlong implies that he does not agree with her dehumanizing treatment of some members of her sex.

“The nun at the cooker coughed and gave the frying pan a rough shake and Furlong understood that the girl could say no more.”

In relating the small gestures of the nun’s forced cough and her unusually rough handling of the frying pan, Keegan establishes the powers of coercion and control that the nuns have over their charges, using a regime of terror to control them into silence. However, this facade is crumbling, as Furlong becomes adept in interpreting their codes.

“Furlong stood down near the door as they walked up the aisle, and watched how easily they genuflected and slid into the pew, as they’d been taught, while Joan carried on up to the front, genuflecting and kneeling where the choir was seated.”

While in the earlier part of the novel Furlong admires his daughters’ compliance and ability to fit in, the phrase “as they’d been taught” indicates that he is aware that they have been conscripted into a system without thinking about it. He, thus, sees a sinister side to their compliance, which relates to the theme of Otherness and Belonging in a Closed Culture. This is especially the case with Joan, who sits apart from the rest in the nun-managed choir.

‘“I can handy see the likeness,’ she said. ‘Is Ned an uncle of yours?’ Furlong, unable to find a reply, shook his head and looked past her into the kitchen whose floor was now covered over with lino. He looked at the dresser, too, which was much the same as it had always been with its blue jugs and serving plates.”

When the visitor at Mrs. Wilson’s empty house unknowingly drops the bombshell that Ned, the man whom Furlong thought of as her assistant, looks like his relative, this sentence reveals that Ned is his real father. His act of taking in the house and noting what changed—the linoleum covering the floor—and what stayed the same—the kitchen dresser—is his attempt to familiarize himself with this new situation. The mixture of change and steadfastness in the surroundings indicates that the news of Ned’s being his father is novel but also makes sense and fits in with everything he knows.

“The worst was how the girl had been handled while he was present and how he’d allowed that and had not asked about her baby – the one thing she had asked him to do – and how he had taken the money and left her there at the table with nothing before her and the breast milk leaking under the little cardigan and staining her blouse, and how he’d gone on, like a hypocrite, to Mass.”

This passage highlights the novel’s exploration of Privilege and Precarity in Patriarchal Society. Furlong feels the full weight of his hypocrisy in attending Mass and pretending to be religious although he neglected to do his true Christian duty in giving a dispossessed girl hope and asking the nuns about her baby. By recalling the image of breast milk leaking through a blouse, he conjures up the notion of mother and child’s craving for one another. The idea that he left her “with nothing before her” indicates that she has no hope of a better future or agency over her life; the passive construction “how the girl had been handled” indicates the nuns’ supreme control over her.

“Driving out the road, she labored on the hills and Furlong knew the engine was giving out, that the new windows Eileen had her heart set upon for the front of the house would not be installed next year, or the year after.”

This passage conveys the Furlongs’ strained financial situation, as they do not have the funds to allocate to two competing needs. The feminization of the lorry to a “she” makes her, the means of Furlong’s employment, a sort of mistress that he must service before his wife. The colloquialism that Eileen has “her heart set upon” new windows and the fact that their installation will be delayed by a period of years indicates the extent to which Furlong anticipates disappointing his wife. The delay of the installation conveys the sense of hopelessness that accompanies poverty in the village.

“You’ve reared a fine family of girls – and you know there’s nothing only a wall separating that place from St Margaret’s.”

Mrs. Kehoe reminds Furlong of his hard work in raising a reputable family and then warns him to not throw it all away by getting on the wrong side of the nuns, highlighting the theme of Otherness and Belonging in a Closed Culture. The literal image of “nothing only a wall” separating the school his daughters attend from the Magdalen laundry becomes a metaphor for the lack of separation between one nun-run facility and the other. She also implicitly alludes to the fact that a girl can easily fall from grace and end up on the wrong side of the wall, all of which establishes the nuns’ power as judges.

“Hadn’t it been an act of daily grace, on Ned’s part, to make Furlong believe that he had come from finer stock, while watching steadfastly over him, through the years. This was the man who had polished his shoes and tied the laces, who’d bought him his first razor and taught him how to shave. Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?”

Rather than being irritated at Ned for refusing to confess his paternity, Furlong views the older man’s reticence as “an act of daily grace,” as though he thought that Furlong would be better off if he thought he was the son of one of Mrs. Wilson’s Protestant visitors. However, Furlong feels the nurturing experience of Ned’s paternity in remembering how the latter helped him grow up. The repeated idea of small things being the hardest to see refers to the title motif of all the small things that make up reality and the idea that the answers are close to home, rather than in the distance.

“He’d imagined, while he was in the barber’s, that the door might now be locked or that she, blessedly, might not be within or that he might have had to carry her for part of the way and wondered how he’d manage, if he did, or what he’d do, or if he’d do anything at all, or if he’d even come here – but everything was just as he’d feared although the girl, this time, took his coat and seemed gladly to lean on him as he led her out.”

This passage reveals Furlong’s dread of going through with his moral obligation to free Sarah from the coal yard. His mind offers up distractions in the fantasy that something will happen to prevent him from carrying out his plan. The adverb “blessedly” indicates the extent to which Furlong wants to be released from his duty by some agent of fate. When the girl accepts his coat and leans on him, he realizes that he has no choice but to go through with his act of reckless bravery. Furlong’s divided mind indicates that he is not idealistically heroic but is aware of grim consequences to come.