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Chapter 3
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Small Things Like These, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Subjugation of Women and Girls
Religious Hypocrisy and Abuse of Power
Complicity
Humanity vs. Selfishness
Summary
Analysis
The convent, “a powerful-looking place on the hill at the far side of the river,” faces the town. The gardens are immaculately maintained, and people often comment on how picturesque the grounds appear. The nuns there run a training school for girls, as well as a laundry business. The laundry business has a good reputation about town.
The narration’s description of the local convent as “a powerful-looking place on the hill” hints at its strong influence over life in New Ross. One gets the sense that the convent—and the powerful religious institution that runs it, the Catholic Church—keeps a close eye on the people of New Ross, who know to keep their behavior in line with Catholic social mores, lest they suffer the social ostracization that, say, Furlong’s mother experienced with her illegitimate pregnancy.
Active
Themes
But people also say other things about the convent—like that the so-called “training school” isn’t a training school at all, but that the girls who attend it are “of low character” and are there to “be[] reformed, doing penance by washing stains out of the dirty linen” all day long. A local nurse once treated a 15-year-old girl there who had varicose veins from standing too long. Other people say the place is an ordinary sort of place where unwed mothers go “to be hidden way until they had given birth,” after which their children are sent off and adopted by wealthy families in America—that the nuns are operating quite an “industry.” Furlong doesn’t believe any of these stories—he assumes it’s mostly just gossip.
People in New Ross euphemistically refer to the convent’s laundry as a “training school” to conceal the reality of what really goes on there, or at least what the rumors say goes on there. The laundry/training school in question is a Magdalene laundry, an institution funded by the state and usually run by the Catholic Church at which women and girls of so-called “low character” (sex workers and unwed mothers, for instance) worked long, unpaid and frequently unrecognized hours to “be reformed.” In fact, as the nurse’s story about the 15-year-old girl with varicose veins suggests, the girls and women experienced horrific, frequently abusive working conditions. The existence of such a place in New Ross hints at the abuse of power and hypocrisy at play within the Church, which preaches tenets of mercy and compassion yet treats some of the most vulnerable members of society with cruelty and a total lack of mercy. In particular, this passage hints at the hypocrisy of the people of New Ross, who regularly attend Mass and cast judgment on so-called immoral people—yet turn a blind eye to the town’s laundry, which would, in a perfect world, prompt widespread moral outrage.
Active
Themes
One evening, Furlong drives to the convent to drop off a delivery. On his way to the the coal house, Furlong walks past a chapel and finds over a dozen young women and girls inside, on their hands and knees, polishing the floor. He asks for Sister Carmel to get their attention, and when they see him, “they look[] like they’[ve] been scalded.” One girl, whose hair has been choppily cut and who has an infected eye, approaches Furlong and begs him to take her as far as the river. Or he can take her home with him. “I’ll work til I drop for ya, sir,” she promises. Furlong notes the girl’s Dublin accent. He says he can’t take the girl anywhere. The girl begs him at least take her to the river Barrow, for all she wants is to “drown [her]self.”
A nun enters the chapel just then, and the Dublin girl falls silent. Furlong tells the nun he was looking for Sister Carmel—he’s here to deliver logs and coal. The nun tells him Sister Carmel has gone to St. Margaret’s, then she escorts Furlong out of the chapel. She implicitly chastises Furlong for upsetting the geese when he arrived, and this makes him not mention anything about the girl he spoke to. The nun goes to the lorry to inspect the delivery to make sure it matches the order, and then she sends Furlong on his way. As he leaves the convent, Furlong remembers that he noticed a padlock on the inside of the door to the chapel.
Active
Themes
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In bed that night, Furlong decides—albeit reluctantly—to mention what he saw that day to Eileen. When he does, Eileen grows “rigid” and adamantly insists that what goes on at the convnet “ha[s] nothing to do with them,” and there’s nothing they can do for the girls there. And besides, aren’t her and Furlong’s daughters “well, and minded?” Eileen tells Furlong that there are some things a person ought not think about—“If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on,” she tells him. She accuses him of being “soft-hearted.” Then she references the “trouble” that Furlong’s own mother got herself into—a low blow.
Things are tense for a time, and eventually Eileen apologizes. Still, she cautions Furlong to just mind his own business. The girls at the convent are there because they were raised “wild,” and then “when they got into trouble,” their people abandoned them. Furlong asks Eileen if she’d think differently if one of the girls were their own. Eileen says that’s the point: “Tis not one of ours.” Furlong, in response, asks what would have become of him if Mrs. Wilson had thought that way. Eileen says Mrs. Wilson was different—she had her big house and her pension. “Was she not one of the few women on this earth who could do as she pleased?”
