Small Things Like These

In Small Things like These, doors and doorways represent the conflict between Furlong’s moral ideals and the various external forces that prevent him from acting on those ideals. Throughout the book, Furlong struggles to weigh his impulse to help others and fight back against inhumanity and injustice with the consequences that might result from his actions. The local convent effectively runs Furlong’s hometown of New Ross, and anyone who goes against their rigid (and often hypocritically and ironically unmerciful) interpretation of Christianity risks social ostracization. Furlong, as the illegitimate son of an unwed mother, knows this all too well. He has only barely managed to achieve social acceptance among his fellow townspeople despite the so-called shameful circumstances of his birth, and he is well aware that everything he has worked so hard to achieve could be taken away from him if he does anything to make trouble for the nuns who run the convent. While delivering some coal to the convent one day, Furlong approaches the the coal-house door and finds it locked. In reaction, he inwardly considers whether he “had not turned into a man consigned to doorways, for did he not spend the best part of his life standing outside of one or another, waiting for them to be opened.” Symbolically, Furlong’s observation comments on how his tenuous social acceptance has incapacitated him, rendering him passive and submissive. Fearful of losing what relative acceptance and respect he has worked all his life to achieve, he has made it a point to keep his head down and not do anything to upset anyone, lest his stirring of conflict result in his his and his family’s fall from grace. This poses a critical problem for Furlong after he discovers the Magdalene laundry the convent is running. Not only does Furlong see how desperately the girls and women who reside there are in need of help—but he also recognizes the harsh consequences anyone who moves to help them will face for assisting these so-called “fallen women.”

By the end of novel, though, Furlong can no longer take moral anguish his inaction causes him. No longer willing to be complicit in the rampant injustice and inhumanity he observes in the convent’s treatment of the women and girls who work at the laundry, Furlong returns to the convent and retrieves Sarah, a young woman he met there, then escorts her back to his home. The novel closes with Furlong once more standing at a doorway, as he waits to enter his home with Sarah by his side. But whereas before Furlong has waited for others to open doors for him and allowed doors to be shut behind him, the novel ends with him on the verge of stepping through a doorway of his own accord. Symbolically, then, the final doorway of the novel reflects the triumph of Furlong’s moral ideals over the external forces that have previously rendered him inactive and complicit in injustice and inhumanity.