Feet and Shoes Symbol Analysis

In Small Things like These, feet and shoes symbolize the relationship between a person’s moral obligation, willingness, and ability to treat others with mercy and compassion. Shoes typically reflect a person’s social rank—and their subsequent deservingness or worth. Early in the book, Furlong notes that he observed Eileen eyeing a pair of shoes she saw in a shop window, and he hints at his plans to buy them for her as a Christmas gift. In this context, the shoes symbolize Furlong and his family’s relative privilege and fortune. The girls and women who work at the Magdalene laundry the local convent operate, meanwhile, often go barefoot. Their lack of shoes represents not only their poverty, but also their low social rank. As a result of these “fallen women’s” supposed sinful natures, the Catholic Church—and the town of New Ross, whose social norms the Church shapes and regulates—deems them inferior and undeserving of mercy and compassion. Somewhat paradoxically, then, the women’s bare feet simultaneously reflect their need for compassion and the fact that (according to the hypocritical Catholic Church) that they are undeserving of that compassion.

Notable, too, is the subliminal religious imagery of feet. In the Book of John in the Christian Bible, there is a scene in which Jesus washes his disciples’ feet and encourages them to do the same to others. The basic moral of the story is twofold: Jesus is suggesting both that a person should humble themselves to help others, and also that everyone is deserving of help. Notably, the story challenges that a person’s rank or goodness has anything to do with their deservingness or their right to dignity and respect. Jesus, despite being his disciples’ leader, is equally as obligated to serve his disciples as they are to serve him, or to serve anyone else, for that matter. This lesson reflects the moral conflict at the heart of Small Things like These, in which Bill Furlong must rebel against the view of the local convent (and the town of New Ross as a whole) that people must earn compassion and human dignity. In Furlong’s mind, a person’s obligation to help others has nothing to do with whether they owe the person in need, or whether the person in need has earned compassion. Instead, the mere fact that a person is in a position to help (that they have shoes, so to speak) is enough to obligate them to help a person in need (a person who has no shoes). The closing scene of the novel, in which Furlong stands at the door of his home, clutching the new shoes he has purchased for Eileen, with the barefoot Sarah by his side, drives home this symbolism.