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.
Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Chapter 4 introduces the convent, “a powerful-looking place on the hill at the far side of the river” (26). The Good Shepherd nuns who preside over it run a training school for girls as well as a laundry business that services all the facilities and wealthy homes in town. The townspeople are unsure of the exact nature of the laundry. Rumors spread that the training schoolgirls are corrupt and made to do penance by washing stains out of dirty linen. Others claim the nuns are pure-hearted, long-suffering servants doing the grueling work. Yet another rumor holds that the place is “no better than a mother-and-baby home where common, unmarried girls went in to be hidden away after they had given birth” (27). If this is true, it means the girls’ own people sent them there, and their children were sent off for adoption to America and Australia, with the nuns pocketing the profit.
Furlong does not like to believe any of these rumors. However, when he goes to the convent to deliver a load of fuel, he encounters a group of women and girls polishing the floor. They are shoeless, look “scalded,” and are poorly cared for. One girl comes up to him and begs him to help her escape. She has a Dublin accent and tells him she has nobody to help her, and all she wants to do is drown herself. Meanwhile, a nun comes in and checks the coal order. Furlong feels that he is being chastised.
As he goes home, Furlong cannot help picturing the girls in their state of misery. He also noticed a padlock on the inside of the door and the fact that the wall between the convent and St. Margaret’s next door is topped with broken glass.
Furlong tells Eileen what he saw, and she becomes “rigid” but insists that they cannot do anything to change the situation. Furlong thinks Eileen knows something, even as she keeps saying that the laundry has nothing to do with them, since their girls are all well-behaved. She is convinced that there are some things a person must ignore to get on in life. She alludes to the fact that Furlong’s own mother got “in trouble,” and he feels it like a blow. She apologizes and says that as long as they stay on the right side of people, they will not have to endure what those girls go through. Furlong replies that it is a good thing Mrs. Wilson did not share Eileen’s ideas, alluding to the fact that he and his mother might have ended up in the Magdalen laundry. Eileen says that Mrs. Wilson had the special privilege of doing as she pleased due to her money and social standing.
Chapter 5 Summary
Furlong is especially busy at work in the few weeks before Christmas. His oldest daughter, Kathleen, is upset because her mother will not allow her to go into town with her friends, and her father is asking if any of his men trouble her. Both parents are conscious and protective of her safety.
The next day, he wakes up before anyone else in the family except Loretta and finds that the padlock on his gate is frozen over. He asks for help at the neighbor’s, and an alluring young woman with cinnamon-colored hair answers. She offers him the kettle, and he accepts, at peace imagining what it would be like to live in that house with that woman as his wife. He imagines another life and that his own father was one of those who went to England.
Furlong drives up to the convent to make his delivery. Opening the coal house door, he finds a girl who is locked inside and has clearly been there long enough to have several bowel movements. He persuades her to accompany him to the lorry and helps her as far as the front door. He asks her what is going on in the convent. They wait a while in the cold on the front step, and he considers taking her to the priest’s house or home with him, but he also wants to wash his hands of the whole business and be at peace. She asks him to ask the nuns about her baby, who is 14 weeks old; she wonders where her son is. Furlong then encounters the Mother Superior, who pretends that the girl ended up in the shed by accident and is so confused that she “can’t tell night from day sometimes” (40). The Mother Superior insists that Furlong come in and take tea with her. He sits and waits while she deals with the “errant” girl. Then, the Mother Superior asks him about his daughters, whom she knows all about. She says that it must be disappointing that Furlong has no sons to carry on his name. He says he took on his own mother’s name and has nothing against girls, as they are half the population. Then, the girl returns, and the Mother Superior makes a show of offering her tea and cake. When she asks the girl to tell them who put her in the coal shed, she says the others hid her there, and they were playing. The Mother Superior makes it seem as though the girls were simply playing a game of hide-and-seek. She dismisses the coal shed incident and makes a show of letting the girl be idle for the day.
Furlong understands that this woman wants him gone, but his own stubbornness fixes him in place, and he insists on having more tea. It turns out that the nun is suspicious of the immigrants who work for Furlong. She proceeds to give him an envelope of money under the pretense that it is a Christmas present. He goes by the window and finds the girl, whose real name is Sarah Redmond, although she goes by a boy’s name, Enda, at the convent. Sarah is his own mother’s name. He asks what he can do for her, tells the girl his name, and says that she can ask for him at any time. As he leaves, he hears the key being turned and the door being locked.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
Chapters 4 and 5 introduce the convent, a place that is segregated from daily life in the town yet influences everything about it. The distribution of the laundry from the nuns’ alleged business to all the homes of the powerful is a metaphor for the institutional coercion involved in running the Magdalen laundry. The true cost of sustaining it is shown in the contrast between the immaculate linen and the squalor and deprivation that characterize the roughly shorn, sty-eyed inmates who clean it. While the nuns, who represent Society’s Conflation of Gender and Morality, cast the girls in a penitential guise, Furlong takes pity on them. In Chapter 5, his comparison of the girls to his own mother extends to the coal shed inmate’s real name, Sarah, which is the same as his mother’s. While Furlong is initially intimidated when the Mother Superior insists that he take tea with her and promotes a false narrative to explain the girl’s captivity, his sense of himself as The Exception prevails; he stands up for the value of girls and women, even declaring that taking his mother’s name did not harm him. His boldness is evident in the Mother Superior’s manifest wish to be rid of him and will later be reflected when Mrs. Kehoe reports on the infamy of his behavior. However, Furlong’s determination to overstay his welcome and his inquiring about Sarah sow the seeds for his controversial rescue of her in the final part of the book.
This part of the book also shows the beginning of tension between Eileen and Furlong regarding the convent and, by extension, the theme of Precarity and Privilege in Patriarchal Society. Eileen’s reaction is a fearful yet pragmatic one; she states that ignoring the convent’s activities will be in their family’s best interests, since they do not have anything like Mrs. Wilson’s social or economic power. However, Furlong draws no sharp distinction between the type of girls who become pregnant without being married and those who do not, as he feels that Mrs. Wilson’s generosity saved his mother from ending up in such a home. He wants to imagine a world where everyone can be as generous as Mrs. Wilson, and everyone can get a second chance like his mother did. Here, Keegan sets the scene for Furlong’s assumption of Mrs. Wilson’s role in the final chapter.
However, while Furlong imagines a more just future for unmarried girls who become pregnant, he remains anxious and vigilant to ensure that his own daughters do not end up in that situation. He guards Kathleen dutifully and wants to know if “any of these men been giving you guff while I was out” (32). Thus, the notion that the Furlong family is vulnerable for having five daughters emerges, as their prospects could be threatened by both preying men and moralistic nuns.
