Performing feminist empathy in Claire Keegan's Small Things like These (2021): from affective encounters to (cruel) optimism

Abstract

This article dwells on Sarah Ahmed’s notion of “affective relationality” and her suggestion that empathy involves the subject’s reaction to the pain of others and willingness to be affected by it. Such postulates are used to explore Small Things like These (2021), the latest novel by the acclaimed Irish writer Claire Keegan. I contend that the book contributes significantly to demand an imperative culture of feminist empathy towards former inmates of the Magdalen Laundries system in Ireland and their ongoing predicaments. This is achieved through the protagonist’s constant uneasiness for how responding proactively to injustice and to the suffering of the Magdalen Other may destabilise his own well-being and that of his family. Ireland’s culture of empathy is, thus, sharply cross-examined by means of a critique of the many fallacies of the moral order against which the story is projected. My analysis focuses on the complexity of affects addressed in the text, where interpersonal encounters and intersubjective identification between the empathetic subject and the object of empathy are foregrounded as relevant for the achievement of a more ethically sustainable society that transcends the temporal framework of the novel.