O peso do silêncio: feminismo e filosofia moral em Pequenas coisas como estas

Abstract

This review analyzes Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan. Set in 1980s Ireland, the novel follows Bill Furlong, a coal merchant whose austere routine is shaped by collective silence, the authority of the Catholic Church, and the Magdalene Laundries. When he encounters a young woman confined in a local convent, Bill is compelled to confront the social normalization of violence. The reading proposes that the work functions as a narrative of moral formation, in which perception and hesitation precede ethical action, and shifts the feminist debate from an exclusive focus on women’s suffering to male moral responsibility. In this way, Keegan articulates an ethics of seeing and acting, in which the awakening of the ordinary man becomes part of the horizon of feminist liberation.