Digital Object Identifier
Everyday horror insidiously seeps into the pores of modern people’s lives. It is not a monster behind you, but rather a monster within. It is not the shrieking of an axe murderer, but the shrieking of a covered-up trauma. It erupts in the midst of banal routines, leaving behind psychological horror. This horror merges fear with pity and triggers Aristotle’s catharsis. Sympathy removes emotional blockages and cultivates social responsibility towards ignored lives. While trauma studies address abuses in the Magdalene laundries, few examine Keegan’s gothic temporality. However, only a few studies examine how time can carry ethical force. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2022) brings this ethical tension to life Bill Furlong’s 1985 Christmas routine. This novella is set in a small town in Ireland. It provides an inside picture of an institution where a girl feels broken by being locked in a Magdalen laundry. Roman Catholic orders largely ran the Magdalen laundries.. It reflects muffled cries amid holiday normalcy, which reveals church-state abuse of “fallen women”. Keegan powerfully shows the everyday involvement in epistemic silencing and social death. This paper will analyse how silence can be complicit and how heroism is not always grand and flashy but exists in our small decision to stand against wrong.
Ms.Ruchi Pandey. “Haunting Silences: Gothic Temporalities and Institutional Trauma in Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 828-845. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.51.
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