Brooklyn

Colm Tóibín

3 ideas

1. Eilis Lacey's secret marriage and return

   In the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey leaves Enniscorthy for Brooklyn, where her sister Rose and a priest, Father Flood, have arranged a job and lodgings for her. She works at a department store, studies bookkeeping at night, and quietly marries Tony, an Italian-American plumber, just before sailing home after Rose's sudden death. In Ireland she lets a courtship with Jim Farrell and a local job carry her along without mentioning the marriage, until the town shopkeeper Miss Kelly reveals she knows about it, and Eilis books passage back to Brooklyn.

2. Lives shaped by others' arrangements, not choice

   Eilis's biggest life turns come from other people's decisions: her sister and a priest arrange her emigration, her mother's needs pull her home, and a gossip's threat of exposure sends her back. She mostly consents rather than chooses, so even her decisive acts look like reactions to pressure. Shown this way, agency for someone with little power works as a series of acquiescences that only later look like a life.

3. Returning emigrant sees home newly desirable

   On her return, Eilis finds Enniscorthy offering what it withheld before she left: a good job, an eligible suitor, and social standing. Her American polish and her status as a visitor make the town treat her differently. That makes staying seem possible and blurs the commitments she made abroad. The pull of home is strongest when the emigrant is seen as having escaped it.

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