Home: a place of conflicting emotions by Dr Jennifer Minter
In Brooklyn, Colm Toibin’s main protagonist, Eilis Lacey, struggles with homesickness as she relives the typically Irish immigrant experience in America during the 1950s. Despite her desire to resettle, Eilis’s relationship with “home” shifts and changes as she struggles to come to terms with the consequences of living in two places – both physically and emotionally. Ambiguously, home represents a place of divided and uncertain loyalties. Even before her fate is decided, by Father Flood, an Irish priest who has emigrated to the United States, and by her sister, Rose and mother, Mrs Lacey, Eilis is aware that something is not quite right in her home town, Enniscorthy. In many ways, “home” seems to lack something that separates her from complete fulfilment and that continues to dog her throughout her personal journey.
Evidently, Eilis’s journey to America takes her into unexplored territory and her new home in Brooklyn is plagued by a desperate feeling of homesickness and nostalgia, so that she never feels completely “solid” there either. However, it also becomes a place that provides Eilis with the opportunity to renew herself and carve an independent future without the strong shadows cast by her family. Whilst her mother continues to symbolise absence and the tug of her Irish roots, Eilis also forges a homely relationship with Tony Fiorello and his surrogate family that will only ever be a substitute.
Accordingly, home captures and reflects Eilis’s journey and her dilemmas. The search for a new “home” is both within her grasp owing to a plethora of new opportunities but it also becomes elusive because of the constant invasion of her past and the memories associated with place. “Home” is therefore a place of prospective happiness and security, but also the place of loss and disappointment.
Home reflects the “two people” of Eilis’s journey
Evidently, Enniscorthy represents many of the positive attributes of home such as comfort, security and familiarity, but it is also a place that divides Eilis from herself in many subtle ways. From the beginning, readers are alerted to the fact that she always imagined staying in Enniscorthy permanently — “in the town all her life, as her mother had done”.
At the same time, Toibin suggests that it is difficult for Eilis to procure employment in this insular town in a socially-conservative environment; she also appears denied of a rosy romantic future. Employment with Ms Kelly becomes a source of humiliation as her employer often brushes her aside and chastises her in front of other customers. (“She checked every price Eilis wrote down, informed her briskly of the price when she could not remember, and wrote down and added up the figures herself after Eilis had done so.”) The shadow of Ms Kelly’s contemptuous treatment also recalls the personal snub she suffered from Jim Farrell, an eminent suitor. At the dance, Jim appears offhanded and rejects Eilis. He “imperiously glanced around the hall, ignoring her”. Romantically, indeed, she becomes destined to become the “wallflower”. Eilis feels ashamed and proudly leaves “with as much dignity as she could”, suggesting that her pride has been irrevocably wounded. These experiences suggest that Eilis must venture elsewhere for solace and support.
The motivation and impetus to emigrate to Brooklyn quietly overtakes Eilis as a foregone conclusion, arranged by others, and in response to her circumstances.
Father Flood is invited to the house for tea, and Eilis soon realises, the invitation has a more significant purpose. She is not present during the discussions; she “quietly left the room” and before she is fully aware of his important visit, she knows that “it had somehow been tacitly arranged that Eilis would go to America. Father Flood, she believed, had been invited to the house because Rose knew that he could arrange it”.
Ironically, the silence that surround his visit leads Eilis to conclude that Rose and her mother were “in favour of it”. (“She had never considered going to America.”)
Like stage-directors, both Rose and her mother control her life and the fact that she settles in Jack’s room becomes a foreshadowing device of departure. Eilis imagines an overriding sense of loss before her departure at the certain fact that she would “lose this world forever”. She wonders if the “wrong sister” is leaving. After all, Rose always seemed the one who is “ready for life”, and who makes friends with ease, perhaps therefore unnecessarily sacrificing herself for her sister. This sense of sacrifice will forever plague Eilis in Brooklyn as her life there becomes a constant “struggle with the unfamiliar”, but a struggle that takes on many different hues. For example, the sense of impending loss, the fact that she would “happily stay here and take care of her mother” means that America will always remind her of sacrifice and loss — not just Rose’s. The mother too, exclaims, “it’ll kill me when she goes”. But as we also know, Jack soon cherishes his independence.
As if to make up for their overriding sense of disappointment, America becomes a place infused with “compensating glamour”. It is this sense of glamour that eventually sets Eilis apart and makes her imminently desirable but the glamour, as we find out, comes at a cost.
Both Jim Farrell and Miss Kelly loom large in Eilis’s departure and eventual return home, as “home” becomes an increasingly complicated place of loss and humiliation as well of pride and dignity. Her past continues to haunt her in the figure of Miss Kelly who reminds her of her inability to stay. Contrastingly, hindsight sheds light on Jim’s snub that, born of misunderstanding, reinforced her separation and distance. Ironically, upon Eilis’s return a year later, Jim explains to her that he was attracted to Eilis but was reeling from his own personal setback with Alison Prendergast. He was the one who was reluctant to set himself up once again for rejection thus cementing a bond between them that will, perhaps sadly, never be realised.
Brooklyn : a place of loss and a “terrible weight”
Toibin thrusts Eilis into a world of emotional anxiety and turmoil, exacerbated by her disconnection with her family. Essentially, her immigrant experience in Brooklyn is characterised by a sense of loss and nostalgia as she constantly looks to the past. Plagued by homesickness and the “weight of loss”, she “hated the house” and struggles to adapt. Father Flood’s comment, “you’re homesick, that’s all” represents the expectation that sadness emerges from migration and that , eventually, familiarity will triumph over sadness.
Toibin uses setting to reinforce a strong sense of absence and the emotional rift that plagues Eilis in Brooklyn; the room is unhomely and makeshift, and in this death-like place referred to as a “tomb” Eilis feels like a “ghost” which serves as a reminder of the security and warmth of a home that she may never recover. Typically, the room reflects her “ghostlike” and insubstantial presence. She felt a “nobody” owing to her lack of familiar connections. “No