In the broadest sense, Brooklyn is a simple coming-of-age tale. Charting the end of Eilis’s adolescence and the beginning of her adulthood, Tóibín creates a portrait of a young woman as she enters the adult world while navigating a life abroad. Interestingly enough, though, Eilis remains passive throughout the novel, despite her many advancements. Although she gains various forms of success and ultimately begins to actively work toward new opportunities, the major decisions she makes along the way are profoundly influenced by other people. In fact, it’s not so much that the people around Eilis inform her decisions, but rather that they effectively make them for her. For instance, she only migrates to the United States because Rose and her mother want her to, and she only starts attending night classes at Brooklyn College upon Father Flood’s suggestion. Furthermore, she returns to Ireland not because she wants to, but because her sister has died, and she only goes back to Brooklyn when news of her marriage to Tony ruins her chances of further pursuing her relationship with Jim Farrell. Accordingly, it becomes clear that Eilis rarely makes decisions for herself. And yet, she does still make her way into young adulthood with a number of promising prospects for the future—a sign that growing up is sometimes an uneven process of moving from passivity to a more active sense of agency.
When Eilis goes to the United States, she does so simply because the entire journey has been arranged for her by Rose and Father Flood. Not wanting to let them down, she agrees to live in Brooklyn and work at a department store, despite the fact that she has strong misgivings about the idea and wishes she could call the whole thing off. Of course, it makes sense that she would go along with her family’s plans for her, since she is—at the time—still rather young and inexperienced. Indeed, her willingness to accept other people’s decisions about her life is reasonable, since she has (like all children) spent her entire childhood and adolescence letting her family members help decide what’s best for her.
Because she’s so used to letting other people inform or even make her decisions, it’s not particularly surprising that Eilis ends up enrolling in night classes at Brooklyn College not because she has actively sought out an education, but because Father Flood suggests it. Although she has taken bookkeeping classes in the past and likes the idea of becoming an official bookkeeper in America, she doesn’t go out of her way to make this happen. Instead, she waits until Father Flood offers to help her attend Brooklyn College—a fact that emphasizes once again that she’s fairly passive when it comes to making decisions about her own life. However, it’s also worth noting that some of Eilis’s passivity (especially when it comes to her career) is most likely informed by how few opportunities were actually available to women in the mid-1900s. In Ireland at that time, many women weren’t allowed to work after getting married, while women in the United States constituted less than 35% of the nation’s workforce. Bearing these facts in mind, it makes an unfortunate kind of sense that Eilis wouldn’t seek out opportunities for herself, since she simply doesn’t know these opportunities are even available to her.
Although it’s important to understand the broader context of Eilis’s professional passivity, it’s also notable that she isn’t particularly proactive in other areas of her life, either. This is made evident when she returns to Ireland after Rose’s death and slowly falls into a relationship with Jim Farrell even though she initially has no interest in him. She doesn’t find anything appealing about Jim, but she keeps allowing her friend Nancy to plan double dates with her fiancé George, Jim, and Eilis. Of course, Eilis has already married Tony, but she still becomes involved with Jim, acting as if she can’t control her own romantic life (which, to be fair, could also be an indication that women at that time had little say in their personal lives, too). Once she develops a legitimate relationship with Jim, though, Miss Kelly (her former employer) tells her that her cousin is Mrs. Kehoe, her landlord in Brooklyn. Mrs. Kehoe, it appears, has told Miss Kelly that Eilis is in a relationship with Tony, thereby forcing Eilis to return to Tony, since she realizes that everyone in town will soon know that she has a husband waiting for her in Brooklyn. In other words, her decision to return to Brooklyn isn’t actually much of a decision, but just one more example of her passive nature giving in to outside circumstances. Rather than actively making plans, Eilis simply lets life wash over her. This, it seems, is because she’s still learning how to be an independent young woman, though it’s also most likely a byproduct of the lack of agency that mid-20th-century society taught women to embody.
It is true that Eilis is passive throughout the novel, but the very end of the book implies that she has begun to realize that her decisions can directly impact her life. On her way back to Brooklyn, she feels strangely happy that she’s returning to America, thinking that this moment—her decision to leave Ireland—will someday mean “more and more” to her. This suggests that she sees her return to Brooklyn as something that will inform the rest of her life, and her happiness in response to this realization suggests that, although this particular decision was somewhat forced, she finally understands that she can make her own choices and that making these choices will help her navigate her way through life. Simply put, then, readers sense that Eilis will perhaps strive to become more intentional about her decisions, having learned that manifesting this kind of self-possession is a crucial part of growing up.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Coming of Age and Passivity ThemeTracker
Coming of Age and Passivity Quotes in Brooklyn
Although she knew friends who regularly received presents of dollars or clothes from America, it was always from their aunts and uncles, people who had emigrated long before the war. She could not remember any of these people ever appearing in the town on holidays. It was a long journey across the Atlantic, she knew, at least a week on a ship, and it must be expensive. She had a sense too, she did not know from where, that, while the boys and girls from the town who had gone to England did ordinary work for ordinary money, people who went to America could become rich. She tried to work out how she had come to believe also that, while people from the town who lived in England missed Enniscorthy, no one who went to America missed home. Instead, they were happy there and proud. She wondered if that could be true.
Until now, Eilis had always presumed that she would live in the town all her life, as her mother had done, knowing everyone, having the same friends and neighbours, the same routines in the same streets. She had expected that she would find a job in the town, and then marry someone and give up the job and have children. Now, she felt that she was being singled out for something for which she was not in any way prepared, and this, despite the fear it carried with it, gave her a feeling, or more a set of feelings, she thought she might experience in the days before her wedding, days in which everyone looked at her in the rush of arrangements with light in their eyes, days in which she herself was fizzy with excitement but careful not to think too precisely about what the next few weeks would be like in case she lost her nerve.
She would prefer to stay at home, sleep in this room, live in this house, do without the clothes and shoes. The arrangements being made, all the bustle and talk, would be better if they were for someone else, she thought, someone like her, someone the same age and size, who maybe even looked the same as she did, as long as she, the person who was thinking now, could wake in this bed every morning and move as the day went on in these familiar streets and come home to the kitchen, to her mother and Rose.
She had been keeping the thought of home out of her mind, letting it come to her only when she wrote or received letters or when she woke from a dream in which her mother or father or Rose or the rooms of the house on Friary Street or the streets of the town had appeared. She thought it was strange that the mere sensation of savouring the prospect of something could make her think for a while that it must be the prospect of home.
Rose, she knew, would have an idea in her head of what a plumber looked like and how he spoke. She would imagine him to be somewhat rough and awkward and use bad grammar. Eilis decided that she would write to her to say that he was not like that and that in Brooklyn it was not always as easy to guess someone’s character by their job as it was in Enniscorthy.
“You know what I really want?” he asked. “I want our kids to be Dodgers fans.”
He was so pleased and excited at the idea, she thought, that he did not notice her face freezing. She could not wait to be alone, away from him, so she could contemplate what he had just said. Later, as she lay on the bed and thought about it, she realized that it fitted in with everything else, that recently he had been planning the summer and how much time they would spend together. Recently too he had begun to tell her after he kissed her that he loved her and she knew that he was waiting for a response, a response that, so far, she had not given.
Ellis worked out in her head that the wedding was four days after the planned date of her departure; she also remembered that the travel agent in Brooklyn had said she could change the date as long as she notified the shipping company in advance. She decided there and then that she would stay an extra week and hoped that no one in Bartocci’s would object too strongly. It would be easy to explain to Tony that her mother had misunderstood her date of departure, even though Eilis did not believe that her mother had misunderstood anything.
Upstairs on the bed Eilis found two letters from Tony and she realized, almost with a start, that she had not written to him as she had intended. She looked at the two envelopes, at his handwriting, and she stood in the room with the door closed wondering how strange it was that everything about him seemed remote. And not only that, but everything else that had happened in Brooklyn seemed as though it had almost dissolved and was no longer richly present for her—her room in Mrs. Kehoe’s, for example, or her exams, or the trolley-car from Brooklyn College back home, or the dancehall, or the apartment where Tony lived with his parents and his three brothers, or the shop floor at Bartocci’s. She went through all of it as though she were trying to recover what had seemed so filled with detail, so solid, just a few weeks before.
She could not stop herself from wondering, however, what would happen if she were to write to Tony to say that their marriage was a mistake. How easy would it be to divorce someone? Could she possibly tell Jim what she had done such a short while earlier in Brooklyn? The only divorced people anyone in the town knew were Elizabeth Taylor and perhaps some other film stars. It might be possible to explain to Jim how she had come to be married, but he was someone who had never lived outside the town. His innocence and his politeness, both of which made him nice to be with, would actually be, she thought, limitations, especially if something as unheard of and out of the question, as far from his experience as divorce, were raised. The best thing to do, she thought, was to put the whole thing out of her mind […].
“She has gone back to Brooklyn,” her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmine Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years ahead, when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more.
