Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn is a novel that examines the effects of immigration on a person’s life. A lower-middleclass woman, Eilis uproots her life in Ireland to travel to the United States in the hopes of gaining economic opportunity. In her small hometown of Enniscorthy, she has been trying to work as a bookkeeper for quite some time, but even her sister’s employer won’t hire her. As a result, she takes a job in a grocery store, a position that her mother insists should be temporary. She has this mentality because Eilis’s community is fixated on social status and reputation—if Eilis isn’t going to get married right away, she must find a good and respectable job. Unfortunately for her, working in a grocery store doesn’t qualify as this kind of job, so she goes to the United States. And though she never does more than work on a sales floor in America, she’s pleasantly surprised to find when she returns to Ireland that her reputation has vastly improved. In fact, her life begins to drastically change just because she has lived in the United States. In this way, Tóibín gives readers an interesting perspective on the process of immigration, illustrating not necessarily that Eilis’s life in the United States is better than her life in Ireland, but rather that the mere act of migrating to a nation her community respects has the power to completely transform her social standing at home.
Although her mother and sister have grand plans for her, Eilis has never particularly thought she’ll attain much upward mobility. Instead, she has always assumed she’ll stay in Enniscorthy for her entire life, briefly working a job until quitting to get married and have children. This is why she’s surprised when Rose invites Father Flood over to talk to her about the possibility of migrating to the United States. Suddenly, she feels as if she’s about to begin a life for which she may not be ready. At the same time, though, she’s delighted by the sense that everyone around her seems to know she’s going to the United States. She likes that her fellow townspeople look at her “with light in their eyes,” picking up on just how much her community values her decision to travel to America, even if they didn’t previously give her much thought. With this in mind, Eilis fights back any feelings of hesitancy about her decision to migrate, thereby revealing that she cares more about pleasing others than about doing what she actually wants.
Despite the excitement surrounding her departure, Eilis’s life in Brooklyn is no more glamorous than her life in Enniscorthy. Shortly after she arrives, Father Flood takes her to a department store called Bartocci’s and helps her secure a job as a salesperson. Meanwhile, she lives in a boarding house with five other women, where she’s not even allowed to have male visitors. Accordingly, it’s fair to say that her home life is less comfortable than it was in Ireland, and her professional life is no better than it was when she lived in Enniscorthy. The difference, however, is that she can enjoy the prospect of upward mobility in the United States in a way that she couldn’t in Ireland. To that end, Father Flood enrolls her in night classes at Brooklyn College so that she can become a certified bookkeeper, and the owner of Bartocci’s promises to give her a job in their accounting office once a position opens up. This sense of potential, it seems, is why Eilis’s family members and community think so highly of the United States, a place they respect for the chances it gives a person to advance in life.
When Eilis returns to Ireland for an extended visit, she finds that her life in Enniscorthy has completely changed by mere virtue of the fact that she has lived in the United States. What’s most interesting about this is that she hasn’t yet actually made any tangible improvements to her life since she first arrived in America. Although she has earned her bookkeeping certificate, a job hasn’t opened in Bartocci’s accounting office, and she’s still living in the same humble accommodations as when she first immigrated. All the same, living in the United States for two years has transformed the way people treat Eilis in Enniscorthy. She reflects upon this as she settles into her new, altered existence, thinking about the fact that Jim Farrell is suddenly interested in her even though he was “openly rude to her” before she left for America. Now, though, she thinks that she “carrie[s] something with her, something close to glamour, which ma[kes] all the difference to her […].” It’s worth noting the language Tóibín uses in this moment, since he says that the changes Eilis has undergone now suddenly make a difference to her, not just to her peers—a sign that she has internalized her community members’ belief that living in the United States is something worthy of profound respect. After all, she hasn’t actually attained upward mobility quite yet, but she still relishes her new status in Ireland, and she chooses to celebrate her elevated station instead of being cynical about her community members’ rather superficial change of heart about her. By showcasing the transformative power of Eilis’s immigration, then, Tóibín reveals the shallow thinking that sometimes underlies matters of status and reputation. And yet, at the same time, he also illustrates the understandable fact that people often deeply respect even just the idea of upward mobility, which is why Eilis’s immigration earns her so much positive attention.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Immigration, Social Status, and Reputation ThemeTracker
Immigration, Social Status, and Reputation Quotes in Brooklyn
“Your mother’ll be pleased that you have something. And your sister,” Miss Kelly said. “I hear she’s great at the golf. So go home now like a good girl. You can let yourself out.”
Miss Kelly turned and began to walk slowly up the stairs. Eilis knew as she made her way home that her mother would indeed be happy that she had found some way of making money of her own, but that Rose would think working behind the counter of a grocery shop was not good enough for her. She wondered if Rose would say this to her directly.
Rose, at thirty, Eilis thought, was more glamorous every year, and, while she had had several boyfriends, she remained single; she often remarked that she had a much better life than many of her former schoolmates who were to be seen pushing prams through the streets. Eilis was proud of her sister, of how much care she took with her appearance and how much care she put into whom she mixed with in the town and the golf club. She knew that Rose had tried to find her work in an office, and Rose was paying for her books now that she was studying bookkeeping and rudimentary accountancy, but she knew also that there was, at least for the moment, no work for anyone in Enniscorthy, no matter what their qualifications.
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.
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.
Eilis marvelled at the different ways each person had expressed condolences once they had gone beyond the first one or two sentences. Her mother tried too, in how she replied, to vary the tone and the content, to write something suitable in response to each person. But it was slow and by the end of the first day Eilis had still not gone out into the street or had any time alone. And less than half the work was done.
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 […].
