In Brooklyn, a novel that charts a young woman’s journey from Ireland to Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín illustrates the human capacity to gradually embrace new circumstances. Eilis Lacey reluctantly leaves her small hometown of Enniscorthy to live and work in Brooklyn, and though she’s overwhelmingly homesick at first and struggles to fit in amongst her new surroundings, she eventually comes to love her life in the United States. This, as her pastor Father Flood suggests, is because homesickness always passes. In fact, Eilis becomes so accustomed to her new existence that she even begins to dislike the idea of returning to Ireland. Before long, though, she’s forced to go home after the unexpected death of her sister, Rose. And though she’s eager to quickly return to Brooklyn when she first arrives in Ireland, she soon gets swept up in the everyday life of Enniscorthy, making it that much harder to tear herself away once more. By drawing attention to Eilis’s ability to slowly but surely accustom herself to her surroundings, Tóibín suggests that humans have an innate tendency to familiarize themselves with new patterns of life, even if those patterns seem strange and disagreeable at first.
Eilis’s initial decision to leave Ireland isn’t particularly proactive, since she lets Rose and her mother make the arrangements with the help of Father Flood. In the days before her departure, she begins to fret about what her new life will be like, but she doesn’t do anything to delay her journey. In fact, it isn’t until she’s aboard the transatlantic ocean liner that she seems to fully grasp how monumental her move to the United States will be, but even this realization is overshadowed by the intense seasickness she feels for the first few days of the trip. In many ways, her bout of seasickness is a critical turning point in the novel because it underscores the value of understanding that it’s possible to simply wait out hardship. To that end, Eilis’s bunkmate, Georgina, tells her after her first night of vomiting that she should expect to feel this way for at least another day and night. Having made the passage from Ireland to America before, Georgina can confidently tell Eilis that she will have to accept feeling sick for a while longer; there is, she insists, nothing to be done to prevent this. However, she also urges Eilis to consider that once this is over, the ship will be in “calm waters.” By saying this, she frames Eilis’s discomfort as temporary, even if it feels intense and never-ending in the moment. In turn, this mentality proves useful when Eilis later experiences a different kind of sickness—namely, homesickness, which is also seemingly unavoidable but impermanent.
Eilis’s initial days in the United States go well because she’s too busy to reflect upon the fact that her life has undergone such significant changes. As soon as she gets the time to read the first letters from her mother and sister, though, she suddenly finds herself wallowing in lonely despair. The only time she’s ever experienced something similar was when her father died, which made her feel as if nothing in life had any meaning at all. Feeling this way once more, she goes to work at the department store, but her boss, Miss Fortini, takes her off the sales floor because she looks unhappy. Eilis then calls Father Flood, who speaks sympathetically to her about what she’s experiencing. He tells her that everyone experiences homesickness and that for some people it goes away faster than for others. All the same, he stresses that it will pass, regardless of what she feels now. He then enrolls her in night classes at Brooklyn College to take her mind off how she feels. Sure enough, between work, school, and the development of her eventual romantic relationship with Tony, Eilis’s intense longing for home soon subsides, suggesting that simply committing oneself to a routine can help allay strong feelings of depression.
Eilis has occasion to learn this lesson—that time and routine often cure emotional difficulties—once more when she visits Ireland in the aftermath of her sister’s death. At first, she’s unhappy to be home because she had to leave Tony, whom she secretly married before coming back to Ireland. Soon enough, though, she falls into the pleasant and reassuring patterns of her old life. Failing to tell her mother or anyone else about her marriage, she becomes more and more entrenched in Enniscorthy and indefinitely extends her stay. She even begins dating Jim Farrell, telling herself at first that this is only temporary. Once again, then, she gives herself over to the simple passage of time, letting her life at home soothe her in much the same way that she let her day-to-day existence in Brooklyn distract her until she no longer missed Ireland. In this way, Tóibín suggests that people can get used to many different ways of life. And though this is often a good thing because it means people like Eilis are capable of overcoming homesickness and sorrow, Tóibín also hints at the fact that people ought to be aware of just how common it is to simply relax into a lifestyle even when that lifestyle might cause problems. After all, Eilis begins to imagine a future with Jim Farrell instead of Tony, cheating on her husband until she finally realizes that she can’t simply ignore the life she built in Brooklyn. Consequently, readers see that people should proactively choose what kind of lives they’d like to pursue, since humans are so adaptable that it’s possible to passively accept even undesirable circumstances.
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Time and Adaptability Quotes in Brooklyn
As her stomach began dry heaves, she realized that she would never be able to tell anyone how sick she felt. She pictured her mother standing at the door waving as the car took her and Rose to the railway station, the expression on her mother’s face strained and worried, managing a final smile when the car turned down Friary Hill. What was happening now, she hoped, was something that her mother had never even imagined. If it had been somehow easier, just rocking back and forth, then she might have been able to convince herself that it was a dream, or it would not last, but every moment of it was absolutely real, totally solid and part of her waking life, as was the foul taste in her mouth and the grinding of the engines and the heat that seemed to be increasing as the night wore on.
She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything. The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there. In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar. Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing.
None of them could help her. She had lost all of them. They would not find out about this; she would not put it into a letter. And because of this she understood that they would never know her now. Maybe, she thought, they had never known her, any of them, because if they had, then they would have had to realize what this would be like for her.
It was only when he came to the chorus, however, that she understood the words—“Má bhíonn tú liom, a stóirín mo chroí”—and he glanced at her proudly, almost possessively, as he sang these lines. All the people in the hall watched him silently. […] And then each time he came to the chorus he looked at her, letting the melody become sweeter by slowing down the pace, putting his head down then, managing to suggest even more that he had not merely learned the song but that he meant it. Eilis knew how sorry this man was going to be, and how sorry she would be, when the song had ended, when the last chorus had to be sung and the singer would have to bow to the crowd and go back to his place and give way to another singer as Eilis too went back and sat in her chair.
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.
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.
