BROOKLYN

by Colm Tóibín

DISCOVERING THE AUTHOR’S LIFE AND TIMES

Colm Tóibín was born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland, and started writing poetry and
stories at the age of twelve, soon after the death of his father.

He graduated from University College Dublin and began a

career in journalism.
He wrote nine novels: The South (1990), The Heather Blazing (1992), The Story of the
Night (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (1999), The Master (2004), Brooklyn (2009) which won the
Costa Fiction Award, The Testament of Mary (2012), Nora Webster (2014), and House of
Names (2017). He also wrote two collections of short stories: Mothers and Sons (2006) and The Empty
Family (2010).

1. When and where was the autor born?

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2. What main event has happened in his childhood that might have had a consequence in his later life ?
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3. What form of literature has he published so far ?

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ILLUSTRATION COVERS.

1. What are the commons points of these covers?

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2. What are the main differences?

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3. Which one do you prefer ? Why ?

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 4. Which themes do you think are being treated in the play ?

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5. Select one of them and make a description of it.

Kinds of pictures Artists Structure

picture, image poster artist in front of on the left handside / on the
painting cartoon photographer =/=behind left
photograph / photo drawing cartoonist in the foreground on the right hand side / on the
portrait cover / front painter in the background right
painting page in the upper part / at in the central part / in the
comic strip the top middle
in the lower part / at next to /near
the bottom

… (image title) is a The picture was taken

painting/drawing/cartoon by …
(artist), painted in … (year).
… (artist) painted … (image) in …
(year).....in (source)
This (image) was published in …..
(year) and extracted from ….....
(source)
in/at/near … (place). /
the scene takes in.....
The photo was taken
in/at/during....(time) The
picture depicts/ shows /
… (scene).

Information on artist and year and origin

Impression Intention

The characters look as if ...
The viewer has the impression that ...
The painting is vivid / happy /
expressive.
The picture makes the viewer feel …
(sad/happy)
The picture inspires the viewer to
think about …
The artist / photographer / painter/ cartoonist uses … to express …
They want to criticise / express / show … It is obvious that the artist wants to
criticise / express / show …
What the artist / photographer / painter wants to criticise / express / show is …
What the artist / photographer / painter wants to point out / focus on is …
I think / believe / am sure that … It seems / appears to me that …
The problem illustrated here is … / The issue raised is …...
… symbolises …

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6. After reading the book, make your own cover.

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DISCOVERING THE BOOK

fill in the blanks with the given words !

heart failure - Italian-American - America - Shop - Enniscorthy - classes - Father - Lacey - 2009
- Brooklyn - sister - style

Brooklyn, a four-part novel published in………………….., focuses on Eilis…………... who lives with

her mother and older……………. ; Rose in the town of …………………..., County Wexford, where

she studies bookkeeping and works in Miss Kelly’s…………………...

Thanks to her sister and an emigrant priest called…………….. ; Flood, Eilis is offered a place and a job

in……………….. , New York. Once in America, she adapts to her new life in Mrs. Kehoe’s Irish

boarding house, in the shop where she works, Bartocci’s, and in Brooklyn College where she

takes…………………… ; in accountancy.

She meets an…………………………….. ; man, Tony, at a dance organised by the Irish parish. Before

her return to Enniscorthy to pay her respects to her sister who has died of…………………

……………………….. ;, Tony convinces her to marry him. Back in Ireland, her community notices

her new American…………. ;, and she lets Jim Farrell, a good match, court her. Feeling threatened by

Miss Kelly’s acquaintance with Mrs Kehoe and the possibility that they might hear of her ‘double life’,

Eilis must leave once again for…………………. ;.

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IRISH MIGRATION

➢ Historical reality of migration through literature

Irish people have emigrated from their country since the eighteenth century, although the peak of Irish
migration was reached in the middle of the nineteenth century, during the Great Famine, leading
millions to move out of Ireland, notably to North America. Brooklyn is inscribed within this
contemporary trend of migration in Irish fiction and represents migration as it was experienced in
the Ireland of the 1950s.
Irish Immigration after the Great Famine

After the Great Famine struck the potato

fields of Ireland in the 1840s, Irish
immigration to America took on a
strikingly different character. The famine
Irish were not the Protestant, relatively
well-to-do immigrants who hadIrish Potato
Famine Farmers assimilated seamlessly
into American society for nearly a century. The new Irish immigrants were largely poor, unskilled, unfamiliar with urban life, and Catholic.

These Irishmen were not welcome. Nowhere was the influence of the Irish immigrant more pronounced than in America's most powerful

city, New York. 75% of the famine Irish landed in New York harbor, and by 1860 a quarter of New York City's population was Irish.

The novel stages

characters that represent
the archetypical figures of
migration. For instance,
Father Flood brings to
mind the emigrant advice
agents who tried to encourage potential workforce to migrate by praising the opportunities abroad. In
the same way, Georgina might stand for the experienced migrant, who is used to travelling back and
forth to her homeland and assists Eilis in her first trip.

ELLIS ISLAND
https://www.google.com/search?
q=irish+migration+USA+1950s&rlz=1C1CHWL_frFR961FR961&hl=en&sxsrf=APwXEdeHUHwIN_
6a4QKpy0iWf6otIEtunA:1684393337819&source=lnms&tbm=vid&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjvz7-Upv7-
AhXLT6QEHdaWDgQQ_AUoA3oECAIQBQ&biw=1707&bih=821&dpr=0.8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:8
35d787b,vid:bDNKHWzQiz8

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 ➢ The emigration of women as a means for their emancipation

More specifically, Brooklyn provides an insight into the historical reality of Irish female emigrants,
through Eilis Lacey’s perspective. Irishwomen were associated with home – understood both as ‘the
house’ and ‘the motherland’ – while Irishmen were required to emigrate for economic purposes.
According to Breda Gray, women have emigrated from Ireland for a variety of motives:
Women have left Ireland in search of life opportunities, career advancement, to give birth and to have
abortions, as a means of personal survival and of contributing to the survival of their families in Ireland.
They have emigrated to escape difficult family circumstances, Catholicism and the intense familiarities
and surveillances that have marked Irish society.

In Tóibín’s novel, Eilis initially migrates “involuntarily” for economic reasons (for the “survival” of her
family in Ireland), just like her brothers. However, her migration eventually becomes the vector of
her emancipation, as it did for many Irishwomen at the time. She progressively grows financially
independent thanks to her job at Bartocci’s, and she intends to become an accountant by taking classes
at Brooklyn College. Indeed, she tells Father Flood that her contemplated career will allow her to repay
him for the money he lent her: “‘I have saved some money,’ Eilis said, ‘and will be able to pay my
tuition the second year and then pay you back for last year when I get a job.’”

However, Eilis’s emancipation remains restricted. In the 1950s, women were still largely confined to
a domestic life and subservient to men and this was also the case in North America. In Brooklyn, even
though she becomes more and more self-reliant, Eilis has little ambition for herself, and mainly pictures
herself as a housewife:

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She knew that once she and Tony were married she would stay at home, cleaning the house and
preparing food and shopping and then having children and looking after them as well. She had never
mentioned to Tony that she would like to keep working, even if just part time, maybe doing the
accounts from home for someone who needed a bookkeeper. (Tóibín, 2010, 213)
Thus, Eilis does have dreams and career prospects, yet she is conscious that, as a woman, her
opportunities are limited, even away from home and family duties or Irish traditions.

➢ An illusory opposition between Ireland and America

Before migrating, Eilis perceives her Irish homeland and her future North American home-state as
antithetic, because she associates the former with her family’s expectations and the latter with freedom.
Nevertheless, her binary vision, which will be contradicted by her actual experience of North
America, is a product of her idealisation, and of the influence of the ‘American Dream’ that every
migrant seeks.
Eilis sees her homeland, Ireland, as an obsolete and traditional society. In Enniscorthy, she works
for Miss Kelly, an elderly woman who runs a grocery shop. To Eilis, Miss Kelly incarnates Ireland as
an archaic and hierarchical system, as opposed to America’s equalitarianism. Indeed, the shop owner
treats her customers differently, depending on their social status.
Ireland is further associated with tradition so that Eilis considers her existenceas already defined, and
modelled on the life all Irish people are destined to: “Until now, Eilis had always presumed that she
would live in the town all her life, as her mother had done [...]. She had expected that she would find a
job in the town, and then marry someone and give up the job and have children.”.
On the contrary, Eilis imagines her future home-state, America, as the place of desire and
modernity. Before moving from Ireland, Eilis had assimilated commonplaces about life in America,
which were so encrusted in her mind that she had come to believe them:
Her conception of the American Dream, which is shared by all migrants, is reinforced by Father Fell
who promotes America as a land of opportunities: “‘In Brooklyn, where my parish is, there would be
office for someone who was hard-working and educated and honest.’
Eilis achieves the American Dream in Brooklyn through consumerism: she marries Tony with whom
she will live on a piece of land he bought on Long Island, and is on her way to become an accountant.

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However, her dual conception of Ireland and America is questioned by her actual experience of
migration: her mobility might not be true mobility, as her American experience mirrors her Irish one.

An immobile migration: Ireland and America as one place

➢ Migration and the diasporic experience

Eilis is fundamentally ‘mobile’ in the sense that she moves to another space, Brooklyn, and that she
undergoes an identity shift, from being subdued to progressively emancipated, from being exclusively
Irish to being both Irish and American. Therefore, America seems to be a place of inclusion, open to
a diversity of diasporic groups. Brooklyn stages different diasporic groups in New York – that is,
communities of migrants – among which the Irish community and the Italian one and Eilis is included
in both. On the one hand, she explores different Irish ‘territories’: first, the Republic of Ireland, then the
Irish diasporic community of Birmingham where her three brothers live, and finally the Irish diasporic
community in Brooklyn. As an Irishwoman, Eilis identifies with these diasporic spaces and with
‘Irishness’, in contrast to ‘Americanness’. On the other hand, Eilis also develops ties with other
diasporic groups in America. She is courted by an Italian-American man and works in a shop that
includes all American residents, regardless of their origins:
‘We treat everyone the same. We welcome every single person who comes into this store.’
Eilis’s experience of migration thus leads her to interact with different diasporic communities and to
constitute her own identity as an Irish-American through their contact.
Nonetheless, America is also a place of exclusion that divides diasporic groups into defined
communities and may prevent exchanges between them. When she moves from Ireland to Brooklyn,
Eilis settles in an Irish parish, peopled by Irish migrants who mostly remain exclusive. In Brooklyn,
some characters epitomise the rejection of other communities of migrants. Mrs. Kehoe’s prejudice
against Italian people who “come looking for Irish girls” stands for the exclusion of non-Irish people
from her own diasporic group. In the same way, Tony’s younger brother Frank states that he and his
family “don’t like Irish people”, which excludes Eilis from the Italian community. Thus, although

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America can appear as a place of mobility because migrants feel integrated there while keeping a link
to their homeland, migrating to America can also be an experience of immobility that leads to a feeling
of exclusion.

➢ Ireland and America: two interchangeable countries

By settling in the Irish parish of Brooklyn, Eilis finds ‘Ireland’ in America. This contradicts her
pre-migration conception of America as a place of freedom, for Irish traditions are what she is once
again confronted to in her home-state. Father Flood himself describes Brooklyn as a ‘Little Ireland’ to
Eilis: “‘Parts of Brooklyn,’ Father Flood replied, ‘are just like Ireland. They’re full of Irish.’ Brooklyn
and Ireland can thus be considered as similar places, because the Irish traditionalism Eilis thought she
would leave behind is omnipresent where she lives in Brooklyn, at Mrs. Kehoe’s boarding house.
Indeed, the elderly Irish lady represents Irish authority and is in charge of the surveillance of the young
Irish women she hosts, who have to follow her strict rules, such as not bringing any boy home, or only
tackling decent subjects.
It is paradoxically because Eilis’s sense of ‘home’ and belonging becomes flexible that her
experience of migration can be considered as stationary – it did not bring her any sense of certainty
about her identity. Firstly, Eilis can no longer see either country as her home. Because both Ireland
and North America can mean home, Eilis is unable to choose between the two and is ultimately caught
inbetween them, or rather ‘stuck’ – none is truly or fully home. Eilis loses her sense of ‘spatial’
belonging – how close she feels to one space or country – as she loses her ties first with Ireland and
then with America. Indeed, her two ‘homes’ become places of familiarity or unfamiliarity, depending
on the country she is staying in: when she is in America, her homeland feels remote to her and when
she visits her family in Ireland, her home-state feels distant.
When Eilis is in one country, she indeed pictures the other country as a ‘dream’, a place that is at the
same time unfamiliar and unreal. Furthermore, she knows she will feel the same way about Ireland,
once she is back in America: “she would look at them [her friends] and remember what would soon, she
knew now, seem like a strange, hazy dream to her” (Tóibín, 2010, 246).

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 ➢ Eilis’s migration as a failed attempt to escape her fate and duty

Eilis’s mobility disrupts her identity more than it makes it clearer to her. Migrating to America tore her
between two spaces, two worlds, between which she cannot choose. Because North America reminds
Eilis of Ireland, she finds in her home-state what she wanted to escape in her homeland, namely
duty. To Eilis, Enniscorthy is associated with her family and filial responsibilities, because of the need
to take care of her aging mother, especially after her older sister Rose died. In that context, going to
America was the promise of independence. Nevertheless, Eilis’s fate is inevitable, as other obligations
await her in America, namely her marital commitment to Tony, whom she marries before leaving for
Ireland.
Her mobility can be considered as a ‘circle’, as she migrates back and forth between her two countries,
somehow always fleeing herself rather than looking for her self. The restlessness of Eilis’s travelling
is paradoxically static because it leads her nowhere, or at least not where she expects.
Eilis Lacey moves from Enniscorthy to Brooklyn, back to Enniscorthy, back to Brooklyn, all in search
of who she can become and where she belongs, finally finding herself nowhere. In the process her Irish
town moves in her mind from a place of confinement to a lost paradise; her America moves from a land
of individual opportunity to a place of confinement as she keeps the vows and takes up the marital
obligations she hoped to escape during her brief return to Ireland. Eilis cannot go home again.
Eilis eventually perceives her homeland and home-state as alien, or as dreams. Eilis’s spatial
immobility – the fact that to her, Ireland and America are equal – is mirrored by an inner immobility, as
the protagonist does not entirely achieve her identity construction through her experience of mobility.

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Eilis’s migration as an incomplete initiatory journey
➢ Eilis’s duality: one body, two selves and spaces

Migrating is an opportunity for Eilis to become someone else than who she is expected to be in Ireland.
She does change by going to America: she undergoes a complex identity shift throughout her
journey, which can be understood as ‘initiatory’. Upon arriving in Brooklyn, Eilis still feels
exclusively Irish and considers herself as an alien in America, which is evidenced by her homesickness:
“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. […]
Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought.”
Nevertheless, she evolves from remaining Irish to living an Irish-American life, through a process of
Americanization. Although she resides in an Irish parish of Brooklyn, Eilis becomes closer to the
American space and way of life: she studies at Brooklyn College, visits Coney Island and goes to the
cinema and baseball matches. As a result, she looks Americanized to her friends back in Ireland, who
cannot help but notice her “new American figure”.

MOVIE’S END
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=jNDneofQOKQ&embeds_referring_euri=http
%3A%2F%2Fcle.ens-lyon.fr%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo

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In spite of the overall faithfulness with which Tóibín’s novel was adapted into a film, the two versions
of the ending differ quite significantly. First, they do not focus on the same man.
Tóibín’s Brooklyn ends on Eilis’s thoughts about her farewell to Jim, while the film adaptation focuses
on Eilis and Tony’s romantic reunion in Brooklyn. Furthermore, the novel preserves a certain amount of
ambiguity about Eilis’s feelings: the reader cannot know exactly if she is happy or resigned about her
fate. The sentence “these words [...] would come to mean more and more to herself” can either suggest
that she is glad to go back to Tony because he is the one with whom she belongs; or that she resigned
herself to following her duty, which lies with Tony. The film clearly sides with the first option: in the
closing scenes, Eilis is first presented as an experienced and confident migrant who teaches another
Irish girl how to survive the trip to America.

Propositions de tâches finales :

➢ EOC : Talk to Irish newcomers at a parish social event in Brooklyn.
➢ EOI : Take part in a book club session to discuss the novel Brooklyn.
➢ EO: Imagine Tony and reunion in Brooklyn. Act out the scene.
➢ EE : Write cut scenes/passages that Colm Tóibín may have removed from its final form.

KEYS

DISCOVERING THE BOOK

fill in the blanks !

Brooklyn, a four-part novel published in 2009, focuses on Eilis Lacey who lives with her mother and
older sister Rose in the town of Enniscorthy, County Wexford, where she studies bookkeeping and
works in Miss Kelly’s shop. Thanks to her sister and an emigrant priest called Father Flood, Eilis is
offered a place and a job in Brooklyn, New York. Once in America, she adapts to her new life in Mrs.
Kehoe’s Irish boarding house, in the shop where she works, Bartocci’s, and in Brooklyn College where
she takes classes in accountancy. She meets an Italian-American man, Tony, at a dance organised by the
Irish parish. Before her return to Enniscorthy to pay her respects to her sister who has died of heart
failure, Tony convinces her to marry him. Back in Ireland, her community notices her new American

13
style, and she lets Jim Farrell, a good match, court her. Feeling threatened by Miss Kelly’s acquaintance
with Mrs Kehoe and the possibility that they might hear of her ‘double life’, Eilis must leave once again
for America.

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