• 1 Brooklyn was adapted into film in 2015 by John Crowley. The film became a major commercial s (...)
• 2 Piaras Mac Éinri, “From Clare to Here”, Études Irlandaises, 25:1, 2000. Available at http://migrat (...)
• 3 Gerardine Meaney, Mary O’Dowd and Bernardette Whelan, Reading the Irish Woman: Studies (...)
• 4 Ibid., p. 95.

1In this analysis of Brooklyn1, I will tackle the ways in which, both in Ireland and in the diaspora, moral obligations, gender limitations and questions of family duty often stifled Irish women’s autonomy, silencing their own wishes and experiences. Unquestionably, the issue of emigration and the social expectations it entailed have proved to be a most relevant factor in Ireland. As Piaras Mac Éinri explains, between the years of the Great Famine and the 1950s, more than six million people left Ireland, a dramatic event which constituted a serious demographic anomaly, “a unique case in the world2”. In the first half of the twentieth century, economic and social conditions were harsh for the majority of people in Ireland and this situation did not improve after independence in 1922. Emigration was a very common phenomenon in the lives of young women. Although national independence was “expected to signal the end of emigration through the provision of employment”, the truth was that “women’s employment stagnated or declined from the 1920s to the 1980s3”. As has been noticed, women’s emigration was primarily the consequence of unemployment and the low marriage rate in the Republic, since “as soon as young Irish women realised that there was ‘no husband and no job at home’, they departed in greater numbers4”.

• 5 Breda Gray, Women and the Irish Diaspora, London, Routledge, 2004, p. 2.

2Women’s migration clearly contradicted the ethos of the newly independent Irish State, where nationalist groups promoted that the Irish woman’s proper place was the home: “Until the 1950s at least, women’s migration was variously constructed as a loss of national breeding stock, a threat to women’s ‘purity’, and potentially undermining of their national and religious identities5”. In order to stop Irish women from migrating, the Government studied drastic measures of containment. Fintan O’Toole relates that:

• 7 Mary E. Daly, “Irish women and the diaspora: why they matter”, in MacPherson P.A.J. and Hick (...)
• 8 Gray, op. cit, p. 2.

3Proposals such as the one mentioned by O’Toole were eventually deemed impractical in a nation where, due to widespread deprivation, many “Irish parents continued to dispatch daughters in their mid-teens to a foreign country in the expectation that their remittances would help support the family back home7”. Forced migration or exile thus proved to be another determinant factor in the lives of many women in mid-twentieth century Ireland for varied reasons, which include family duty, poverty or lack of marriage prospects. Additionally, many other women were also compelled to migrate due to the morally conservative nature of Irish society: “Irish women’s migration throughout the twentieth century was also a response to the regulation of women’s sexuality and of pregnancy outside marriage8”.

• 10 Tory Young, “Brooklyn as the ‘untold story’ of ‘Eveline’: Reading Joyce and Tóibín with Rico (...)
• 11 Ibid., p. 131.
• 12 Ibid., p. 131.

5Tellingly, as I argue here, this cultural silence surrounding the subjectivity of the female emigrant reverberates in the complex manner in which Tóibín constructs his central character in the novel, the highly observant but restrained Eilis. In fact, one of the most salient characteristics of Tóibín’s narrative is the tensions between Eilis’s inner reflections and her missed possibilities for self-assertion. As Tory Young rightly puts it, “the reader is privy to Eilis’s feelings and is often tormented by her inability to voice them10”. Unable to assert herself, Tóibín’s protagonist is “without voice11” and “her choices can hardly be described as free12”.

• 13 Ellen McWilliams, Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction, London, Routledge, 20 (...)
• 14 María Amor Barros-del Río, “On Both Sides of the Atlantic: Migration, Gender, and Society in (...)

6Among his Irish contemporaries, Tóibín is not alone in his intellectual and artistic exploration of female experiences of migration and exile. In Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction, Ellen McWilliams observes: “Whilst historically women have frequently been overlooked or made to serve an emblematic or symbolic function in the portrayal of exile in Irish writing, more recent treatments of exile and migration show a keen interest in reclaiming the history of the Irish woman emigrant and in explicitly addressing this lacuna13”. As McWilliams suggests, the topics of exile and homecoming have featured prominently in the Irish literary tradition, but not from a female viewpoint. María Amor Barros-del Río also addresses this issue in her analysis of recent Irish novels focusing women and migration, including Edna O’Brien’s The Light of Evening (2006), Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side (2011) and Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015). Like McWilliams, Barros-del Río highlights that, in recent years, “[this] profusion of migrant fiction suggests a need to express cultural identity negotiations, a matter still unresolved, in particular those of women abroad14”.

• 15 Historically, Ireland had been a country of mass emigration, and this pattern changed (...)
• 16 Paul Morton, “An Interview with Colm Tóibín.” Bookslut. Available at: [http://www.bookslut.com/fea (...)
• 17 Carly McLoughlin,“‘Images of Ireland that Matter Now’: Colm Tóibín in Conversation”, i (...)

7Tóibín began to write his emigration novel in 2006 partly as a reaction to Irish xenophobia and the result of the 2004 Irish Citizenship Referendum15, which removed the right to automatic citizenship to children born to immigrant parents. As Tóibín acknowledges: “Some of the impulse for [Brooklyn] is entirely political. There were times… where I felt alone in my views on immigration16”. In his writings and public lectures, Tóibín has repeatedly expressed his deep dismay at the result of this referendum, regarding it as a regressive decision that transgresses basic individual rights. In a recent interview, he declared that: “If you are born here [in Ireland] then where else could you be from other than the place where you were born? Blood, maternity, paternity –those issues are very abstract compared to ‘I was born here … that’s what I know17’”. According to Tóibín, citizenship laws should appropriately account for the fact that the individual’s sense of belonging extends beyond questions of descent or parentage. Thus, for Tóibín, the enforcement of an exclusionary model of Irish citizenship based upon notions of bloodline can only serve to increase social divides and perpetuate racist attitudes. Curiously, in Brooklyn the protagonist’s inability to build a decent future and a family life in the moralistic society of 1950s Ireland strikingly compares to the struggle of many immigrants in a much more liberal but racist contemporary Ireland.

• 18 Ironically, Brooklyn was published in 2009, at the outset of another major economic crisis i (...)
• 19 Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn, London, Penguin, 2009, p. 11. Further page references occur in the ma (...)
• 20 Meaney, O’Dowd and Whelan, op. cit, p. 97.

8In Brooklyn, Tóibín presents readers with a central character, Eilis Lacey, who leads a placid existence in 1950s Enniscorthy, co. Wexford, enjoying her social life and having an easy relationship with both her mother and her sister, Rose. Unfortunately, Eilis faces a situation similar to those of young Irish people who, because of the economic crisis of the late 2000s and early 2010s18, had to leave Ireland: “There was, at least for the moment, no work for anyone in Enniscorthy, no matter what their qualifications19”. Eilis only finds employment as a part-time shop assistant, working for the exploitative and fastidious Miss Kelly, who keeps a servant, Mary, whom she treats with contempt. Understandably, Rose, Eilis’s sister, is worried and comments that: “[Miss Kelly] has a little slave, doesn’t she? She took her out of a convent” (15). With no family connections and nobody to protect her, Mary finds herself at Miss Kelly’s mercy. Interestingly, Tóibín alludes here to the harsh socio-economic realities of female employment throughout the first half of twentieth century Ireland. In fact, it has been noted that the conditions in which many female shop assistants worked compared to a “system of slavery20”.

• 21 Young, op. cit, p. 138.

9At home, Eilis shares stories of her “weekly humiliation at Miss Kelly’s hands” (24), but little does she suspect that this prompts Rose to secretly arrange her settlement in New York with the help of Father Flood, an Irish priest on his holidays from America. Symptomatically, nobody asks Eilis whether she wants to leave Ireland. Commenting precisely on the issue of Eilis’s powerlessness, Young takes the view that the protagonist’s “behavior is bound by assumed conventions21.” When comparing Joyce’s “Eveline” (1904) and Tóibín’s Brooklyn, Young calls attention to the two young women’s role as daughters in a patriarchal society:

• 23 For another comparative analysis between Joyce’s ‘Eveline’ and Tóibín’s Brooklyn, see Carreg (...)
• 24 Laura Elena Savu, “The Ties that Bind: A Portrait of the Irish Immigrant as a Young Wo (...)

10Though I agree with Young, I would also suggest that Tóibín’s protagonist (and Joyce’s, as well) is simply not expected to make such decisions in the first place23. Early in the text, we learn that Eilis had once the intention to migrate to England, but her mother had rejected her idea outright. When Father Flood visits the family, he does not address himself to Eilis, but to her mother. On seeing her mother’s positive response, Eilis discovers that the plans for her migration will go ahead: “Her mother had been so opposed to her going to England that this new realization came to Eilis as a shock” (23). Tóibín, then, shows how Eilis’s familial role connects with her lack of authority to assert her own will, which leads her to remain silent about her own wishes: “She would have given anything to be able to say plainly that she did not want to go, that Rose can go instead, that she would happily stay here” (31). As Laura Elena Savu succinctly explains, “in Brooklyn, as in Tóibín's other novels, intimations of attachment are strongly felt but rarely spoken… Much of the action, in fact, takes place below the surface, in the resonance of tone, gesture, and silence24”.

• 25 Eibhear Walshe, A Different Story: the Writings of Colm Tóibín, Sallins, Irish Academi (...)

11Equally relevant to Eilis’s self-suppression is the family dynamics of silence, caused by the death of the father and the emigration of the three brothers. In his analysis, Eibhear Walshe puts forward the idea that “one of the central elements in the novel is the repressed and unspoken emotional life of the Lacey family, depleted by death and exile, and this habit of silence, inherited by Eilis, haunts the most important decisions of her life25”. Since the brothers live now in England, the two sisters and their mother had already endured the pain of losing family to emigration. Liam McIlvanny suggests here a link between the social and personal silences pervading the Irish experience of emigration:

• 27 Linda Dowling Almeida, Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945-1995, Bloomington and I (...)
• 28 Ibid., 37.
• 29 Gray, op. cit, 28.

13Once she is in New York, Eilis is placed under the care of the Irish diasporic community, strongly characterised by its parochialism and norms of female respectability. Here, Tóibín –who seems to have carried out extensive research into 1940s and 1950s Brooklyn and the Irish diaspora– reproduces a detailed account of what life might have been like for a young Irish woman at that time. In her study of Irish immigration to 1950s New York, historian Linda Dowling Almeida notes that Irish migrants entered “established and maturing ethnic communities and in some way needed the existing community to facilitate their transition to America27”. Almeida further remarks that “family, church, and ethnic organizations dominated community life among the Irish… The parish to which one belonged typically defined social and neighborhood boundaries28”. This type of community life had a greater impact on the experiences of young unmarried women. Though the diasporic Irish community grants a sense of both security and identity, it can eventually limit the individual’s desires for self-invention and autonomy. As Breda Gray has also argued, even though migration entailed an element of romanticism and individual freedom, “there is some evidence that Irish migrant women’s experiences were also dominated by the cult of domesticity and Catholic Church efforts in their countries of destination to prevent the development of individualism and the occupation of the sexual self29”.

• 30 Claire Bracken, “Review of Brooklyn.” Estudios Irlandeses 5, 2010, p 166-167, 167.

15Another figure of great importance for Eilis is Father Flood, who not only sponsors her migration and secures her a job as a shop assistant, but also enrolls her in night classes in accountancy at Brooklyn College. Interestingly, even though Tóibín characterises the priest as truly benevolent, he also portrays him as exerting great control on Eilis’s life. Grateful to the priest for all his guidance, the protagonist cannot avoid asking him why he is being so generous. Father Flood’s response –“we need Irish girls in Brooklyn” (78)– certainly adds some ambivalence to the apparently altruistic nature of his actions. Hence, whilst receiving the genuine kindness of the priest, Eilis is at the same time “position[ed] as an object of exchange between cultures30”. As a young woman living in the diaspora, she is expected to adapt to the moulds of her Irish Catholic background.

• 31 Barros-del Río, op. cit, 87.
• 32 For instance, the racist Miss McAdam readily complains that she “didn’t come all the way to (...)

16In her analysis of female migration in contemporary Irish novels, Barros-del Río notes that the “social networks of Irish migrants abroad functioned as active social forces that framed their limited scope of agency. Consequently, these novels witness the pressure exerted upon the female migrants as ineluctable forces that molded their position in the new society31”. What is relevant about Tóibín’s character is that, through her strategic use of silence, she manages to evade some of values and moral codes of her diasporic community. For example, at the Irish dancehall –where Irish women are expected to dance with Irish men– Eilis meets the Italian Tony, with whom she starts a relationship. Aware of the racist attitudes of some of her roommates32, Eilis maintains a self-protective silence about Tony at the beginning of their relationship. Later on, when Eilis’s boyfriend is introduced to Mrs Kehoe, he knows that he has to put on his best manners and pretend to be Irish. Tony’s ploy certainly succeeds, since Mrs Kehoe will consider him a proper suitor for Eilis, “with nice old-fashioned Irish manners” (135). Eilis’s landlady, who worries about Italians going to Irish dancehalls and spreading “immorality” (104), becomes easily fooled by Tony’s performance. In short, Tóibín ironically brings to light the inconsistencies of fixed ideas on what it means to be Irish, as Mrs Kehoe’s prejudices are mocked.

• 33 Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm (...)
• 34 Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland: Voices of Change, London, MacMillan, 1986, p. 33.

17Yet, Brooklyn also shows that, at the time, a woman’s personal independence was often threatened by familial obligations. After the sudden death of Rose, “Eilis’s mother wrote and mentioned how lonely she was and how long the day was and how long the night” (191). Mrs Kehoe also expresses her compassion for Eilis’s “poor mother” (175) and the protagonist’s brother, Jack, writes a letter to urge her to travel to Enniscorthy to be with her: “I know she’d love to see you, she keeps saying that is the only thing she is hoping for… I think she wants you to come home” (180). Due to her grief and social pressures, Eilis’s appreciation of her time away from her family drastically changes: “It changed everything Eilis thought about her time in Brooklyn; it made everything that had happened to her seem small” (177). As Costello-Sullivan aptly argues, Eilis is manipulated by her family and thus “reverts to familial patterns, the pull of the space she traditionally holds in her family and culture proving too strong to resist33”. This traditional space for a woman like Eilis means that she is morally obliged to disrupt her life abroad and take care of her lonely mother in Ireland. This type of familial behaviour was characteristic of traditional rural life in Ireland, when one of the daughters was always “pressurised to stay and care for an ailing parent34”.

• 35 Bracken, op. cit, p. 166.

19Interestingly, though this diasporic community has its strict rules of female behaviour, Eilis –Mrs Kehoe’s favourite lodger because of her “manners” (99)– defies social expectations by dating an Italian and having premarital sex with him in her own bedroom. Despite the readings that consider Tóibín’s protagonist as being utterly passive, or a “spectator in her own life35”, I would argue that the writer constructs a much more complex character. Eilis is, thus, presented as a young woman who at times employs tactics of silence and concealment while allowing herself some autonomy away from the expectations of others.

• 36 Dilek Inan, “Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn: Caught Between Home and Exile.” Philologist: Journal of Langu (...)

20Nonetheless, as Tóibín is careful to show in his fiction, his protagonists are always tied to their time, place and personal history. Tóibín’s characters often have a rich inner life, but public factors influence them irremediably, affecting their decisions and self-image. Before she departs for Enniscorthy to visit her mother, Tony persuades Eilis to secretly marry him as a means of securing her return to America. According to Dilek Inan, the protagonist submits to Tony’s wish because “she does not have a strong sense of herself, but she has a strong sense of what others make of her36”. Though Inan’s argument remarks the actual fact that Eilis is constantly manipulated by others, I would also argue here that her strong attachment to Tony cannot be ignored, nor her sexual inexperience and her fear of being pregnant. Before Tony proposes, marriage is also mentioned by a priest when Eilis goes to confession: “What had happened between her and Tony… was maybe a sign from God that they should consider getting married and raising a family” (191). Marriage is thus seen as the means to make up for the “sin” of their premarital sexual relationship, a way to placate the possible danger of pregnancy and illegitimate motherhood. Hence, I would argue that it is not only Tony’s persuasion that drives Eilis to a hasty marriage, but also the sexual morality of her time.

• 37 Eve Walsh Stoddard, “Home and Belonging among Irish Migrants: Transnational versus Placed (...)

26No matter what new opportunities she may be given now, Eilis’s independence is already compromised by her marriage to Tony, whose warm presence has now become “merely a shadow” (237). The idea of divorcing him comes to her mind, but divorce is seen as foreign and outrageous in 1950s Enniscorthy: “The only divorced people anyone in the town knew were Elizabeth Taylor and perhaps some other film stars” (236). Furthermore, when the protagonist thinks about Jim’s reaction were she to tell him about Tony, she believes that “it could not be said; his response to her deception could not be imagined. She would have to go back” (242). Eilis’s worst fears are confirmed when knowledge of her commitment in America reaches Enniscorthy. Acting as a guardian of “Irish propriety”, Miss Kelly, the protagonist’s former employer, has a private conversation with Eilis implying that she knows about the double life she is leading. Miss Kelly gloats over her victory against “immorality” when she tells the scared Eilis that “you can fool most people, but you can’t fool me” (245). It is then disclosed that Miss Kelly is Mrs Kehoe’s cousin, a discovery which fills Eilis with terror should her marriage with Tony be discovered in the town. In spite of the distance between the two places, Eilis cannot evade the transnational surveillance of Irish Catholic morality, personified here by both Mrs Kehoe and Miss Kelly. Therefore, in Tóibín’s novel, as Eve Walsh Stoddard eloquently puts it, “the transnational linkages between Ireland in Enniscorthy and Ireland in Brooklyn turn into ties that bind, and perhaps strangle37”. Eilis has no option but to leave Enniscorthy and escape scandal.

• 38 John Crowley’s Brooklyn (2015) adds a final sequence in which Eilis returns to New York and (...)
• 39 Marisol Morales-Ladrón, “Demistifying Stereotypes of the Irish Migrant Young Woman in Colm T (...)

27The final scene of Brooklyn concerns Eilis’s confession to her mother, when she informs her that she is married and must go back to America. Shocked by the news, the mother stays evasive and apparently indifferent to her daughter’s distress, though she does reveal some of her repressed anguish: “If I say any more, I’ll only cry” (249). As the protagonist heads towards America, she does not know what situation she will meet on her arrival38. Eilis imagines the years ahead, when this final break with the mother and her separation from Enniscorthy “would come to mean more and more to her” (252). In her reading of the ending, Marisol Morales-Ladrón rightly notes how “both her real mother and her allegorical (mother)land will callously dispatch Eilis, incapable as they are to accommodate the uncertainties and ambiguities that have molded her39”. Eilis, as Morales-Ladrón contends, is forced to leave because of the social mores of her native Enniscorthy. In fact, the protagonist’s last actions in the novel are propelled by sentiments of fear and anxiety. With this ending, Tóibín powerfully symbolises how, at that time in Ireland, women’s lives were constantly marked by the threat of social exclusion.

• 40 Edward A. Hagan, “Colm Tóibín’s ‘As Though’ Reality in Mothers and Sons, Brooklyn, and (...)

28To conclude, if Eilis’s first migration is caused by her lack of opportunities in Enniscorthy, her second one is induced by the danger inherent in a sexual scandal which could cause this young woman’s stigmatisation and marginalisation. Tellingly, in both cases, the protagonist remains reluctant about her departure –thus, in the figure of Eilis, Tóibín dramatises “the failure of emigration as liberation40”. Furthermore, just as women’s voices in Ireland were absent in public discussions about emigration, so is Eilis’s voice in the novel when it comes to her interactions with others, as she is seldom asked about her own needs and experiences. Consequently, in Tóibín’s Brooklyn, the reader is confronted with a protagonist whose experiences are shaped by a personal history of silence and self-suppression. Throughout the novel, Tóibín makes readers share his central character’s insecurities, indecisions and renunciations in the face of external circumstances that reduce her options in life.