Brooklyn SAC and Exam revision page
- Themes
A theme is an idea that a text explores and examines. It can be stated
explicitly or implied. The theme universalises the specific context of a text.
The theme(s) and subject of a text are not synonymous. The subject is
specific, the themes are general and are able to be related to common human experience.
Task 1: Analyse the ways in which Brooklyn explores the following human
experiences:
• Family
• Class / social status
• Migration
• Racial prejudice
• Love and duty
• Education
• Commitment and marriage
• Pre-marital sex
• Role of church
• Growing up
For each of these ‘themes’, identify the following:
• Different perspectives explored by the text
• Identify (and substantiate by referring closely to the text) the author’s view, that is, what he
is implying
- Check the COLM Toibin Brooklyn Website here: Click here!
- Section A - Reading And Responding
- Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín Questions for study and discussion.
- What does the title tell us about the significance of place in this text?
- Describe five to ten differences between Brooklyn and Ireland during the 1950s.
- What are the conflicts in Brooklyn?
- What types of conflicts or challenges (physical, moral, intellectual, or emotional) does Eilis face?
- How does Colm Tóibín reveal character in Brooklyn?
- Choose five characters to focus on. Find and discuss two quotes for each character.
- Some of the themes in this novel are family, new beginnings, multiculturalism, immigration, economic depression, gender roles, relationships, personal growth and racism. Write a short paragraph about each. What other themes can you find?
- Choose at least three themes from Brooklyn. How do they are they explored through the plot and characters? Include four to five quotes for each theme.
- Is Eilis Lacey consistent in her actions? Is she a fully developed character? How? Why?
- Which of the characters do you find likeable? Are these people you would want to meet?
- Which of the characters do you find unappealing. Why do you think Tóibín includes them?
- Discuss some of the symbols (significant objects, reoccurring motifs etc.) in Brooklyn.
- Does the story end the way you expected? How? Why?
- What is the central/primary purpose of the story? Is the purpose important or meaningful?
- How essential is the setting to the story? Could the story have taken place anywhere else?
- What is the role of women in the text?
Sample Essay Topics
1. ‘Brooklyn depicts the immigrant experience as essentially defined by loss and regret.’ Discuss.
2. ‘While Eilis is a character of genuine integrity she is unable to confront the conventional expectations of a woman’s role.’ Do you agree?
3. ‘Toíbín resists offering readers a simply uplifting story but provides a more complex portrait of his protagonist, Eilis Lacey.’ Discuss. 4. ‘The nature of personal freedom is the true subject of Brooklyn.’ Discuss.
5. ‘By returning to Brooklyn and marriage to Tony, Eilis recognises the limitations to her independence.’ Do you agree?
6. ‘The twin settings of the novel, Enniscorthy and Brooklyn, play a significant role in Toíbín’s narrative.’ Discuss.
7. ‘The loneliness and isolation that afflicts Eilis is shown by Toíbín as the typical products of modern life.’ Discuss.
8. ‘Eilis’s personal transformation is shown to be ultimately futile at the end of the novel.’ Do you agree?
9. ‘Loss of identity and the need for reinvention are the characteristic experiences described in the novel.’ Discuss.
10. ‘Without her family and disconnected from a sense of home, Eilis becomes a ‘shadow’ and a ‘ghost’. What enables her to regain her sense of identity in Brooklyn?
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
Brooklyn is an elegant novel. Toibin efficiently tells the story of Eilis Lacey, a young woman from the Irish countryside, as she matures from girl to woman. In beautiful, but never overwrought, prose, Toibin tells the story of Eilis’s maturing.
Eilis is a light character. By light, I means she lacks substance. She is too often what Rose, her mother, Mrs. Kehoe, Miss Kelly, Father Flood, or Tony or Jim make of her. As KfC and John Self have pointed out, she tends to take the path of least resistance with almost no regard for who is pushing her. We see this tendency of Eilis’s early when, trying to be a dutiful employee and neighbor, she tells Miss Kelly well in advance of her departure for America that she is leaving. Miss Kelly sacks her on the spot. Eilis takes it without complaint. In fact, she actually thanks Miss Kelly. For what she is thanking her is not clear. As she leaves, she wants to say goodbye to her co-worker, Mary, but does not because Mary has not made the effort to turn and look at her. Eilis, apparently, does not want to risk putting herself or Mary in an awkward situation, so “Eilis quietly left the shop and went home.” Eilis is a wallflower, thanking people for sacking her and lacking the courage to say goodbye.
At first, we can dismiss this as youth and immaturity. After all, she is still young enough that her mother, her older sister (Rose), and Father Flood arrange for her to go to America without consulting her until after the decision has been made. Eilis, again, does not resist. She seems to have little will of her own.
There is another strand too, which is related to Eilis’s passivity. We first see it most clearly when Eilis, having been in America a short while, gets homesick. She longs for her Irish home and the familiar. In describing the feeling of homesickness, she likens it to the passing of her father:
She kept thinking, attempting to work out what was causing this new feeling that was like despondency, that was like how she felt when her father died and she watched them closing the coffin, the feeling that he would never see the world again and she would never be able to talk to him again.
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.
Eilis defines herself by her relationships and surroundings. But, even so, there remains an emptiness to Eilis, as if she is waiting to be filled with others’ desires. She has no “will to power”.
She ultimately deals with homesickness as she does with most problems when they do not resolve themselves or are not resolved by another:
She would try to put those two days behind her. No matter what she dreamed about, no matter how bad she felt, she had no choice, she knew, but to put it all swiftly out of her mind. She would have to get on with her work it if was during the day and go back to sleep if it as during the night. It would be like covering a table with a tablecloth, or closing curtains on a window; and maybe the need would lessen as time went on, as Jack had hinted it would, as Father Flood had suggested. In any case, that was what she would do.
Eilis herself almost hits on her tragic flaw, though not quite, fairly early in her stay in America. When one of the lodgers (Miss Keegan) leaves the boarding house where Eilis is staying, the best room in the house becomes available. Mrs. Kehoe, the landlady, arranges for Eilis to move into the room despite Eilis being the most recent boarder. When Eilis asks why she is being given the best room, Mrs. Kehoe explains:
”You are the only one of them with any manners.”
After the move is accomplished, Eilis avoids the other lodgers for as long as she can. The inevitable meeting occurs on a Friday evening. Miss McAdam, another lodger, sits Eilis down and gives her an alternate explanation for Eilis ending in the room. According to Miss McAdam, a man was stalking Miss Keegan and, at one point, exposed himself to her on the steps of the boarding house. Miss Keegan was afraid to identify the man to the police and left for the relative safety of Long Island.
…And then, to make matters worse, the Kehoe woman wanted to move me down to Miss Keegan’s room. She went on about it being the best room in the house. I put her in her place. And Miss Heffernan is in a terrible state. And Diana has refused to stay in the basement on her own. So she put you down there because none of the others would go.”
Eilis noticed how pleased with herself Miss McAdam seemed. As she watched the older woman sipping her tea, it occurred to Eilis that this could easily be her revenge on Eilis and Mrs. Kehoe over the room. On the other hand, she reckoned, it could be true. Mrs. Kehoe could have used her, the only lodger who did not seem to know why Miss Keegan had left.
Eilis is ultimately unable to determine which of these very different versions of reality to believe.
She studied their faces as they addressed her, but nothing became clear. She wanted to allow for the possibility that everyone’s motives were good, but it was unlikely, she thought, unlikely that Mrs. Kehoe had genuinely given her the room out of pure generosity and unlikely also that Miss McAdam and the others really did not mind this and had merely wanted to warn her about the man who had followed Miss Keegan so that she would be careful. She wished she had a real friend among the lodgers whom she could consult. And she wondered then if she herself were the problem, reading malice into motives when there was none intended. If she woke in the night, or found time going slowly at work, she went over it all again blaming Mrs. Kehoe one moment, Miss McAdam and her fellow lodgers the next, and then blaming herself, eventually coming to no conclusion except that it would be best if she stopped thinking about it altogether.
And this is the solution with which Eilis is all too comfortable. It is not only that Eilis avoids confrontation, but she tends to shield herself from the truth and, if she glimpses it despite her best efforts, to hide it away somewhere away from her conscious mind. She finds that if she does not think about something, it fades.
This sense of fading and unreality is related to her passivity and is repeated throughout the novel. Earlier, of course, Brooklyn and her life there seemed unreal. Her solution to homesickness works. In fact, it works so well that she has the following epiphany:
Later, during the week, as she was making her way from Bartocci’s to Brooklyn College, she forgot what she was looking forward to; sometimes she actually believed that she was looking forward to thinking about home, letting images of home roam freely in her mind, but it came to her now with a jolt that, no, the feeling she had was only about Friday night and being collected from the house by a man she had met and going to the dance with him in the hall…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.
Her fresh engagement with America comes, of course, with a new romance. There is a particularly telling scene, after Tony has told her he loves her but before she has reciprocated, in which she watches Tony:
There was something helpless about him as he stood there; his willingness to be happy, his eagerness she saw, made him oddly vulnerable. The word that came to her as she looked down was the word “delighted.” He was delighted by things, as he was delighted by her, and he had done nothing else ever but make that clear. Yet somehow that delight seemed to come with a shadow, and she wondered as she watched him if she herself, in all her uncertainty and distance from him, was the shadow and nothing else. It occurred to her that he was as he appeared to her; there was no other side to him. Suddenly, she shivered in fear and turned, making her way down the stairs and towards him in the lobby as quickly as she could.
Eilis manages, as she does with every other uncomfortable truth, to ignore her uneasiness. She and Tony are secretly married just before she goes back to Ireland. The decision to marry, of course, was Tony’s. Tony was afraid Eilis would not return if they were only promised rather than married. Eilis simply goes along to avoid unpleasantness.
When she returns to Ireland, she finds that her feelings are somewhat reversed. Instead of feeling that her life in America is meaningless, it is her old Irish life that seems to her alien and empty.
She was glad she did not have to write now from her bedroom, which seemed empty of life, which almost frightened her in how little it meant to her. She had put no thought into what it would be like to come home because she had expected that it would be easy; she had longed so much for the familiarity of these rooms that she had presumed she would be happy and relieved to step back into them, but, instead, on this first morning, all she could do was count the days before she went back. This made her feel strange and guilty; she curled up in the bed and closed her eyes in the hope that she might sleep.
And, of course, she does not tell anyone in Ireland about her marriage.
She wished now that she had not married him, not because she did not love him and intend to return to him, but because not telling her mother or her friends made every day she had spent in America a sort of fantasy, something she could not match with the time she was spending at home. It made her feel strangely as though she were two people, one who had battled against two cold winters and many hard days in Brooklyn and fallen in love there, and the other who was her mother’s daughter, the Eilis whom everyone knew, or thought they knew.
Eilis senses that one of these two selves will necessarily pass. When she, Nancy, George, and Jim head off to the beach, Eilis examines the surroundings as they go. Toibin uses language that echoes his description of her feeling when her father’s casket closed from earlier:
This was where Eilis had come with Rose and her brothers and her parents when they were children, but she had not been there for years nor thought about it. As they drove through Blackwater village she almost pointed out the places she knew, such as Mrs. Davis’s pub where her father had gone in the evenings, or Jim O’Neill’s shop. But she stopped herself. She did not want to sound like someone who had come back home after a long time away. And, she thought, this was something that she might never see again on a Sunday like this, but for the others it was nothing, just a decision.
The echo here of her memory of her father’s funeral is beautifully haunting. Her next departure from Ireland is a death too. She knows this and feels alone because no one else understands how one of her two selves will necessarily die.
Of course, her decision to return to America, like almost every decision Eilis makes is an acquiescence to the demands or desires of someone else. For instance, when they get to the beach and, eventually, Jim asks if she will go into the water with him, she “had already planned to say no.”
But his tone, when he spoke, was unexpected in its humility. Jim spoke like someone who could easily be hurt. She wondered if it was an act, but he was looking at her with an expression so vulnerable that she, for a second, could not make her mind up what to do. She realized that, if she refused, he might walk alone down to the water like someone defeated; somehow she did not want to have to witness that.
“Okay,” she said.
And this is the problem with Eilis. It is not that she does not have her own desires. Rather, Eilis lives too much in the present, too little in the future. She does not want to hurt Jim at the beach, so she agrees to go into the water, deepening his attachment to her. She is already married to Tony, so things cannot work for both. But she ignores the future consequences. She agrees to go with Jim because it is the easiest path for her at that moment, because the present Jim is more real to her than the absent Tony.
Eilis recognizes this feeling later when looking at two letters from Tony.
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.
All of this putting out of mind thoughts of the future and people absent can only lead to problems. Eilis’s short-term compromises will have long-term consequences. She has drifted her way into a corner.
The answer was that there was no answer, that nothing she could do would be right. She pictured Tony and Jim opposite each other, or meeting each other, each of them smiling, warm, friendly, easygoing, Jim less eager than Tony, less funny, less curious, but more self-contained and more sure of his own place in the world. And she thought of her mother now beside her in the church, the devastation and shock of Rose’s death having been softened somewhat by Eilis’s return. And she saw all three of them – Tony, Jim, her mother – as figures whom she could only damage, as innocent people surrounded by light and clarity, and circling around them was herself, dark, uncertain.
Again, Toibin returns to earlier imagery. This time the echo is of the scene where Eilis watches Tony from afar and sees herself a shadow. These two scenes are telling revelations of how Eilis sees people and her relation to them. Though she is passive, she sees herself as a shadowy actor. She avoids acting to avoid damaging them. There is a self-centeredness to her passivity. She is unwilling to contradict others because she sees them as fragile, helpless before her dark, uncertain power to damage.
And she will damage either Tony or Jim, or both. Each moment along the way she was enjoying herself and did not want to hurt their feelings. By doing this, Eilis encouraged each of the men to love her. She, however, does not return the love of either with anything approaching the same intensity. She simply burrows further into a situation that she knows will not bring her long-term happiness. Nothing about her feelings suggests that her marriage to Tony will be fulfilling to her. Her method of communicating those feelings and making difficult decisions suggests that she will continue to drift into lose-lose situations, waiting only until a damaging choice is required. Her uncertainty is a menacing, foreboding shadow over the people in her life.
Toibin’s use of recurring imagery and language to emphasize these themes is outstanding technique. One of my frustrations with the novel was that Eilis seemed so often an empty vessel. But I think this is part of the point. Eilis’s essential trait, her tragic flaw, is her unwillingness to make choices, particularly difficult choices. Her pleasantness, her industriousness, her intelligence are all undermined and overshadowed by her unwillingness to confront and shape her own future. Toibin exploits this by giving us so little of Eilis besides her seeming pliability. By the end of the novel, we see Eilis for what she is. We realize more than ever how accurate she was when she saw herself as a sinister shadow in Tony’s life.
As always, Eilis manages to put the final consequences of her choice out of her mind too. The closing paragraph is outstanding:
[H]er mother would stand watching Jim Farrell with her shoulders back bravely and her jaw set hard and a look in her eyes that suggested both an inexpressible sorrow and whatever pride she could muster.
“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.
Reading and Responding:
Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín
The VCAA Bulleting describes the text as:
Assessment in Unit 3 of this area study requires you to demonstrate the following
key knowledge and skills:
• Thorough and insightful understanding of the ideas, characters and themes
constructed and presented in the text.
• Complex discussion and critical analysis of the structures, features and
conventions used by the author to construct meaning.
• Complex analysis of the ways in which social, historical and/or cultural values
are embodied in the text. Construction of a sophisticated interpretation which
demonstrates an understanding of ways in which the text is open to different
interpretations by different readers.
• Considered selection and use of significant textual evidence and highly
appropriate use of relevant metalanguage to support analysis.
• Highly expressive, fluent and coherent writing.
Tóibín, Colm, Brooklyn, Picador, 2009
In the 1950s Eilis, an Irish girl from a small town, moves to the USA to
better her life. She obtains employment, but suffers severe homesickness
as she settles into a ghetto-like Irish enclave in Brooklyn. After meeting a
kind Italian-American boy, she plans an American future. However, when
a tragedy calls her back to Ireland, and she realises that her position in the
community has improved, she faces the dilemma of the migrant – the old
country or the new? Tóibín lucidly presents two cultures, the dream-like
quality that infuses whichever is the current ‘other’, and the seductive
power of home.
Characters and Characterisation
Understanding characters is critical to your study of a narrative text.
Characters generate the action of the narrative; their fortunes and
misfortunes, their aspirations and challenges, engage the readers’ interests
and emotions. Characterisation is the way in which the author constructs the
characters, to position the reader to respond.
Main characters
Eilis (pronounced AY-lish) Lacey is the protagonist of the text. The protagonist
and the main characters are carefully crafted by the author so that the reader
is able to discern the underlying motivations for their behaviour.
When reading the text, you need to focus on the ways in which the author has
created the characters by focusing on the following:
• The use of the narrative voice. From whose perspective is the text written?
• Direct description of appearance, thoughts feelings
• The character’s speech and actions.
• What other characters say (or what is implied) about the character
• The character’s relationships and actions
• Imagery and symbolism associated with the character.
Task 1: For each of the main characters write a summary of important information
such as:
• Full name (spelled accurately)
• Age and age spans covered by the narrative
• Where they live, domestic circumstances, social status, relatives, friends, education,
health…
• Personal qualities, attitudes, values
• Changes in their life circumstances, relationships, attitudes and values
Task 2: Create a concept map for Eilis and one of the other main characters
Minor characters
Minor characters receive less attention, but they can serve important functions such as:
• Provide important background information
• Interact with the main characters and enable the reader to see the main characters in
different roles and settings
• Embody viewpoints and beliefs that contrast with those of the main characters.
Task 3: Select three minor characters and record the following:
• Relationship with the protagonist
• Role in the narrative
• Personal qualities that distinguish the character
Themes, Ideas and Values
The themes of a text are its most general statements about human
experience. The characters and settings exist only in the world created by the
author. On the other hand, the ideas and values the text explores also exist
outside the world of the text. This allows the reader to respond to a text by
relating it to his or her own perspectives and life experience, even when the
text describes events in the distant past or very different cultural mores.
Values
Values are qualities that a society regards as worthwhile. These values are reflected in the laws and
social conventions of different societies. Values provide common ground for everyday decisions
about right and wrong behaviour. Not all societies share the same set of values. Values can differ
from one society to another – some as a matter of emphasis, other differ radically.
There are many different values such as: honesty, justice, patriotism, respect for others, loyalty,
fidelity, equality, freedom of choice, taking responsibility, tolerance, and the list goes on.
Individuals tend to absorb the values and priorities of their culture as they grow up, although
maturation involves the questioning of family and social attitudes and beliefs as part of the process
of personalising individual values.
Values are not necessary fixed: just as individuals question the values of family and society as part
of the maturational process, social values also gradually shift over time.
In narrative texts, characters embody values through their thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs and
actions. A text can convey many different values through its various characters and narrative
perspectives. However, the author will not suggest that all of these viewpoints are equally valid, or
that the author shares the values expressed by every character.
Task 2: Consider the following questions and record your thoughts making sure to
support your answers with close reference to the text.
• Identify five or six values that are held by the main characters of the text. Give a textual
example for each, for example, a quotation or an action taken by one of the main
characters.
• Do any of the main characters act in ways that contradict their basic values? What are the
reasons? What are the consequences? Is your view of the character diminished as a
result?
• Which values are portrayed as being most important? State which characters possess
these values and which do not, giving a brief quotation or explanation for each.
Ideas
What are your ideas about the text?
Task 3: Write paragraph responses to each of the following questions. Make sure
that you substantiate your point of view by close reference to the text.
1. Create two photomontages capturing what life was like in the 1950s in Enniscorthy (County
Wexford) and Brooklyn.
2. What is the first indication in the text that Rose’s life is not as ‘rosy’ as it appears to be?
3. Before she goes to America, Eilis believes 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” (pg 26). Why do you think the Irish had such a rosy view of America?
How are Eilis’s expectations met upon her arrival?
4. As Eilis begins night classes in accounting, she notes the divisions between Italian and Jewish
students, and the lack of English or other Irish students. At work, she must confront racial
integration when Bartocci’s opens its doors for the first time to black customers. How does Eilis
react to the divisions among Europeans immigrants from different countries, as well as those
between white and black Americans? How are the traditional ethnic lines of Brooklyn
beginning to break down in the 1950s?
5. When Eilis and Tony first meet, she seems more interested in him as an escape from her
troublesome housemates than as a genuine romantic interest. Tony, however, is clear about
his love for Eilis from the start. Why do you think Eilis is hesitant in her feelings? Is a
relationship with such uneven attachment doomed from the start, or do you believe that one
person can “learn” to love another over time?
6. Some characters in the novel are referred to as Miss or Mrs., while others are identified by
their first name. Does this reflect their relationship with Eilis? Why would Colm Tóibín make
this stylistic choice? How would your perception of the characters in Brooklyn be different if
Tóibín had written the novel from the “first-person” perspective of Eilis?
7. Imagine Eilis in today’s world. Do you see her primarily as a career-motivated woman, or as a
wife and mother? How does Tóibín present the conflict between job and family in the 1950s?
How is it different today?
8. When the clerk of the law bookstore in Manhattan engages her in conversation, Eilis displays
an ignorance of the Holocaust that would startle us today. How do you explain her confusion?
What does it tell us about the Ireland—and New York—of the 1950s?
9. Something happens to Rose that, in retrospect, makes you re-examine the reasons she might
have urged Eilis to move to America. Discuss this.
10. Eilis decides to keep her marriage to Tony a secret from her mother and friends in Enniscorthy
because she believes they won’t understand. Do you believe that this is Eilis’s true reason, or
might her silence indicate other motives? Explain your reasoning.
11. Does Eilis’s notion of her duty to family evolve from the beginning of the novel—when she
leaves Enniscorthy—to the end, when she returns to Tony in America? Explain your reasoning.
12. If Eilis had been able to choose freely, between Brooklyn and Tony, and Enniscorthy and Jim,
what do you think she would have chosen? Or is Eilis really a young woman who does not
choose, who allows others to determine her fate? Explain your reasoning.
13. Tóibín ends Brooklyn before Eilis even boards the ship back to America, leaving her future
unwritten. Why do you think Tóibín chose to end the book there? What do you imagine Eilis’s
future holds? Explain your reasoning.