Representation of Home in Brooklyn: A Novel

1387 Words3 Pages

In Brooklyn: A Novel, Colm Toibin narrates the experience of a young woman named Eilis Lacey, who leaves behind Enniscorthy, Ireland to start a new life in Brooklyn, New York. Like many other novels about migrants, Eilis’s relationship to “home” and Brooklyn is represented through her experiences and feelings. Eve Walsh Stoddard states that “Home points at rather than determines its referent. Thus we may say that ‘home is where the heart is’ or home is where one’s family is,”’ in her essay “Home and Belonging among Irish Migrants: Transnational versus Placed Identities in The Light of Evening and Brooklyn: A Novel,” (156). This makes readers constantly question where Eilis’s heart lies and where she believes home is. Throughout Brooklyn: A Novel, the concept of home is prominent and represented in more than a physical location; but a meaning, a state of mind, and a feeling of belonging.
At the beginning of the novel when Eilis realizes that it is time for her to pack and leave Ireland, she feels that “She would prefer to stay home, sleep in this room, live in this house, do without the clothes and shoes. The arrangements being made, all the bustle and talk, would be better if they were for someone else” (Toibin 31). This depicts her home in Ireland as a feeling of belonging for Eilis. She wishes that she wasn’t the person who had to go though this and doesn’t want to be in her own shoes when it comes to moving away from home. This further portrays Stoddard’s theory of Sigmund Freud, especially on “the uncanny” since the double is a key figure in Freud’s uncanny. (Stoddard 150) Eilis associates the atmosphere in her home with sadness because of her departure and puts her mother and sister’s feelings before hers when she thinks, “...

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...n Brooklyn with Tony and when she is in Ireland with her mother, which proves Stoddard’s cosmopolitanism theory.
Throughout the novel, the representation of home is portrayed as a meaning, a state of mind, and a feeling of belonging to Eilis. Although the distance from her ancestral home in Ireland caused her great difficulty and homesickness, she overcame her insecurities and adapted to her new home in Brooklyn, giving her a new identity. In Brooklyn: A Novel, Toibin effectively portrays the experiences of many immigrants through Eilis and shows how an unfamiliar and empty place can turn into home.

Works Cited

Toibin, Colm. Brooklyn: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2009.
Stoddard, Eve Walsh. “Home and Belonging among Irish Migrants: Transnational versus Placed Identities in The Light of Evening and Brooklyn: A Novel.” Eire-Ireland 47.1 & 2 (Summer 2012): 147-171.

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