Demystifying Stereotypes of the Irish Migrant Young Woman in Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn

Abstract

Colm Tóibín’s novel, Brooklyn (2009), recounts the story of a young woman who emigrates from Ireland to the United States in the early 1950s. Although reluctant and discouraged by received idealized notions of “the promise land” and of a hopeful future, Eilis nevertheless pursues her desire to fulfil a career of her own and to achieve some kind of independence: two unusual aspirations for a woman of her time. In the author’s attempt at reversing traditional stereotypes associated to the Irish emigrant, Tóibín explores such themes as the displacement of the foreign other, the cultural divide, the dislocation of the subject at home and abroad, and the alienating experience of growth and awakening. Caught in between two worlds, the apparent liberal values projected by North America are finally engulfed by the moral duties that an extremely patriarchal Irish society has imposed on the protagonist. Therefore, bearing all these questions in mind, the purpose of the present discussion is to bring to the fore matters related to Tóibín’s deconstruction of the Irish diasporic subject, its subversion and its process of demythologization in contemporary Irish narrative.