Brooklyn

In addition to consistently feeling the weight of homesickness, Eilis must also often confront the pressures of her family’s expectations. At times, these expectations can be a positive force in her life, propelling her growth. As the youngest daughter in her family, she looks to her mother and sister for approval: “Eilis knew as she made her way home that her mother would indeed be happy that she had found some way of making money of her own, but that Rose would think working behind the counter of a grocery shop was not good enough for her” (7). At the beginning of Brooklyn, Eilis begins to gain more independence by starting a small job at Miss Kelly’s store, but she knows that Rose believes she can do much better. Rose’s expectation that Eilis should work in an office and not in a grocery store leads her to plan Eilis’s departure to Brooklyn for a better employment opportunity. It is the beliefs of her family, and not Eilis’s own wishes that propel her across the Atlantic.

Familial expectations follow Eilis to Brooklyn and begin exerting their influence in parts of Eilis’s life that do not concern her employment. Being so far from home, Eilis hesitates to write to her family about Tony, worried about their reaction. Her hesitation to share everything about him is directly linked to how she believes her sister will react: “When Rose replied to her, she asked what he did for a living. Eilis had deliberately left this out of the letter because she knew that Rose would hope that she would go out with someone who had an office job, who worked in a bank or an insurance office” (145). Tony is a plumber, and Eilis expects Rose to disapprove of this as a career for Eilis’s partner. Eilis therefore leaves this information out of the letter she writes to Rose introducing Tony. Rose wants Eilis to have a comfortable and successful life and to settle into an elevated class of professionals. Eilis feels this pressure, and it conflicts at times with her feelings toward and commitment to Tony.

While familial expectations for much of the novel are concerned with Eilis’s career and love life, they become more serious and harder to evade in the aftermath of Rose’s death. When Rose dies and Eilis returns to Enniscorthy to spend some time with her mother, she realizes that Jack’s hints that she should come home to be with their mother are actually a reflection of her mother’s wish for her to stay permanently: “And in her own letters, as in Eilis’s, she wanted it emphasized that, since Eilis was home, she had plenty of company and needed no more visitors” (215). Eilis’s mother makes it known in town that Eilis is back and does her best to not only ignore Eilis’s life in Brooklyn, but to also convince her to stay. Her hints, such as those in the letters, telling people that she needs no one because she has Eilis, demonstrate to Eilis that with Rose’s death, the responsibility to look after their mother falls to her. Her mother expects her to stay in Enniscorthy now and live with her, but Eilis, pulled back to Brooklyn for Tony, struggles to accept this. She struggles with an inner conflict spurred on by the expectations of different family members, as Rose wanted her to start a new life in America while her mother expects her to remain in Enniscorthy, creating intense personal turmoil for Eilis.