The Complicated Nature of Irishness in America
7 min read
America’s conception of itself as a nation has always been built on the aspirations of the immigrant. But to immigrate to this country can be dehumanizing—can demand, to some degree, the erasure of one’s previous identity. In many cases one is expected to undergo a homogenizing process, smoothing away any prickly individualities: names, languages, sometimes entire systems of belief. The French writer Georges Perec, describing Ellis Island in the 1970s, likened it to “a sort of factory for manufacturing Americans, a factory for transforming emigrants into immigrants; an American-style factory, as quick and efficient as a sausage factory in Chicago.”
Long Island, the Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s new novel, is the follow-up to his popular 2009 book, Brooklyn, a coming-of-age story about a young woman named Eilis Lacey who leaves Ireland and tries to make a life in New York. The sequel picks up in the 1970s, 20 years after the events of that earlier story, and begins with a betrayal. Tony Fiorello, Eilis’s third-generation Italian American husband, has impregnated another woman. So far, so familiar; an infidelity plot in a domestic drama is not exactly new territory.
But the way Eilis becomes aware of the affair is jarring. Her prosperous suburb seems to be populated mostly by second- or third-generation Americans, so when the husband of Tony’s mistress knocks on her door and tells her about the pregnancy, she’s surprised to note his Irish accent. Immediately, “she recognized something in him, a stubbornness, perhaps even a sort of sincerity … She had known men like this in Ireland.” Like a ghost, this voice and this man have shown up on Eilis’s doorstep, a reminder of the country that she left 20 years ago. And, as Long Island’s story unfolds and we follow the dissolution of Eilis’s marriage, along with her subsequent summer-long retreat to an Ireland already in the beginning stages of its own sea change, Tóibín asks that most American of questions: Can you go home again? His new novel suggests that to emigrate might itself be a fundamental betrayal, a breaking of a bond not unlike a husband betraying his wife—and that even when one returns to the homeland, one remains in a sort of exile that demands humility, flexibility, and perhaps some form of penance.
Going home—back to Ireland, back to Enniscorthy, and back to her mother’s house—is in fact what Eilis decides to do next. Readers of Brooklyn will not be surprised by this choice, echoing as it does Eilis’s pivotal trip back home in that novel, after the unexpected death of her sister and her secret marriage to Tony. The shared structure between the two books is a clever choice by Tóibín. Eilis’s second trip back to Ireland distinctly recalls her previous one, but this time, she is middle-aged and has two teenage children; her homegoing has been warped by regrets and mistakes that, with age, she can now see more clearly.
What has changed in Ireland? Everything and nothing. Jim Farrell, the pub owner with whom Eilis shared a brief and chaste affair 20 years before, is still there, as is Eilis’s mother and her brother, Martin. But despite this veneer of consistency, the social norms of this conservative and as of yet still very Catholic country have begun to strain. Fissures in social relationships and a disillusionment with the power of the Church have started to form, ones that will, in another 20 years, crack open alongside the economic boom of the ’90s, transforming the Republic of Ireland into a country where divorce, gay marriage, and abortion all eventually became legal. Change, however vague, is everywhere, seen in the refrigerator and the washing machine that Eilis purchases for her mother’s home and in the secretive extramarital sex men and women have with each other after meeting in dance halls. “Times have changed. I see that in the pub,” Jim notes to Eilis, before proposing that they sleep together.
And Eilis, too, will change. The majority of this novel takes place back in Ireland, signaling a restoration of Eilis’s sense of personhood, eclipsed as it has become over the past two decades by Tony’s domineering family. On Long Island, Eilis lives on a street virtually surrounded by her in-laws, Tony’s brothers, and their wives and children. Amid the chaos of the Fiorellos, Eilis has receded, her identity worn down and crammed into the accommodating role of “wife,” while an air of ethnic tribalism pervades. Tony’s father, the booming patriarch residing over weekly Sunday lunches, has still, after 20 years, never quite learned how to say Eilis’s name. Tony’s family members constantly invoke Eilis’s Irishness as evidence of her perceived strangeness, blaming “her interest in privacy and staying apart as something Irish.” Eilis’s own children bear little resemblance to their mother, taking after their father in their looks and demeanor. She has become symbolic: Irish before she is a person in her own right, a wife who is nothing more than an accessory to Tony. Tóibín seems to suggest that being both wife and immigrant demands conformity to the expectations dictated by one’s position.
Now, with the arrival of the baby looming, even Eilis’s role as the sole mother to Tony’s children is threatened. When, near the beginning of the book, Eilis’s busybody mother-in-law, Francesca, made it clear that she would be raising her new grandchild within sight of Eilis’s own home (implicitly suggesting that Eilis will thus want to keep her distance), she seemed to be using her daughter-in-law’s ethnicity as justification: “I often think you get homesick at our big gatherings, with all the Italian food and all the Italians talking,” Francesca tells her in an icy moment. “It often strikes me that you might sometimes dread our lunches. I know how I would feel if everyone was Irish.”
Francesca’s comments could be read as prejudice, or simply as a mother-in-law’s distaste for a woman she still considers an outsider in her family. But Irishness in America comes with its own baggage. Like most questions of ethnic and national identity, it is porous and complicated. Of all the diasporas to have settled in the United States, Ireland’s has had a particular impact, if through nothing but sheer numbers alone. (From 1820 to 1930, reports the Library of Congress, as many as 4.5 million Irish immigrated to America; today, one out of 10 Americans claim Irish ancestry of some kind.) Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that a sort of twinned relationship between the two countries has formed over the years, which often rears its head in moments of statecraft or mutual cultural interest: President Barack Obama’s welcome in Moneygall, the hometown of his great-great-great-grandfather; the surprising popularity of American country music on Irish radio stations; the short-lived video portal that connected Dublin to New York City.
We see a similar doubling in Long Island, especially when Eilis’s children, Rosella and Larry, come to visit toward the end of their mother’s stay. Though they’re acknowledged as American—“What is strange,” Eilis herself comments, “is how American they are”—soon enough, a blurring occurs: Rosella grows close with her grandmother, while Larry, out at the pubs with his uncle Martin, begins to take on an Irish cadence to his voice, slang peppering his speech. If emigration can be seen as a betrayal, then the second generation’s return to the motherland harbors a chance at mending the relationship.
A repair will not come for Eilis and Tony, though. The more time Eilis spends in Ireland, the greater the divide between herself and her husband grows, while she deepens her bond with her children. Eilis wants her children “to like the town and think well of her mother and Martin and talk nostalgically when they got home about their time in Ireland, with the idea that this, too, was where they came from, even if it might seem less significant than the Italian world that they had heard about from their grandparents.” This is a reversal of the immigrant’s essential betrayal to the country of their origin, a kind of atonement for leaving.
Like a husband stepping outside the boundaries of his marriage, an immigrant’s return home can feel like an inappropriate flirtation, a betrayal of both the original decision to leave and the life now lived in the adopted country. But by the end of Long Island, Eilis’s own relationship with both America and Ireland has, through her children, solidified. She will return to America and, in doing so, she will turn the definition of “home” from black-and-white, either/or, to something more fluid: both.
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