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ABSTRACT
Financed by a British-Irish-Canadian co-production, Brooklyn (John Crowley 2015) deals with twentieth-century Irish diaspora, particularly the mass emigration of unmarried Irish women in the 1950s. While Irish immigration to the United States has been ongoing since the eighteenth century, until a few decades ago the perspective of Irish women was missing in Irish and Irish-American literature and film. In the 1880–1920 period, the Bridgets, Irish-born maids, were stereotypical characters in film. In recent decades, there has been a renewed interest in filling the gap regarding the experience of Irish female immigrants, often represented as deceased mothers. Drawing upon psychoanalytical film theory and the work of cultural studies scholars who have paid special attention to the representation of Irish immigrants, this essay analyzes Brooklyn’s gendered representation of younger Irish female immigrants to the United States and the tension between nationalism and transnationalism posed by migration. This gendered depiction provides a new perspective on Irish immigration to America.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. In November 2019, there was a similar news story reported about 16 men who were found in the back of a truck that departed from France for Ireland. Yan. ‘Truck owner, driver not treated as suspects in smuggling of 16 people into Ireland: report’ Xinhua 24 November 2019 http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-11/24/c_138578642.htm.
2. The Republic of Ireland has become an integral member of the European Union, signing the Dublin Convention in the early 1990s. This convention brought about a new awareness to Irish nationals of the status of migrants and refugees in establishing that asylum seekers should petition for protection in only one country of the EU.
3. The film differs from Tóibín’s novel in not presenting Eilis’s three older brothers who migrated to England. In the novel, Jack is the only one who interacts with Eilis, and only on two occasions: the first during her one-day layover in Liverpool, the second when he writes her after Rose’s death.
4. Tóibín’s novel describes, for instance, African-American women as an emerging sector of the consumer market in Brooklyn and the resistance they met, even by some female Irish characters.
5. In ‘What is a Minor Literature?’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari speak of the deterritorialization of language. For them, Joyce and Beckett ‘being Irish, both exist in the condition of a minor literature’ (Citation1983, 19).
6. Gareth Millington observes that ‘Brooklyn is about the preservation of origins through the cinematic commemoration of neighborhoods, districts and architecture believed to be integral to historical narratives about European migration to the United States’ (Citation2016, 138).
7. Meaney et al. explain that ‘an unnamed Roman Catholic priest explained to 500 Irish emigrants just arrived into New York harbor in 1922 that American girls became secretaries, book keepers, stenographers and clerks with “good salaries, short hours and a day off each week”' (Citation2013, 109).
8. As Noel Ignatiev explains: ‘To Irish laborers, to become white meant at first that they could sell themselves piecemeal instead of being sold for life, and later that they could compete for jobs in all spheres instead of being confined to certain work; to Irish entrepreneurs, it meant that they could function outside of a segregated market. To both of these groups it meant that they were citizens of a democratic republic, with the right to elect and be elected, to be tried by a jury of their peers, to live wherever they could afford, and to spend, without racially imposed restrictions, whatever money they managed to acquire. In becoming white the Irish ceased to be Green’ (Citation1995, 3). Patricia McKee holds that, ‘In the more visual terms of twentieth-century public life, there is a wide range of whiteness. White persons can, therefore, experience their identity not merely as self-same but as diverse’ (Quoted in Foster Citation2003, 51).
9. The theme of a returning female emigrant to Ireland also appears in Maeve (Pat Murphy 1981).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Carolina Rocha
Carolina Rocha is Professor of Spanish at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She specializes in contemporary Argentine and Brazilian film and literature. She is the author of Masculinities in Contemporary Argentine Popular Cinema (Palgrave 2012) and Argentine Cinema and National Identity (Liverpool University Press 2018). She is currently working on a manuscript about cinematic representations of female immigrants in the cinemas of the Americas.