A Laingian Reading of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn : Eilis Lacey’s “Ontological Insecurity” and “Schizoid” Personality

Farrell, a young man from Enniscorthy.Finally, she is compelled to relocate to Brooklyn upon comprehending that Miss Kelly, her former employer, has been informed of her marital status.Within the body of scholarly literature on Tóibín's Brooklyn, Stoddard's article has been particularly useful to the topic of this research.Stoddard utilises the concepts of "mourning" and the "uncanny" alongside cosmopolitan discourses to investigate the feminine liberty/constriction and desire/obligation dichotomies via an interpretation of "the ambiguities surrounding the migrant's 'home'" (149-50).These ambiguities are illuminated through Eilis's segmented selfhood against the backdrop of both her relationships with her mother, Tony, and Jim and her attachments to Enniscorthy and Brooklyn.Focusing on Eilis's inner divide while she prepares her luggage in "Part One" of Brooklyn for her impending migration, Stoddard argues: "Rather than inhabit the subjectivity assigned to her, she doubles herself into a twin who will do the duty of leaving while she herself can stay home" (161).Stoddard further links Eilis's split to her eventual separation from Enniscorthy as her "love object" by stating that Eilis manages to endure "by repressing images of home, but letters from her family [bring] her crashing into her sense of loss and alienation" (162).As per Stoddard, Eilis's self-view "as two different people in the two locations" is a manifestation of her self-division (163).Eilis's sentiment of being Rose's spectre is another expression of this (163), according to Stoddard.Another secondary source that has been noteworthy for this study, specifically concerning Eilis's bifurcated sense of self while she is in Brooklyn, is Antía Román-Sotelo's article.Analogously to Stoddard, Román-Sotelo employs Freud's concept of "mourning."However, unlike Stoddard, she does not utilise it in conjunction with the concept of the "uncanny" as delineated by Freud or cosmopolitan discourses.Instead, she employs it independently, interpreting Eilis's alienated and fragmented self as possibly "mourning" due to the loss of her native land or, in other words, her "love object."Román-Sotelo also holds that Eilis's estrangement from Enniscorthy is the reason for her temporary lack of grasp on