In Brooklyn: A Novel, Colm Toibin narrates the experience of an ordinary young woman named Eilis Lacey, who leaves behind Enniscorthy, Ireland to start a new life in Brooklyn, New York. Like many immigration narratives, immigrating and coming-of-age develops the protagonist’s identity and character. For Eilis, this development is portrayed through her changing bodily and physical appearance. Her smiling, crying and use of make-up shapes how her character and identity comes-of-age and becomes mature and confident. The defining experience of settling into a new life of her own and coming-of-age changes her appearance from a negative one to a positive one. Throughout Brooklyn: A Novel, the concept of change in Eilis’s identity and character is prominent and represented through her bodily and physical appearance of smiling, crying and the use of make-up.
The bodily appearance of smiling is portrayed at the beginning of the novel before Eilis immigrates to Brooklyn and leaves her mother and sister, Rose, behind. Eilis associates the atmosphere in her home with sadness before her departure and puts her mother and sister’s feelings before hers when she thinks,
She would make them believe, if she could, that she was looking forward to America and leaving home for the first time. She promised herself that not for one moment would she give them the smallest hint of how she felt, and she would keep it from herself if she had to until she was away from them. There was enough sadness in the house, maybe even more than she realized. She would try as best she could not to add to it. What she would need to do in the days before she left and on the morning of her departure was smile, so that they would remember her smiling. (Toibin 33)
In this quote, Eilis tells herself to not add more sadness to the atmosphere, rather to make them believe that she is looking forward to Brooklyn.
In “About Effie” Neil’s most significant impression of Effie is created when she looks at him. Neil tells how when he first meets the new maid, she looks at him with such meaning that it scares him: “. . .the way you’ll know her is this: she’ll look at you as if she thought you were someone she was waiting for, and it will probably scare you. It did me” (82). Neil describes the first time he meets Effie in terms of the way they look at each other, saying “The first time I saw her, she saw me first” (82). Neil is shocked by this new maid, not only because she gives him such a profound look, but also because she bursts into tears upon seeing him.
... level of self-awareness is necessary to navigate this journey effectively, traits which the family simply does not have. Yolanda has potential to reach some level of self-awareness and thought during her college years, but this hope is considerably dimmed as she becomes increasingly torn between her two cultures. Yolanda is the main narrator in this novel and still has a possibility, albeit slim, of a happy future. This cannot possible be achieved without thought, actual, conscious thought as to how she is going to turn her life around and make her blended cultures something for others to admire rather than something to be ashamed of. American literature does not highly value many novels pertaining to immigrants, however, it would have been helpful for them to absorb and apply the tenets of Transcendentalism and American literature in general to aid the transition.
The history of racial and class stratification in Los Angeles has created tension amongst and within groups of people. Southland, by Nina Revoyr, reveals how stratification influences a young Asian woman to abandon her past in order to try and fully integrate herself into society. The group divisions are presented as being personal divisions through the portrayal of a generational gap between the protagonist, Jackie, and her grandfather. Jackie speaks of her relationship with Rebecca explaining her reasons why she could never go for her. Jackie claims that “she looked Asian enough to turn Jackie off” (Revoyr, 2003, p. 105). Unlike her grandfather who had a good sense of where he came from and embraced it, Jackie rejected her racial background completely. Jackie has been detached from her past and ethnicity. This is why she could never be with Rebecca, Jackie thought of her as a “mirror she didn’t want to look into”. Rebecca was everything Jackie was tr...
Studs Lonigan is the protagonist and the name of the trilogy of three novels, Young Lonigan, the Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan and Judgment Day, by the American author James T. Farrell. The novel is a classic depiction of Irish life in the South side of Chicago and how Studs Lonigan comes of age in the setting. It is particularly in the second part that Farrell brings to light the venom of racism and how its unchecked spread helped to produce and reproduce the ghetto. The main reason Farrell cites for writing the book is the urban world that he knew had never been portrayed honestly enough in fiction. In his words, ‘I am a second-generation Irish-American. The effects and scars of immigration are upon my life. The past was dragging through my boyhood and adolescence’ (Farrell, 1993). It was the acrimony that Farrell had for the Irish Chicago neighborhood in which he grew up that led him to write the novel. In his opinion the Catholic parish church as the neighborhood’s primary institution was a great obscurant whereby the immigrants and their children were always uncertain of their identity and place in the new land (Byrne, 2006).
Coming-of-age stories commonly record the transitions—sometimes abrupt, or even violent—from youth to maturity, from innocence to experience of its protagonist, whether male or female. Greasy Lake by T.Coraghessan Boyle and Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates are great examples of traditional coming-of-age stories. The roots of the coming-of-age narrative theme are tracked in the male protagonist’s perspective for Boyle’s short story, while the Oates’ story captures the coming-of-age theme from Connie; a female protagonist’s perspective. In both short stories, the authors fulfill the expectations of a coming-of-age genre when they take us through the journey of rebellion and self realization, as the
The Statue of Liberty is an American icon because it symbolizes freedom, success, and the power of this nation. This image is what the U.S stands for to the outside world. Foreigners strive to move to America because of its wealth and acceptance towards all races and ethnicity. “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” recounts the story of how Carlos Garcia, Laura Garcia, and their four girls move from the Dominican Republic to the United States to escape a dictatorship, and establish a new life in flourishing New York City. Many unexpected culture shocks await them in their new country. Although the girls find it difficult to adapt at first, they soon begin to assimilate and Americanize. On the other hand, “The Struggle to Be an All-American Girl” by Elizabeth Wong illustrates the life of an Asian American having to embrace two entirely different cultural identities. Both the Garcia family and Elizabeth Wong's family have to deal with two opposing cultures without losing too much of their heritage. The book and the essay are similar in that characters in each story lose much of their original tradition. However, they are different in that the families move to the states for distinctive reasons, and the cultural preference of “The Struggle to Be an All-American Girl” is more evident than that of “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents”.
There is particular consideration given to the political climate in this story. It is incorporated with social and ethnic concerns that are prevalent. The story also addresses prejudice and the theme of ethnic stereotyping through his character development. O'Connor does not present a work that is riddled with Irish slurs or ethnic approximations. Instead, he attempts to provide an account that is both informative and accurate.
... who settled on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where we could see packs of books telling the stories and experiences of past immigrants. I felt the rush and the excitement that characterize the city, but I also couldn’t get enough of the multiple cultures in New York. One would spend days and weeks in the “City that Never Sleeps” but still, it would take many more to truly experience every aspect of it or understand how the diverse ethnicities were able to survive and succeed there.
Humans intelligence, psychology, and emotional vales are learned and adoption occurring depending on the situation this is key because peoples perceptive on the same thing can be distinct which is clearly portrayed in this novel.. People have different personalities dependent, broken down, rebellion, coward, and so forth through different characters pieces of yourself can be reflected. This book was write about the Victorian romanticism era, but can still be understandable to today’s time. This symbolic interpretation of the Canada shows a meshing of two worlds where change is unacceptable, but learn about these problems from the past helped shape Canada. To we have reached a time where Aboriginals are respected and other immigrants are welcomed into Canada.
The female, adolescent speaker helps the audience realize the prejudice that is present in a “melting-pot” neighborhood in Queens during the year 1983. With the setting placed in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, the poem allows the audience to examine the experience of a young immigrant girl, and the inequality that is present during this time. Julia Alvarez in “Queens, 1963” employs poetic tools such as diction, figurative language, and irony to teach the reader that even though America is a place founded upon people who were strangers to the land, it is now home to immigrants to claim intolerance for other foreigners, despite the roots of America’s founding.
The linguistic and cultural clashes that children encounter, and how they negotiate between their ethnic and American “mainstream” cultures, and how these clashes and problems influence their relationship with their parents and their ethnic identities as a whole and how they were dealt with differently as we look at two stories dealing with two girls who are both coming of age in different society from where they originally came from. Jairy’s Jargon a story written by Carmen-Gloria Ballista, is a story that encounters the life of a young girl coming of age in Puerto Rico, except she’s originally from New York. Milly Cepeda’s story, Mari y Lissy, is a story about twin sisters who differ in personality and are often at odds with each other, but are both learning to live in a city that is very different from where they came from.
In her famous short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” Joyce Carol Oates shows the transition from childhood to adulthood through her character Connie. Each person experiences this transition in their own way and time. For some it is leaving home for the first time to go to college, for others it might be having to step up to a leadership position. No matter what, this transition affects everyone; it just happens to everyone differently. Oates describes Connie's unfortunate coming of age in a much more violent and unexpected way than the typical coming of age story for a fifteen year old girl.
Anzia Yezierska has written two short story collections and four novels about the struggles of Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. Yezierska stories explore the subject of characters’ struggling with the disillusioning America of poverty and exploitation while they search for the ‘real’ America of their ideals. She presents the struggles of women against family, religious injunctions, and social-economic obstacles in order to create for herself an independent style. Her stories all incorporate autobiographical components. She was not a master of style, plot development or characterization, but the intensity of feeling and aspiration are evident in her narratives that overrides her imperfections.
Must race confine us and define us?’ The story The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, written by Heidi W. Durrow, revolves around the protagonist Rachel, who has bi-racial parents. After her mother and two siblings plunge to their deaths from a Chicago building, young Rachel Morse survives and is sent to Portland. Furthermore, part of her story is learning about how she conform into the world while dealing with her ethnicity. Additionally, when Rachel’s moves in with her grandmother, she is faced with racial expectations at home and at school.
...eisz. She can hear her playing the piano and thinks of her talking about art. She wonders if she is a real artist. She becomes exhausted and knows that she is too far out to return. The water that she was so mesmerized with throughout the novel and that was the beginning of her new life, was also the end.