51 pages • 1 hour read
Long Island
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Themes
The Pressures of Living in a Small Community
Throughout Long Island, the pressures of operating in a small community impact each of the three primary characters. In Enniscorthy, Jim and Nancy struggle to keep their relationship a secret while Eilis feels isolated and ignored in her tight-knit Italian family in New York. Tony’s family operates as a unit, with his mother next door in a house so close to Eilis’s that it might as well be the same house. She is expected to spend every Sunday at Francesca’s house partaking of a long Sunday dinner in which Tony’s entire extended family is present and in which Tony’s infidelity is well known to everyone—a subject of seemingly lighthearted gossip. The intense closeness of this Italian American family leaves the Irish Eilis feeling like a perpetual outsider, and the prospect that this family will soon welcome a child Tony had with another woman makes it clear to Eilis that the family will never consider her an equal member.
When it becomes clear to her that Tony’s family plans to keep his new child within the family, she realizes how the connectedness of their lives and proximity of their houses will impact her: “She would look out the kitchen window and see Tony’s child being raised by its grandmother, taking its first steps on a lawn on which there was no fence to divide Eilis’s house from Francesca’s” (46). Eilis grows to understand that for her wish to have no contact with the child to be honored, the baby can be nowhere near the family. The small community of the Fiorello family means that even if Francesca takes the baby, the child will grow up in the shadow of Eilis’s home and be a constant reminder of Tony’s infidelity. Therefore, Eilis realizes the constraints of her present situation, knowing that to escape the legacy of Tony’s betrayal and to avoid the negative impact on herself, she must look to make a life elsewhere.
Across the Atlantic, in Enniscorthy, the pressure of a small community presents a different challenge for the characters. Here, the small and connected community creates an atmosphere of constant surveillance in which secrets rarely stay hidden. With everyone knowing each other and constantly sharing what they see and hear, gossip runs rampant and often influences characters’ decisions. Jim and Nancy, wanting to keep their relationship a secret from the town, only ever meet in the middle of the night, believing that darkness will help shroud them. Despite this onerous precaution, one of Mrs. Lacey’s friends spots them and relays the news: “And one night late when she went to do a widdle she could see across into Jim Farrell’s living room from her landing. And Jim had company, female company. He seemed to be enjoying himself. And who appeared soon afterwards into the street, only Nancy Sheridan?” (280). At the same time, Nancy learns through the grapevine that Jim is romantically involved with Eilis. As this gossip spreads, it leads to fateful decisions. Nancy decides to make her engagement to Jim public, hoping to force him to marry her. The gambit works, as Jim is too fearful of the town’s judgment to let it be known that he has been carrying on two secret love affairs at once. With friends and neighbors gathered in the pub to congratulate him on his engagement, Jim appears unable to act decisively. Instead, he allows others to make his decisions for him. In both Tony’s family and the small town of Enniscorthy, small communities suffocate the desires and need for connection of the characters.
The Tension Between Desire and Duty
Each of the three main characters of Long Island constantly struggles to reconcile their desires with their sense of duty toward others. Eilis, Jim, and Nancy are all split between staying with the people and families who depend on them and moving on to someone new, who represents a new opportunity in life and love. Nancy desires a new life with Jim—one in which she can abandon the chip shop and move out of the town whose gossipy atmosphere oppresses her. At the same time, the dream of a future with Jim feels to her like an abandonment of her late husband, George: “In feeling so tenderly towards George, in dreaming how happy she would be with him at the wedding, she was imagining a life without Jim. But if, instead, she thought only of Jim, how lucky she was to be with him, it felt as if she were leaving George behind” (115). Throughout the novel, Nancy feels as though any allegiance to Jim is disrespecting her memory of George, while holding onto George limits her happiness and her chance for a new beginning. These feelings often make it difficult for her to approach her relationship with Jim with confidence.
While Eilis longs to finally be with Jim, with whom she fell in love 20 years before, she realizes that this choice will have serious implications for her life in America and her relationship with her children. She no longer feels any sense of duty toward her husband, Tony, whose infidelity and callousness have shown her that their relationship is no longer viable, but she fears any action that might drive a wedge between herself and her children. Meanwhile, Jim struggles to decide whether to pursue Eilis and abandon Nancy. For Jim, Eilis’s reappearance is the culmination of decades of yearning—a chance to put right what has gone most seriously wrong in his life. His relationship with Nancy, by contrast, is much more provisional: They are two people who found themselves lonely at the same time, and with few potential romantic partners in such a small community, they ended up together by default. Nonetheless, Jim is conscious that he will do Nancy great emotional harm by abandoning her. She has been making plans for a life with him, and even though these plans have very little to do with any particular love for him, he doesn’t want to ruin her dreams. Once their engagement becomes public knowledge, Jim feels a further sense of obligation toward his friends and neighbors. He finds himself stuck in the middle of these two women, unable to make a decision himself and instead depending on the other two to make his decision for him: “When Nancy was ready for the announcement, Jim would be able to think of no excuse to postpone it. Sometimes he was able to tell himself that the matter was in Eilis’s hands. If she said yes, he would follow her. If she said no, he would do what he already had planned” (224). Unwilling to follow his own desires, Jim ends the novel sitting on his bed, waiting for Nancy to come upstairs and tell him his next move.
Loneliness as a Motivating Factor
Despite the love triangle that exists between Jim, Nancy, and Eilis, each of these three characters experiences intense loneliness throughout the novel that at many times informs their decisions. While Nancy and Eilis each confront massive changes to their families and are forced to look ahead to unexpected futures, Jim is stuck in his ways. He respects his own independence, even if it comes at the cost of a lackluster love life and no family. The loneliness that comes from this life is only noticeable to him after he begins his relationship with Nancy:
It would be hard to explain to her how lonely he felt when he came into these rooms after closing time and how that feeling became more intense if he woke in the night or in the morning. He had not felt like this before the possibility of being with her arose (142).
Once Jim experiences a prolonged romantic relationship for the first time in his life, finally moving on from the trauma of Eilis’s disappearance, he realizes how lonely his life is. As this loneliness compounds itself the more involved he becomes with Nancy, he becomes more eager to marry her and begin a new life together.
Nancy, meanwhile, on the other side of this relationship, feels a different kind of loneliness, stemming from grief over her husband, George. Throughout Long Island, Nancy often thinks of what life might be like if George was still with her, imagining how he might support her. Each of these moments, however, is followed by the harsh reality of his absence, such as at her daughter’s wedding: “But no matter what she tried to think about, the memory of her own wedding came back to her and then the feeling that George was not watching over them, but he was gone, no part of him was here at all” (157). Nancy struggles with her grief for George, feeling as though there is a missing part of her. Because she is so used to his presence, his absence is all the more painful as she begins to struggle with the notion of moving on with Jim. George’s absence is a motivating factor for her, however, in her decision to be with Jim. She wants to build a new life, away from the grief of George and the loneliness of a life running the chip shop largely by herself.
Eilis, too, feels intensely lonely in her life with Tony. Despite the optimism with which their relationship began in Brooklyn, Tony has become a disappointing husband, too caught up in the pursuit of his own desires and the demands of his tight-knit family to notice how his actions impact Eilis. Eilis attends Sunday lunches at her mother-in-law’s house—a ritual of family togetherness—but the family discusses her intimate life as if she were not there. When they plan to take in Tony’s baby—the product of an affair—against her wishes, Eilis realizes that the family will never truly view her as one of them. She therefore arrives back in Ireland feeling detached from her life in America. She realizes that she has been lonely for a long time, and she wonders how different things could have been if she had chosen Jim all those years ago. The loneliness that Eilis feels in America spurs her to action throughout the novel, prompting her to enter the love triangle with Jim and Nancy.
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