Milkman

“Small-numbered women, unless married to, mother of, groupie of, or in some way connected with the men of power in our area—meaning the paramilitaries in our area—would have gotten nowhere in directing communal action, in influencing to their advantage public opinion here. Local women en masse, however, did so command, and on the rare occasions when they rose up against some civic, social, or local circumstance, they presented a surprising formidable force.” 

Although the very premise of Milkman—middle sister’s struggle to deal with a stalker—centers on the threat misogyny poses, the novel does not depict women as entirely powerless. Sexism in middle sister’s community is tightly intertwined with institutional power, whether in the form of the paramilitaries, the Church, or the state. While this provides people like milkman with the opportunity to abuse their authority, these institutions are themselves vulnerable to public pressure from women acting “en masse.”

This is particularly true of the paramilitary, which as a rebel organization depends on the goodwill of the surrounding community. Over the course of the novel, women therefore leverage the power they have as a group to end curfews or to intervene on behalf of individuals. Here, middle sister banks on the affection these women have for third brother-in-law to keep milkman away during their run; if milkman approached and got into some kind of fight with third brother-in-law, the neighborhood women would likely side with the latter.  

“There was the fact that you created a political statement everywhere you went, and with everything you did, even if you didn’t want to.” 

Language is a powerful force in Milkman in part because of the heightened paranoia life during the Troubles entail. As middle sister notes here, statements of allegiance to one side or the other aren’t simply conveyed in words, but through various symbolic actions; everything from the “school you went to” to “the hymns you sang” to “[h]ow you pronounced your ‘haitch’ or ‘aitch’” (25) carries a political meaning, or at least the potential to be interpreted as carrying a political meaning. As a result, every social interaction becomes disorienting, as people struggle both to monitor the “political statements” they themselves are making, and to assess the statements of others. This mistrust and confusion ultimately facilitate widespread abuse of power by cloaking people’s intentions.   

“So [chef] talked food, lent food books (which freaked me out) to maybe-boyfriend who (also freaking me out) read them.” 

Middle sister’s thoughts about chef, maybe-boyfriend, and their mutual interest in cooking offer a good example of just how restrictive the norms of masculinity are in her community. Because cooking and baking are traditionally associated with women, most people in the area view chef as effeminate, making him the victim of frequent homophobic attacks. Maybe-boyfriend escapes this violence, perhaps because his hobbies also include conventionally masculine interests like cars and sports. Nevertheless, middle sister finds her boyfriend’s tendency to read cookbooks alarming, and perhaps even lends some credence to the idea that chef—in lending cookbooks—is acting as a “homosexual with a drive to recruit male heterosexuals into the homosexual fold” (32). Burns ultimately reveals that chef and maybe-boyfriend actually are in a relationship, but pokes fun at the supposed connection between cooking and effeminacy by having chef save maybe-boyfriend from an attacker by wielding one of his “long kitchen knives” (289).

“[T]here had been a recklessness [...] a rejection of me by me that had begun years earlier—I was going to die anyway, wouldn’t live long anyway, any day now I’ll be dead, all the time, violently murdered—so he may as well have me ‘cos he knew all along he was going to have me, couldn’t stop him from having me.” 

Da’s deathbed admission that he was raped as a boy is unexpected and potentially jarring. Nevertheless, it’s an important moment on several levels. For one, it provides insight into da’s character and into the episodes of depression he suffered throughout his life. It also serves as a reminder that the harms of toxic masculinity and patriarchal power structures aren’t confined to women; men in marginalized positions—in this case, due to young age—are also vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Meanwhile, da’s rationale for submitting to the abuse speaks to the trauma of daily existence during the Troubles; because his existence is already so precarious, da feels he has little to lose at the hands of his abuser. What’s more, the sense of powerlessness associated with life in a war zone spills over into da’s interactions with his abuser, which he describes as a fait accompli. In this way, the episode foreshadows the moment when middle sister gets into milkman’s van: “Here was this thing that happened for always I knew it was going to happen, for it had been telling me for ages that it was coming and that it was going to happen” (298).

“What if we accept these points of light, their translucence, their brightness; what if we let ourself enjoy this, stop fearing it, get used to it; what if we come to believe in it, to expect it, to be impressed by it; what if we take hope and forgo our ancient heritage and instead, and infused, begin to entrain with it, with ourselves then to radiate it; what if we do that, get educated up to that, and then, just like that, the light goes off or is snatched away? This was why you didn’t get many shining people in environments overwhelmingly consisting of fear and of sorrow.” 

Like the episode involving the sunset, middle sister’s description of “shiny” people illustrates the long-term impact of trauma on the community mindset. Because they’re used to sudden, violent upsets, the people in middle sister’s district are afraid to open themselves up to enjoying an experience; doing so would mean risking the pain of losing it in the future. This response is understandable, but ultimately counterproductive, because it causes people to cling tightly to their suffering simply because it’s familiar. Here, for instance, middle sister notes the fear associated with “forgoing their ancient heritage,” even though that heritage is itself at the heart of the Troubles and all the pain associated with them.

“Men and boys killed the cats, or at least in default of killing them, kicked them or catapulted them with stones on passing.” 

When middle sister comes across a severed cat’s head on her way home from French class, she feels inexplicably moved to give it a decent burial. The above passage helps explain why: the routine “felicide” (94) in middle sister’s neighborhood is closely tied to gender. It’s men who perpetrate the violence, and they do so, at least in part, because they see the cats as “feminine,” and therefore as a proxy for women; in fact, McSomebody actually goes so far as to call middle sister a “cat” while threatening to kill her. In addition, the above description of men casually abusing street cats bears a notable resemblance to passages describing women “walking down the street and getting hit by a guy, any guy, just as you’re walking by, just for nothing, just because he was in a bad mood and felt like hitting you” (162). It’s not surprising, given all of this, that middle sister would feel a sense of kinship with the cat she stumbles upon, even if she can’t quite articulate why. 

“[T]his time too, mostly he asked questions, though without appearing anxious for any response. This was because his questions weren’t real questions. Not sincere requests for information or for confirmation of his surmises. These were statements of assertion, rhetorical power comments, hints, warning, to let me know he was in the business of knowing already.” 

This description of middle sister’s third meeting with milkman is one of the most explicit statements the novel makes about the relationship between language and power. The apparent content and function of milkman’s questions are mostly irrelevant; what matters to milkman isn’t which clubs middle sister and maybe-boyfriend go to, but rather showing middle sister that he is keeping an eye on her movements. Similar exchanges take place throughout the novel, though sometimes in very different circumstances. For example, when maybe-boyfriend’s neighbor asks him “which among [them] at the garage then, drew the bit with that flag on?” (21), he’s speaking not out of genuine interest, but rather to alert maybe-boyfriend to the fact that he could use the supercharger as leverage over him. In other words, language in Milkman functions at least as much as a means of exercising power as it does a way of communicating.

“This was not schizophrenia. This was living otherwise. This was underneath the trauma and the darkness a normality trying to happen. Observing the niceties therefore, not the antipathies, was crucial to coexistence.” 

In this passage, middle sister describes the multiple layers of denial that are necessary for her and others in the community to go about their daily business. It isn’t simply a matter of turning a blind eye to the region’s constant violence (including violence perpetrated by one’s own side), but rather of bracketing off the entire existence of the conflict for extended periods of time. Middle sister offers her French class as an example, noting that there is a general tacit agreement not to acknowledge the fact that there are both separatists and loyalists in the room. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to entirely suppress the tensions and contradictions of life during the Troubles, and these “inner contraries” well up from time to time, revealing the divisions that exist not only within the country, but also within the psyches of its citizens: “Impossible then, with all these irreconcilables, to account, not just politically-correctly, but even sensibly for oneself” (113).

“To the groupies of these paramilitaries however—and this would be certain girls and women unable to grasp with mind and emotion any concept of a moral conflict—men who were in the renouncers signalled not just wonderful specimens of unblemished toughness, sexiness and maleness, but through attaining to relationship with them, these females could push for their own social and careerist ends.” 

Although the novel itself pokes fun at the groupies for relishing the danger and brutality of their boyfriends’ lives, it also suggests that the public disapproval these women encounter is largely a reflection of unfair gender norms. Several of the groupies are the mistresses of married men, and all are flouting the societal expectation that women should not have sex until marriage (and then only for the purpose of conceiving children). Perhaps even more significantly, however, the groupies are women whose pursuit of “their own social and careerist ends” puts them at odds with the prevailing patriarchal order. To be sure, the groupies can only attain a position of power by attaching themselves to powerful men, but the very fact that they desire that power is threatening in and of itself.

“This inability of the community to acknowledge his good deeds was because his reputation for general all-round unfriendliness had become so fixed in the district consciousness that it would have taken an enormous explosion of conscious effort to shift that particular bit of hearsay on to the truth. As there was little inclination for re-adjusting even the tiniest of misperceptions here, such conscious mental effort to reach awareness on the part of the community on behalf of real milkman was never going to happen anytime soon.”

The gap between who real milkman is and who the community believes him to be speaks to the power of public opinion in the novel. As middle sister describes him, “the man who didn’t love anybody” is actually a very altruistic person; in fact, the reason why she’s talking about him in the first place is that he has noticed her walking alone at night and offered her a ride home. As she notes, however, there is little appetite in her community for reassessing a judgment once it has been pronounced, probably because public consensus is one of the few apparent sources of certainty in people’s lives.

“Real milkman, however, said, ‘Bloody—’ then he checked himself. ‘Can’t go anywhere but they’re at it,’ he added. ‘Well, they can make of this what they will.’ This attitude again surprised me, and also unexpectedly uplifted me. If he could acknowledge one of the unmentionables, maybe that meant it might be possible for anybody—for me—even in powerlessness, to adopt such an attitude of acknowledgment, of acceptance and detachment too.” 

The “unmentionable” middle sister refers to in the above passage is the click of a camera, and thus a reminder of the state surveillance the community is under. Beyond that, however, the fact that real milkman openly acknowledges the noise is significant. As middle sister’s use of the euphemism “unmentionables” itself implies, there is an enormous amount of secrecy and double-speak in her district; the separatist campaign takes place largely underground and relies on the silence of sympathetic civilians to survive. Much of what happens in Milkman serves as a reminder that this silence can facilitate abuses of power. Thanks to her experiences with milkman, middle sister is beginning to recognize this, which is why she reacts with such relief to real milkman’s willingness to speak candidly.  

“Before the milkman, maybe-boyfriend’s touch, those fingers, his hands, had been the best, the most, the absolute of lovely. But now, since the milkman, any part of maybe-boyfriend coming towards me brought up in me mounting bouts of revulsion and a feeling that I might at any moment be sick.” 

Although middle sister remains confused about whether milkman’s behavior truly is wrong, it’s clear from its effects that it does constitute a form of sexual violence. Without ever touching middle sister, milkman is nevertheless able to intrude on her mind and body, occupying her thoughts and causing fatigue, dizziness, and insomnia. Significantly, milkman’s stalking also impacts middle sister’s attitude towards sex and relationships in much the same way physical sexual assault might; although she knows on some level that maybe-boyfriend wouldn’t hurt her, she is unable to control the feelings of disgust and suspicion that intimacy—whether sex or simply his desire to see where she lives—provokes in her.

“All this made sense within the context of our intricately coiled, overly secretive, hyper-gossipy, puritanical yet indecent, totalitarian district.” 

The above passage encapsulates both the general mindset of middle sister’s community and the way in which that mindset feeds on itself. In some respects, the district truly is under “totalitarian rule”: in addition to the state forces that periodically terrorize the neighborhood, there is also the violence and corruption of the local paramilitaries. This state of affairs inevitably encourages secrecy, paranoia, and gossip as those in the district police themselves as a means of self-protection. The ultimate result is a community that is itself as “totalitarian” as the forces that ostensibly rule it; in Milkman, public opinion is perhaps the most effective way of enforcing order and conformity.

“I’d assumed that how my face looked, how I was making it look, how I presented it outwardly, was down to me, under the control of me, the ‘I am’ deep in the council chamber. I thought this real me was in there, in charge, hidden from them but directing from the undergrowth. Thought too, I’d chosen a subordinate to assist me and not some rebel to turn tables and override me.” 

In response to the rumors surrounding her and milkman, middle sister adopts the same tactic she uses to avoid engaging on political matters: feigning (and at times deliberately cultivating) ignorance. By doing so, however, she inadvertently ends up with a fractured and alienated sense of self. For one, the more she hides her thoughts and feelings from those around her, the more she herself loses access to her inner world: “[M]y head, which initially had reassured [...] now began itself to doubt I was even there. ‘Just a minute,’ it said. ‘Where is our reaction?” (178). As the above passage demonstrates, she also becomes estranged from her body, losing her ability to recognize or control her facial expressions. Significantly, she describes this feeling as a sense that a “rebel” has taken control of her. This allusion to the ongoing insurgency suggests that while middle sister’s feelings may have arisen from sexual trauma, the kind of self-alienation she describes is also a community-wide problem, stemming from years of violence and terror.

“According to the police, of course, our community was a rogue community. It was we who were the enemy, we who were the terrorists, the civilian terrorists, the associates of terrorists or simply individuals suspected of being but not yet discovered to be terrorists.” 

The above passage takes place in the context of middle sister discussing her decision not to go to the police about milkman’s stalking. In fact, the decision isn’t really a decision at all, since as she explains, her community effectively exists outside the authority of the state. Arguably, however, it does so at least in part because of the state itself: in labeling everyone within the district a terrorist or eventual terrorist and refusing to engage with them except as “the enemy,” the government forces them to look to the paramilitaries for protection and leadership. In other words, the passage serves as an example of the way in which consensus can shape reality on a national scale, with the state’s beliefs about middle sister and her community ensuring that their welfare ends up being ever more tightly tied to that of the “terrorists.”

“‘I’ve been warning you to kill out that habit you insist on and that now I suspect you’re addicted to—that reading in public as you’re walking about.’ ‘But—’ I said. ‘Not natural,’ she said. ‘But—’ I said, ‘I thought you meant in case of traffic, in case I walked into traffic.’ ‘Not traffic,’ she said. ‘More stigmatic than traffic. But too late. The community has pronounced its diagnosis on you now.’” 

Middle sister’s habit of reading as she walks around the city is one of her primary coping mechanisms and survival strategies. Significantly, the books she reads all predate the 20th century, and in this sense, represent a determined effort to ignore the violence that surrounds her in favor of something more pleasant. As she sees it, there is also a tactical reason for filtering out her surroundings in this way: in doing so, she prevents herself from seeing or overhearing anything that might make her a liability to either the government or the paramilitaries. When she talks to longest friend, however, middle sister learns that her attempts to protect herself have paradoxically made her more of a target. The community considers her behavior suspicious, and she consequently comes under increased scrutiny: “[N]ow—owing not to Milkman, but to my escalating beyond-the-paleness—I was being stopped not cursory but much more than cursory times” (208).

“I needed my silence, my unaccommodation, to shield me from pawing and from molestation by questions. In contrast to friend, I myself was of the view that trying to placate with information to win them over, would not bring benefits of desistence but would encourage and lead them on even more. Besides, I didn’t want to. Still I didn’t want to. This was my one bit of power in this disempowering world.” 

One of the central lessons middle sister learns over the course of the novel is that silence will not necessarily protect her. Her belief that it will isn’t unreasonable; she has grown up in a society that monitors people’s words and actions carefully for political overtones, and in which expressing political opinions openly can be deadly. Furthermore, she deeply resents what she earlier describes as the public “sample testing of [her] thoughts, opinion and inclination” (172), even depicting it as a violation akin to sexual violence (i.e. “pawing” and “stalking”). Nevertheless, it slowly becomes clear that middle sister’s silence is inadequate in the face of the threat milkman poses; her unwillingness or inability to even name the threat he poses only provides him with cover. 

“I felt her strong arms though, felt her warm breath, and knew in that moment that it was good beyond God to have my mother near me.” 

For much of the novel, middle sister’s relationship with her mother is marred by suspicion and misunderstandings. Ma’s love for her daughter often manifests in ways middle sister finds irritating; for instance, her preoccupation with seeing her daughter safely married strikes middle sister as outdated and caricatured, rather than as genuine (if misguided) concern. However, when middle sister is poisoned, she realizes how much she truly does love and depend on her mother. This not only hints that their relationship will be less combative going forward but underscores the broader importance of female solidarity in the novel.  

“[The issue women] then went on to say that as the renouncers had elected themselves rulers of the roost here, how about they leave tablets girl to them, to the issue women, and instead investigate one of their own? They could do something, suggested these women, about that middle-aged letch in their movement who went around preying upon and grooming young women.” 

As helpless and alone as middle sister feels throughout much of the novel, she acknowledges in retrospect that “probably there had existed individuals who could have helped [...] only [she] lost that opportunity through having no faith in them and no faith or sense of entitlement in [her]self” (180). The issue women are a prime example of this. As feminists, they are by definition concerned with problems like sexual predation, and as this passage demonstrates, they’re actually aware of milkman’s predilection for “grooming young women.” Nevertheless, when real milkman suggests speaking to the issue women, middle sister is resistant; though sympathetic to some of their ideas, she is too worried about how the community would judge her to follow real milkman’s advice.

“So I lost presence of mind and allowed myself to be pushed into obtaining chips with menaces. Most damning therefore, my own behaviour, this handling of the chip shop badly, no matter there’d been a compelling of me by everybody in it exactly to handle it badly.” 

The seemingly trivial incident in the chip shop is actually a testament to the power of public consensus in the novel. Middle sister does belatedly realize that she’s being given the chips for free because people are scared of her and the influence she has with milkman. By that point, however, she is so frustrated by the situation and daunted by the prospect of “disrespect[ing] and contradict[ing]” her “elders” that she takes the chips without protest (242), thus reinforcing the perception that she extorted them with “menaces.” In other words, the narrative surrounding middle sister and milkman has become so powerful by this point that it’s actually shaping reality: “This was more of their sensationalism, more of those makings-up, those lies of theirs that they wanted to be true and so in their heads and in their gossip they made true” (257).

“Terror Of Other People probably thought that with her dead, it, itself, could carry on living. It would party it up, let its hair down, continue to be fearful. Never do they realise, these psychological usurpers and possessors, that in dispensing with the host—with the one being above all whom they need for their own survival—inevitably they are also dispensing with themselves.” 

Tablets girl’s plight is in many ways the logical endpoint of the kind of cognitive dissonance virtually everyone in the community does their best to quell. She is ultimately so torn between her desire to be happy and her fear of being happy that her personality splits along these lines: she writes notes to herself in which “Terror of Other People” constantly interrupts “Lightness and Niceness” to urge constant vigilance (266), and she tries to poison her sister, whom she sees as “[s]ome split-off usurping aspect of herself” (218–19). As middle sister notes, however, all of tablets girl’s efforts are ultimately self-defeating; tablets girl cannot “kill off” her more hopeful side without destroying herself in the process. In her case, the destruction is quite literal, since her poisoning of others results in her own murder. Broadly speaking, however, her fate serves as a warning both to the rest of the community and in fact to Northern Ireland in general; the implication of the above passage is that in trying to defeat one another, each side involved in the Troubles will end up self-destructing.   

“I knew he wanted revenge, that for a long time he’d nursed revenge—even from before the era of Milkman. He’d made his decision because I was supposed to have been a nice girl and further, his nice girl, but some mistake had occurred which confused him and insulted him but because of Milkman setting his sights, he’d been forced to retreat and keep resentment in check.” 

Given the novel’s plot and even its title, it may seem surprising that middle sister’s final confrontation involves not milkman, but Somebody McSomebody—a man she had earlier described as more of an irritation than a genuine threat. However, the episode serves as a reminder that the misogynistic violence milkman embodied is in reality a systemic problem that preceded him and will survive him. McSomebody may not have the institutional power that milkman did, but he is still capable of physically assaulting middle sister. What’s more, he has absorbed the lessons of a patriarchal society—in particular, the idea that he is entitled to whichever woman he wants.