Milkman

As its unusual diction and syntax demonstrate, Milkman is highly conscious of how language is used. Middle sister’s narration is dense, circuitous, and often oddly—or even ungrammatically—structured. Here, for instance, is how she summarizes her second encounter with milkman:

As with last time with the flashy car, this time too—with the sudden appearance, the proximity, the presumption, the click of the camera, his judgment upon my running and walking then once again that abrupt departure—there was confusion, too much of being startled (9-10).

The idiosyncrasies of middle sister’s voice serve an important purpose, however, in that they reveal the relationship between language and power—in particular, how difficult it can be for a relatively powerless person to speak. For a start, it’s worth noting that English—though widely used by the 1970s and the de facto common tongue—is not native to Ireland; to the extent that it supplanted Irish, it did so in association with British imperialism. Although middle sister probably grew up speaking English, her stilted use of it is a deliberate reminder that the language has in some sense been imposed on her.

Meanwhile, the experience of living through the Troubles in particular circumscribes middle sister’s language in much more direct ways. The covert nature of separatist resistance necessarily means that communication often relies on codes, hints, and euphemisms; Milkman, for instance, never mentions organizations like the IRA or states like the U.K. by name, but instead uses terminology like “renouncers” and the country “over the water.” Lastly, the society middle sister lives in lacks a frame of reference for any kind of misogyny that stops short of outright physical or sexual abuse. This creates an additional layer of difficulty whenever middle sister tries to explain her experiences with milkman:

Was he actually doing anything? Was anything happening? If I didn’t know, how could I explain to and convince anyone else? [...] Even if I were to be heard, people here were unused to words like ‘pursuit’ and ‘stalking,’ that is, in terms of sexual pursuit and sexual stalking (182-83).

Part of what the above passage demonstrates, however, is that it isn’t simply language but also silence that can be weaponized to serve the purposes of those in power. Because so much of the communication that takes place in the novel does so in code, the community is hyperaware of the unstated and perhaps even unintended connotations words can have; certain terms, for instance, are unofficially off-limits because their “too high-flying, too-posturing” (21) nature evokes a sense of Englishness. In fact, given the brutality of paramilitary crackdowns on those suspected of disloyalty, knowing these kinds of connotations can quite literally be a matter of life and death. At the same time, however, the need for secrecy in the face of an external enemy prevents anyone within the community from acknowledging any of these connotations openly. The end result is a situation in which those in power are able to capitalize on silence and ambiguity to further their own agendas, all with virtual impunity. The prime example of this is milkman’s harassment of middle sister, which takes place entirely under a veneer of plausible deniability; he never openly threatens to kill maybe-boyfriend if she resists his advances, and because she doesn’t dare make the subtext of their interactions explicit, he doesn’t need to.

In some sense, then, the very wordiness of middle sister’s narration is itself an attempt to reclaim power from her oppressors. Although the circumstances in which she’s speaking mean that her language is often tortured and roundabout, it’s also exhaustive; she belabors points, often listing one synonym after another, in order to ensure that what she is saying can’t be misunderstood. Most importantly of all, the mere fact that she is speaking signals a turn away from silence as a form of self-protection; in retrospect, she says, it’s clear that she should have spoken out about what was happening with milkman, and so she does so now.

Despite the novel’s setting, it is not ethnic or religious but rather patriarchal violence that largely drives Milkman’s plot. The Irish Catholic community middle sister lives in is highly conservative on matters of gender and sexuality; for instance, while the novel takes place in the 1970s, it is still the expectation that most girls will marry and begin having children in their teens. There are indications that attitudes are changing—some couples have begun to experiment with living together before marriage, and a fledgling feminist group has sprung up in middle sister’s neighborhood—but the environment generally remains a misogynistic and homophobic one; abuse and harassment of women is rampant, and men like chef are regularly beat up on suspicion of being gay.

By and large, however, Milkman is not concerned with overt physical or even verbal abuse. Unlike Somebody McSomebody, who ultimately does assault middle sister, milkman never touches or outwardly threatens her; in fact, on the face of things, his interactions with her are never anything but polite. Nevertheless, both middle sister and the novel frame milkman as a far more serious threat than McSomebody, in large part because he is able to threaten and pursue her in an indirect manner. Milkman is a high-ranking member of a local paramilitary in a community that is effectively in rebellion against and under siege from the surrounding country. This gives milkman significant implied power in his interactions with middle sister, while also limiting possible avenues of resistance. Many things necessarily go unsaid in middle sister’s community, and milkman is able to use this silence as a weapon against middle sister; at one point, for instance, she finds herself struggling to grapple with the implied threat milkman makes to have maybe-boyfriend assassinated, because “[a]t public, grassroots level [she] wasn’t even supposed to know this man was a renouncer” (116). This same dynamic in fact extends to the problem of misogyny in general, which is so masked by the ongoing sectarian conflict that victims of patriarchal violence may struggle to articulate what’s happening even to themselves:

At the time, age eighteen, having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were—if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there? (6).

The novel itself, however, is quite clear that this kind of “attack” is in fact a violent one. As time goes on, middle sister suffers both mentally and physically from the stress of milkman’s stalking: She becomes chronically fatigued, experiences episodes of what she calls “anti-orgasms,” and describes milkman as having “infiltrated [her] psyche” (166). While milkman never actually lays hands on middle sister, he is nevertheless able to invade her body and mind in a way that is reminiscent of sexual assault, and has the same long-lasting traumatic consequences; middle sister, for instance, increasingly finds herself disgusted by the thought of sex or intimacy with maybe-boyfriend as a result of milkman’s predatory behavior. What’s more, middle sister’s suffering is amplified by the sexism of the community at large, which begins to ostracize her as “the upstart, the little Frenchwoman, the arriviste, the hussy” (205) for purportedly sleeping with a married man. It is widespread, systemic misogyny as much as it is milkman himself that is responsible for middle sister’s situation.       

On that note, it’s significant that the dynamic that exists between middle sister and milkman plays out on a broader scale between the community and the paramilitaries. Much like middle sister’s powerful stalker, the local paramilitaries promise both protection and violence to the district at large; they shield the community from military crackdowns and provide it with some semblance of a government, but they also bully and extort it. This suggests that there is a common thread of toxic masculinity running through both the misogyny middle sister experiences and the violence of the Troubles; in both cases, there is a cultural expectation that men should be dominant and aggressive. It isn’t surprising, then, that the most serious pushback to paramilitary action comes from the novel’s women. Perhaps the best example of this comes in the final chapter, when the local girls try to persuade the local boys to join them in their waltzing. The boys, having already begun to absorb the prevailing gender norms, rebuff them in favor of “throwing miniature anti-personnel devices at the foreign soldiers from the country ‘over the water’ any time a formation of them appeared on our streets” (315). In shrugging off this rejection and continuing to dance by themselves, the girls are implicitly rejecting both the ethno-religious conflict at the heart of the Troubles and the patriarchal norms that facilitate male violence more generally.