‘This was the “I’m male and you’re female” territory’ : inserting gender into the historical-political binary in Anna Burns’s Milkman

Abstract

Anna Burns’s novel Milkman (2018) makes a significant intervention into narratives of the Northern Irish Troubles by inserting gender as a significant source of entrapment and coercion for women within the nationalist community. The novel depicts a society filled with borders and restrictions, where in the name of perpetuating tribal dualisms women in particular are silenced and forced into socially sanctioned roles. This essay analyses the tactics used by Burns and her unnamed protagonist to challenge the authority of those who have assumed control over the naming and narration of the past. It argues that, through the fragmentary style of her narrative voice, Burns introduces precisely the kind of subversive openness needed to challenge the privileging of the political conflict, deconstructing linguistic constructs in order to reveal widespread collusion in the silencing of women. The narrator gradually learns to identify her harassment at the hands of a local paramilitary strongman as sexual rather than political in nature, thus linking the novel with contemporary feminist activism which seeks to empower women to highlight the kind of predatory behaviour that went unchallenged until relatively recently, not least because women lacked the precise vocabulary to verbalise it.