79 pages • 2 hours read
Anna BurnsMilkman
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Middle sister doesn’t see milkman again until one evening when she is returning from an adult French class downtown. During this particular lesson, the teacher read aloud from a novel in which the author described the sky as some color other than blue. The students protested this, becoming even more disturbed when the teacher insisted that they look out the window to observe the colors of the sunset. While doing this, middle sister noticed a white van parked outside, but quickly convinced herself it wasn’t milkman’s.
Middle sister’s route home passes through a perpetually deserted area of town she calls the “ten-minute place.” Middle sister once asked ma why this neighborhood is so desolate, but ma’s only explanation was that some places, like some people, are “just stuck” (84). Ma then began to complain about her deceased husband (“da”), who suffered from episodes of depression; in middle sister’s community, it is seen as self-indulgent to be depressed, although it is also suspect to be too hopeful.
A bomb left over from World War II recently exploded in the ten-minute place, and while middle sister is walking, she comes across the head of a cat killed in the blast. Cats are not popular in middle sister’s district, but she feels a sudden urge to give the remains a proper burial and is in the process of picking them up when she senses milkman approaching.
Milkman begins talking about maybe-boyfriend. He mentions the controversy surrounding the supercharger, before abruptly changing the topic to eldest sister’s ex, who was killed by a car bomb. Gradually, middle sister realizes milkman is threatening to have maybe-boyfriend killed as well.
Middle sister doesn’t know how to respond, not least because she can’t be entirely certain that milkman really is a paramilitary; some people simply pretend to be involved in the movement. One such person is “Somebody McSomebody”: an 18-year-old man who once asked middle sister out, and began harassing and threatening her when she turned him down. She recently encountered him at a club, and McSomebody—having heard the rumors about middle sister and milkman—implied that he too was a high-ranking paramilitary. Middle sister knew this was untrue but suspected that McSomebody half-believed what he was saying; paramilitaries wield enormous influence in the community and are highly popular with a certain subsection of women. In fact, some of these “groupies” had approached middle sister on a separate outing, gushing about the dangers of their boyfriends’ lives and offering middle sister advice.
Back in the present, middle sister continues to listen nervously to milkman’s seemingly pleasant conversation until four men suddenly emerge from the shadows. Distracted by their appearance, middle sister doesn’t notice when milkman slips away. The other men leave afterwards, confirming—in middle sister’s mind—that they’re involved in milkman’s schemes.
While wondering what to do, middle sister hears the real local milkman calling out to her from his car. Real milkman (also known as “the man who didn’t love anybody”) is one of the district’s “beyond-the-pales,” in part because he once refused to allow paramilitaries to continue stashing weapons in his yard. Nevertheless, he’s a kind-hearted and helpful man who is friends with ma. Middle sister blurts out that she has a cat’s head she needs to bury, and real milkman offers to place it in his yard. He also urges middle sister to let him drive her home, and she agrees.
As real milkman drives, he inquires after middle sister’s family and asks about milkman, suggesting that middle sister speak to the local feminist group about the situation. Privately, middle sister considers this insane: The community views these “issue women” as misguided at best and dangerous at worst, and middle sister is afraid of drawing further attention to herself. She listens quietly, however, until real milkman drops her off at her house.
Chapter 3 Analysis
Chapter 3 begins with an incident that demonstrates how the Troubles have impacted not just the mindset of middle sister, but also that of the community as a whole. The behavior of the French class may seem like an overreaction, but it stems from several interrelated anxieties. Middle sister and her peers live very precarious existences; people routinely die violently in the course of everyday activities like driving or crossing the street. In response to this danger and uncertainty, people adopt various coping mechanisms: for instance, convincing themselves that they do in fact have control of their surroundings, or trying to preempt future loss and suffering. The class’s response to the novel and the sunset is an example of both. Not only do the students consider it dangerous to become invested in a new experience they could lose at any moment, but they see the very fact that it is a new experience as reason for alarm:
After generation upon generation, fathers upon forefathers, mothers upon foremothers, centuries and millennia of being one colour officially and three colours unofficially, a colourful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be (73).
Perhaps because disruptions of the status quo are so often deadly in middle sister’s community, it is easier for the class to deny the evidence of their own eyes than to change the way they think.
This in turn helps explain the unusual power that public opinion has in the novel. Because there is so little actual stability, people look to community consensus (including inherited beliefs) to provide them with the illusion of certainty. As middle sister has already discovered, the effects of this can be far-reaching and problematic; the story that she is having an affair with milkman has already begun to impinge on her life in the form of encounters with McSomebody and the groupies, and even ma is absolutely convinced of the rumor’s truth. The story about maybe-boyfriend’s supercharger has similarly taken on a life of its own and symbolizes how a lack of certainty (in this case, the absence of the flag and the confusion about whether the car itself sported one) can spark rumors that only obscure the truth further.
This reliance on public opinion and tradition is also one of the things that makes middle sister’s community so conservative on matters of gender. Although attitudes are slowly changing, women are generally expected to marry young and immediately begin having children; part of what upsets ma about her daughter’s supposed relationship with milkman is the fact that she “wasn’t decently in, that [she] wasn’t the wife” (123). Outright misogyny is also common and is part of what gives the episode involving the cat’s head its significance. According to middle sister, cats’ unpopularity stems in part from the perception that they are “feminine” (93), and male violence against cats sometimes overflows into male violence against women. The fact that milkman corners middle sister while she is tending to the cat’s head therefore hints at the danger she herself is in.
In fact, sexism is so much a part of middle sister’s world that it can be difficult to even recognize. For instance, when the issue women show up at a protest about a local curfew, people are stunned to learn that they aren’t talking about issues like “witch-burnings, footbindings, [and] suttee” (161), but rather “homespun, personal, ordinary things”:
[T]hey spoke about ordinary physical violence as if it wasn’t just normal violence, also speaking of how getting your blouse ripped off in a physical fight, or your brassiere ripped off in a physical fight, or getting felt up in a fight wasn’t violence that was physical so much as it was sexual (162).
This problem of identifying misogyny intersects with issues of language and silence. As middle sister notes early on, part of the reason she finds it difficult to deal with milkman is that she has a hard time even articulating what he’s doing and why it’s wrong:
Why was he presuming I didn’t mind him beside me when I did mind him beside me? Why could I just not stop this running and tell this man to leave me alone? Apart from ‘where did he come from?’ I didn’t have those other thoughts until later, and I don’t mean an hour later. I mean twenty years later (6).
In this way, silence protects the interests of those in power not only by limiting criticism, but also by limiting people’s access to the very words and concepts that enable criticism. This is particularly true in Milkman, where the ongoing dirty war cloaks all interactions in an additional layer of paranoia and secrecy. For instance, even when middle sister realizes that milkman is threatening maybe-boyfriend, she says nothing, because she is “socially conditioned into pretending” (116) these threats don’t take place.
