Gossip, guerrilla intelligence, and women’s war work in Anna Burns’ Milkman

ABSTRACT

In Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018) the danger of the sectarian conflict largely confines women’s labour to domestic spaces: childrearing, homemaking and, where women do participate in the conflict, emergency homemade medical care and alerting paramilitaries of danger. The novel takes place in distinctly female spaces as we see the Troubles from within kitchens and sitting rooms, from side-ways glances, heads kept down and rushed walks home. This paper argues argue that Burns highlights a significant way women participated in the conflict: through speech, namely gossip. Gossip constitutes a kind of verbal labour and feminine guerrilla intelligence in the novel as it spreads information and allegiances within the community outside of the traditional and masculine military sphere. The novel recognises both the importance of gossip as a legitimate way women participate in conflict from within approved domestic spaces and illustrates the destructive nature of gossip on the individual. While overlooked as non-military actors, Burns highlights how women’s role in upholding their community’s power structures through gossip is key to maintaining paramilitary power and their own survival, making it a significant, if concealed, form of labour.

KEYWORDS:

• Gossip
• the troubles
• domestic labour
• women and work
• contemporary fiction

In Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018), the danger of an unnamed city and an unnamed conflict confines women to domestic labour: the work of childrearing, homemaking and other care obligations. Furthermore, when women do partake in the conflict it is also framed within this same sphere of domesticity as women provide emergency homemade medical care, alert paramilitaries of danger, and break curfews. The novel, while situated amid the sectarian conflict of the Troubles and named after the predatory male figure of the narrative, takes place in distinctly female spaces as we see the Troubles from within kitchens and sitting rooms, from side-ways glances, heads kept down and rushed walks home. Caroline Magennis argues that movement, both of the body and around the unnamed city, is central to Milkman and who has access to movement is crucial to Burns’ exploration of sexual predation and navigation of sectarian conflict.¹ I would add that engagement with movement also defines the division of labour in the novel: while women’s work is confined to the domestic sphere men’s work necessitates geographic movement. Despite this domestic delimiting, Burns illustrates how women’s impact on the conflict moves far beyond the home through their participation in and circulation of gossip which features in this novel as a unique form of verbal labour.

Burns draws on the “separate spheres” ideology of male and female work whilst also blurring the boundaries of said spheres, illustrating that binaries of public/private, male/female labour break down in the face of guerrilla conflict, or indeed were never truly as strict in practice as in theory. As we see in Milkman, and in reality, “women’s experience has never neatly divided into the “domestic” and the “public,” since these two spheres are profoundly interwoven” and, in terms of the Troubles, as “violence was indiscriminate, women and children on both sides of the conflict were victims.” ² This illustrates that women’s role in the conflict occupied the intersection of domestic and public, a standing which neither protected them from violence nor excused them from providing their labour to the sectarian cause. In this analysis, “domestic labour” will be used to refer to any form of work traditionally undertaken by women within the home, such as housework, cooking, and care work. Burns’ novel illustrates how this work is changed by the Troubles and is reoriented towards furthering military aims, such as the development of the remarkable “homespun medical corps” from the typically unremarked upon care work performed by women within the home.³ Alongside this reappropriation of domestic work, Burns highlights another significant way in which women participated in the conflict: through speech, the deliberate absence of speech or obfuscation of meaning – namely gossip. In Milkman, gossip constitutes a kind of verbal labour and guerrilla intelligence, spreading information within the community outside official, often masculine lines of communication and therefore evading detection by occupying forces. The novel recognises both the importance of gossip as a legitimate way women participate in conflict from within approved domestic spaces, as well as illustrating the destructive nature of gossip on the individual.

Conflict and the “work” of war is complex, both in the context of the Troubles and Milkman. While it might be seen to refer to literal instances of aggression or defence – such as bombings, shootings, the arrest of paramilitaries or civilians – it should also include consideration of women’s physical or material support or aid to the paramilitary cause: medical care, refuge, hiding weapons, or ending curfews. However, in Milkman, women’s participation in the conflict also involves upholding Republican ideals and standards of behaviour, reproductive labour, and internal policing of a community through the weaponisation of shame and reputation. This aspect of women’s participation in conflict is necessarily slippery and difficult to define, as its very purpose is to be naturalised and self-perpetuating within the community. Additionally, within the sectarian conflict there is no unified patriarchal system against which to measure women’s role. The patriarchal control the paramilitaries hold over the unnamed city in Milkman is precarious and improvised, sometimes mimicking the very imperial judicial system they are fighting against through their reputation for violent punishments, requisition of goods and money, and “kangaroo courts.” As such, women’s existence and labour within such an improvised system is subject to similar problems of boundary definition.

Gossip sits at an intersection between the public and private, leisure and labour. It necessitates going out in public, engaging with others, and assumes an intricate understanding of political and social events and nuances not typically associated with the interiority and domesticity of women’s labour. However, it also requires a space of secrecy and confidence, intimate conversation and quiet watchfulness, that evokes the private sphere of domestic work. Therefore, gossip’s paradoxical status, and that of the women who spread it, make it a model representation of the position of women and their work during the Troubles. The gendering of gossip has been evident since Samuel Johnson’s definition of the term, as “[o]ne who runs about tattling like women at a lying in,” encapsulating its negative feminine connotations.⁴ Of course, men also gossip in Milkman. However, they also partake in the conflict in more “legitimate” ways, and it is expected of and acceptable for them to be involved in conflict-adjacent activity outside of the home meaning that they need contend with the fraught concealment that comes with assumed domesticity and femininity. While often seen as the stuff of idle chatter or socialising, as opposed to “real talk,” gossip amidst conflict can become a form of labour, morphing from frivolous speech act in peacetime into a way of rule enforcement in war.⁵ Gossip’s usefulness to the renouncers (Burns’ term for Republicans) is tied to its position as a kind of domestic and feminine labour, and its position as unofficial, marginal, and guerrilla. It is therefore a way in which traditionally feminine actions are repurposed for the masculine endeavour of the conflict.

Gossip’s status as labour stems from the sense of duty and expectation attached to it within the community depicted by Burns. Not only does gossip entail a significant amount of emotional turmoil and labour for those involved as subjects, but it is also something which women have a duty to spread in order to protect the community, even when it means weaponising gossip against a member of that community to police them back into normative behaviour. For instance, middle sister’s eldest sister is “sent” by her husband to “apprise” and “warn” middle sister that she “had been seen talking with this man” – milkman (4). Her mother, too, “[seeks middle sister] out and started in on the conciliatory note […] coaxing,” trying to get middle sister to give up what she assumes is her daughter’s paramilitary lover (4, 49). Her mother is persuaded to action by “all the local general gossips,” trying first to reason with her daughter, and then shaming her (48). Gossip is also the catalyst of more visible “war work” in the novel, when rumours about the paramilitary attacks on the feminist “issue women” or “real milkman” (the name given to the community’s actual milkman to distinguish him from the paramilitary that goes by the same name) initiate action from the community’s women to stop egregious violence (159, 140). Additionally, rumours of middle sister’s relationship with milkman causes the established “paramilitary groupies” to ambush her in the toilets of a pub, instructing her on how to behave now that she is one of them (124). Each of these acts has the broad aim of survival in the “hair-trigger” society that is Northern Ireland, attempting to uphold the “proper” roles and behaviour of women or to police the paramilitary violence and thus bolster community hierarchies and morale against a common enemy (6). While overlooked as non-military actors, women’s role in reproducing these power structures through gossip is key, in Burns’ novel, to maintaining paramilitary power and ensuring their own survival, making gossip a significant (if concealed) form of labour.

Working at the margins

“Women always broke the curfews” middle sister tells us (159). The politically “disastrous episode” (159) curfew breaking by women from the Falls Road has, as Begoña Aretxaga details, “achieved the quality of a myth of origin, the starting point of women’s popular resistance.”⁶ In Milkman, middle sister describes these kinds of events, using the heroic lexicon usually reserved for the renouncers: women “instinctively” rising up or “uniting once more, they threw themselves into action” (158). However, just a page after this assessment, curfew-breaking is depicted as a result of women’s patience being “stretched far enough:” “It would have been over-tried, over-tested […] it would snap – because life was going on – children to be fed, nappies to be changed, housework to be done, shopping to be got in” (159). This change from the language of conflict to the language of domesticity illustrates the contradictory position of women during the Troubles, and the specific way they could further the military effort through subversive use of domestic labour. Because women were, ultimately, not viewed as political actors by the British occupying force, and by their use of a “safety in numbers” approach, they could perform an act of mass disobedience and not pose the same threat as men.

Burns demonstrates the disarming power of the domestic through the absurd image of women and a menagerie of pets taking to the streets en masse: “[w]ith them would be their children, their screaming babies, their housepets of assorted dogs, rabbits, hamsters and turtles. Also they’d be wheeling prams” (160). Middle sister considers how women could use their narrow privilege as assumed non-political actors to effectively engage with the political conflict:

To shoot up a district of women, children, prams and goldfish otherwise, to run them through with swords much as one might like to, would not look good, would look grave, sexist, unbalanced, not only in the glare of the critical side of the home media, but also in the eyes of the international media (160).

Furthermore, Burns uses sustained capital letters to illustrate the speech of the women in this scene, “CURFEW’S OVER! EVERYBODY IS TO COME OUT! CURFEW’S OVER!,” which is presented in the same manner as the occupying forces threatening demands, “RETURN TO YOUR HOMES. THIS IS NOT A GAME. THIS IS THE LAST INTIMATION. OBEY THE SIXTEEN HUNDRED HOUR CURFEW. IF YOU ARE NOT OFF THE STREET IN … .” (160–161). By using the same typographical representation for women and state forces, Burns illustrates the potential power of ostensibly passive, domestic actors as well as highlighting the everyday realities of existing alongside conflict: the reality of women who “defeated the curfew and were about to rush home to deal with the potatoes” (160). In the novel, women occupy a paradoxical role through their domestic positioning as they are both removed from the conflict and at its centre; in opposition to their depoliticised status in the eyes of the occupying forces, their every action has the potential to be viewed as political by their Catholic community and the paramilitaries who rule it.

This paradoxical role is further evidenced by the development of the “homespun medical corps,” in which the contrast of the domestic and militarised vocabulary succinctly illustrates the position of women and their labour during the Troubles. Towards the end of the novel, middle sister recalls how the women of the community would:

turn out in numbers with binlids, with whistles and they’d warn everybody, including the renouncers, of the approach of the enemy; all for billeting the renouncers too, for tipping them off, for stopping the curfews, for transporting weapons and, of course, there was the expertise of their homespun medical corps. Any renouncer worth his salt would agree there was nothing like getting shot but retaining enough lifeforce to run the warren of side streets and back entries to make it into one of those women’s houses – to have your bullet extracted, to have your skin pulled together, to have yourself sewn up or, if no time for sewing, to be held in place with enough nappypins to give you time to outrun the military house-searches which would by now be going on (321).

The fact that “any renouncer worth his salt” knew the importance of women in the guerrilla conflict is a clear admittance of the significance of women’s domestic labour, even as it remains on the margins of the society and conflict. The mention of running “the warren of side streets and back entries” to obtain this improvised medical care emphasises its place on the margins, as well as the imperfect, but vital, nature of the war work performed by women.

When middle sister is poisoned by tablets girl, she has first-hand experience of women’s improvised labour, namely the “backyard pharmacy” orchestrated by her mother and other women of the community who gather for a communal purging effort:

Ma returned with an awful-smelling, dreadful-looking, monstrous pint-sized concoction. So also appeared neighbours, bearing demijohns, bell-jars, green, brown and yellow warning jars, balsams, philtres, phials, herbs, powders, weighing scales, pestle and mortars, huge pharmacopoeias […] They had materialised out of nowhere which was usual with neighbours on occasions of “not going to hospital” (217, 225–226)

This insistence on “not going to hospital” also illustrates women’s role in the retention of the community “purity” and safety. The hospital is one of many contentious zones associated with informership and the state, and anyone who attends is the subject of gossip, suspicion, and perhaps punishment. The “homespun medical corps” is, moreover, dependent on guerrilla intelligence – gossip – with news of injuries or poisonings spreading through the streets. However, despite the flexibility of women’s labour in moving in and out of the strictly domestic sphere through this medical care, there is still an enforced gendered domesticity at play within this form of care work. Avoiding hospital is not just suggested by the paramilitaries, but enforced; the hospital is permissible only in the case of grave injury or for those already deemed “beyond the pale” by the community. As such, those who already shoulder the majority of care work, women, are coerced by community leaders into what is another form of domestic labour, only with the appearance of merging the separate spheres of sanctioned male and female labour. Ultimately, Burns illustrates how the flexibility of women in the community, their ability to work on the margins, and work within the conflict is possible when said work is an improvisation or expansion of the domestic. Their position as domestic labourers will always come first, and this paradoxically makes their work more effective within the context of guerrilla warfare and pushes women’s work further into the margins.

Burns’ mention of “military house-searches” undertaken by the occupying force also illustrates the women’s representation as at once overlooked domestic, maternal, sexualised actors and potential members of the hostile guerrilla force which is present in oral histories and accounts of the Troubles. Shattering Silence, Aretxaga’s feminist ethnography of Northern Ireland, recounts the story of a young nationalist woman known only as “Moira” as she speaks about the aftermath of a house search: “You don’t feel the house clean for days afterwards, no matter how much you clean it.”⁷ Here, there is an “implicit but clear continuity between the body and the house in women’s narratives of house searches,” again signalling both the occupying force’s and women’s view of themselves as inherently domestic actors, with their bodies mirroring the violation of the domestic sphere.⁸ Indeed:

[f]or Moira the humiliation, destruction, impotence, and anxiety accompanying such a house search was as defiling as a sexual assault […] the verbal abuse of women and the arrest of their children blurred this line, if such a distinction can indeed be established between symbolic physical violation.⁹

Moira’s testimony illustrates again that, within the context of the Troubles, women’s domestic work was about more than just homemaking, caring, and even the homemade medical care and curfew-breaking of Milkman: it is also the emotional labour of existing under the persistent threat of violation and violence. While this is not rendered quite so explicitly in Burns’ novel, we see middle sister muse on the inescapable sexualisation of Republican women by occupying forces, the constant “drip-drip effect of sexual comments” made to dissuade women from “being witness to what was going on” when a male relative was being stopped and questioned (95). This impossible choice between the threatening sexualisation which accompanies “being witness” and “caus[ing] more suffering and prolonged humiliation” to their men exemplifies the conditions within which women’s labour exists in the novel (95). This is the crux of women’s position in the context of the Troubles – that they are simultaneously demilitarised, viewed as domestic, sexualised, subjected to intimidation by both sides of the conflict, and are at once constantly under suspicion and vital to the paramilitary effort. This multiplicity is a result of women’s troubled positions and marginal labour, in particular the work of gossip.

The retrospective narration of the novel – with middle sister telling the events of milkman’s predation twenty years after the fact – illustrates how gossip interacts with truth. Narrating from this later, temporally removed position, middle sister’s testimony is now more “official:” she has the words for what she experienced that she didn’t possess as a teenager when she had only “a feeling […] an intuition, a sense of repugnance” (6). As middle sister retrospectively comes to understand her experience as sexual harassment and predation, rather than the love-affair narrative circulated at the time, Burns highlights gossip’s power to usurp truth and its impact on the individual and community. This distinction – between truth and gossip – was, it is implied, all the harder to make at the time of events due to the importance of anonymity amid conflict – indeed, there are no names used in Milkman. Even in the authorised form of ethnography, such as Aretxaga’s, there remains a persistent anonymity to many recollections of the Troubles, illustrating that even the more official or objective narratives retain the fearful and nameless quality of much gossip or hearsay. The transformation of gossip into official narrative in Milkman is, again, part of the contingency of women’s labour in the novel: their work and their accounts of life within the Troubles is lent legitimacy when it can be approved or verified from a position of objectivity and authority otherwise denied to women at the time.

Gendered work

Burns’ examination of sexual predation against the backdrop of sectarian conflict is dependent on the exploration and interrogation of the binaries upheld by that society, such as male/female, renouncer/unionist, and paramilitary/civilian. Gossip both enforces these binaries, operating as a form of community self-policing, and contradictorily allows women a role in the conflict which goes beyond the sanctioned domestic sphere. Burns depicts a “patriarchal and aggressively heteronormative society” where “the greatest perceived power lies at the intersection of nationalist politics and hypermasculinity” with the renouncers.¹⁰ The renouncers are “iconic noble fighters in pretty much the whole of the community’s eyes” (119), but it is this perceived nobility which allows them to participate in and obscure abuses of power “expressed as homophobia, misogyny, and sexual violence.”¹¹ Siân White states that, in Milkman, the “average male citizen” – that is, men not involved in paramilitary activities – performs masculinity “through insistent rejections of queer stereotypes; he endorses physical strength, blue-collar work, and football, and rejects cooking, owning coffeepots, and appreciating sunsets,” and also navigates strict gender binaries.¹² However, men are not viewed as community commodities in the same way as women. Burns illustrates how women are used for the advancement of the cause through middle sister’s mother’s continued insistence on marriage and production of “right religion” babies, as well as middle sister’s own view that men

don’t see you as a person but instead as some cipher, some valueless nobody whose sole objective is to reflect back onto them the glory of themselves. Their compliments and solicitousness too, are creepy. They’re inappropriate, squirmy, calculated, rapacious, particularly as not long afterwards – or not long before as in my case – you know it’s going to be insults, threats of violence, threats of death and variations on stalk-talk (133).

It is clear then that gender binaries and the instrumentalisation of women’s bodies can easily devolve into dehumanisation and violence as middle sister “connects her individual feelings of dread and powerlessness to disparities of gendered and sexual power in the broader culture.”¹³However, what is unique about Burns’ construction of these binaries is that she illustrates how often they overlap in a state where identity and secrecy are of the utmost importance. The binaries of “paramilitaries/ordinary people” and “explicitly threatening/insignificant” have the most frequent overlap as the aim of the paramilitaries is to appear indistinguishable from the ordinary citizen.¹⁴ Therefore, this conflicting state – where binaries are both rigorously upheld and constantly broken down – dictates that the social role of women is always unfixed, and that their labour may be of extreme importance or may be simply distraction, risk, and potential betrayals of the renouncers’ cause. The way in which gossip both enforces these binaries and allows women an important role in the conflict makes it a primary example of how women’s invisible labour was a vital part of the Troubles.

Gossip

Gossip is an approved speech act in the novel because of its ability to further the resistance effort. While it is still strongly associated with women, Burns’ use of gossip in Milkman distinctly opposes the idea of gossip as superficial.¹⁵ Discussion of a member of the Catholic community using the “wrong” brand of tea or of keeping the “bit with that flag” from an old British car might appear petty, but these discussions are heavily coded with signifiers of loyalty or traitorship in a society where secrecy is of utmost importance (21). That gossip can be an important means of furthering the resistance effort – even if it can also risk confounding or complicating actions through misplacing suspicion or vitriol – is clear with milkman and middle sister, and with maybe-boyfriend and the Blower Bentley.¹⁶ While Kirkegaard suggests that “gossip anticipates real talk,” Milkman shows that a seemingly trivial discussion can confound the enemy and conceal “real talk,” as both enemy forces or those of the “wrong religion” do not have access to the community’s codes. This, coupled with the position of gossip as a predominantly female activity, means that gossip-as-intelligence is even better concealed from the opposition, who rarely seem to view women as anything but sexual or maternal objects.

Furthermore, Patricia Spacks argues in favour of gossip as “healing talk,” wherein the “sources of pleasure in gossip duplicate the forces of healing.” In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick also explores how people navigate “the possibilities, dangers, and stimulations of their human social landscape,” coining the term “nonce taxonomy” to categorise those “unsystematic resources” for dealing with the difficulties of life.¹⁷ Sedgwick describes nonce taxonomies as “the making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of old and new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take to make up a world,” with gossip critical to the imagining of “new and revisioned categorical systems that allow for different modes of being in the world.”¹⁸ Those who have the most need to develop a nonce taxonomy are those who have experienced “oppression or subjugation,” and gossip is one such tool for navigating a potentially hostile world.¹⁹ The “devalued arts of gossip” are traditionally associated, as we have seen, with “servants, with effeminate and gay men, with all women” and, although Sedgwick does not claim that all gay men or women partake in or are skilled in gossip, she maintains that their “distinctive needs are peculiarly disserved by its devaluation.”²⁰ This notion of gossip serving marginal identities and positions is undoubtedly represented in Milkman, but it is also interrogated.

Indeed, there are distinctions of gossip at play in what can and cannot be said, and in the repercussions of disclosure. Spacks argues that “gossip manifests itself as distilled malice” playing with reputations and “circulating truths and half-truths and falsehoods.”²¹ The social and political functions of gossip have always featured the empowerment of one individual or group over another, or furthering ambition through the diminishment or ridicule of a competitor or enemy, often without this being the express intent of those spreading the gossip.²² In this context, Burns resists portraying gossip as a fully liberatory or subversive practice. Instead, gossip is also demonstrative of “the restrictive nature of the climate in which [Burns] is writing,” with renouncers utilising its policing potential and, in turn, recreating a system of non-liberatory politics reminiscent of the very colonial oppressor they are trying to resist.²³ That is, gossip is used to designate those who are “beyond the pale” and are at odds with the supposed collective “district consciousness;” seen to “flout convention,” they are “a law unto themselves” (219). Moreover, as both spoken and tacit, gossip is predominantly conveyed by women but simultaneously retains an unspoken quality as an unofficial mode of communication. Therefore, it cannot be said to exist, at least not officially or traceably. This obviously makes gossip indispensable in guerrilla warfare, but also creates potential for negative effects on women. Indeed, violence against women in the community occupies the same paradox as gossip: ever-present but invisible.

We see these dynamics play out with middle sister who, in particular, is the victim of gossip: she is unable to voice her experience of milkman’s predation because it is part of an unspoken and accepted violence against women. From the beginning of the novel, middle sister focalises gossip’s centrality to the community: “I was being talked about because there was a rumour started by them, or more likely by first brother-in-law, that I was having an affair with this milkman” (1). The novel starts at the end of the story, with Somebody McSomebody threatening middle sister after the death of milkman, with Burns then shifting the narrative back to the start of middle sister’s experience of predation, illustrating the origins of this rumour in community gossip. The initial meeting of middle sister and milkman is narrated with neutral language, emphasising that any action was milkman’s, not middle sister’s:

He appeared one day, driving up in one of his cars as I was walking along reading Ivanhoe.

[…]

You’re one of the who’s-its girls, aren’t you? So-and-so was your father, wasn’t he? Your brothers, thingy, thingy, thingy and thingy, used to play in the hurley team, didn’t they? Hop in. I’ll give you a lift.

[…]

First time that was all that happened – and already a rumour started up (3–4).

Burns takes care to highlight the familiarity of milkman with middle sister, due to both the insular nature of the community and the primacy of gossip. However, although middle sister is frustrated at the rumour and angry at her eldest sister’s warning at the behest of her hypocritical and sexually perverse husband, she is relatively unconcerned due to the nature of gossip in the area: “Gossip washed in, washed out, came, went, moved on to the next target. So I didn’t pay attention to this love affair with the milkman” (5). This evocation of the tide-like qualities of gossip, washing in and out, predictable and dependable, emphasises just how enshrined it is in the culture of the community as well as middle-sister’s confidence that she would be only a fleeting focus, illustrating the way in which anyone can find themselves under suspicion in this “hair-trigger society.”

By carefully walking the boundary between visible and invisible violence milkman can get away with casting all community suspicions onto middle sister. As the latter comments:

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?²⁴

Just as milkman remains aloof, covert and hidden in his paramilitary actions, he behaves thus in his predation of middle sister: despite being the titular character, he is significantly absent from the novel and only features in restricted vignettes. That milkman “weaponises his position within a network of guerrilla intelligence to destabilise middle sister with the intention of sexually exploiting her” illustrates the intimate relationship between sexual and political violence in the novel.²⁵ Despite this interrelation, the violence against women is still unspeakable, and middle sister characterises its diffuse nature as “[h]ard to define […] piecemeal […] might not seem, once relayed, to be all that much at all” (181). It is significant that the privileged position of gossip in the community means that this circulation of false information is the only way middle sister’s experience can be (mis)represented in the community at the time. At the time of the stalking, middle sister becomes a nexus of both revulsion and begrudging respect, and is policed by the entire community to ensure she is honouring one of the de facto leaders of the area. As she is given chips, and brought into the fold of renouncer “groupies,” we see the burden of labour thrust upon women, with middle sister’s every move loaded with an expectation of loyalty which she must now perform despite not truly being involved with milkman through any desire of her own.

Thus, gossip is central to what middle sister identifies as the “psycho-political atmosphere” of the community, marked by an affect of paranoia: “a species of fear based on the dysphoric apprehension of a holistic and all-encompassing system.”²⁶ Holly Wielechowski argues that it is “precisely this apprehension that drives the fear and suspicion that floods the text, as the narrator encounters and is enmeshed in the system propagated by the renouncers to keep control of the local community.”²⁷ Middle sister’s assertion that that “these were knife-edge times, primal times, with everybody suspicious of everybody” (27) is often proved to be warranted, as very real acts of colonial and sectarian violence take place within the narrative and this drives the “paranoic affective loop” in the community, where even neutral actions and affects are drawn into self-perpetuating suspicion and gossip.²⁸ This affective loop “ultimately renders the validity or invalidity of the fear itself irrelevant, as the effects are necessarily real and tangible regardless,” illustrating the sovereignty of gossip in the area as the solution and cause of fear.²⁹

As a result, it is not until after the Troubles, in middle sister’s retrospective narration, that she can really speak of what happened to her. Middle sister remembers that “[a]ll ordinary people also understood the basics of what was allowed and not allowed, of what was neutral and could be exempted from preferences, from nomenclature, from emblems and from outlooks” (22). This idea that everyone “ordinary” instinctively “understood” what was and was not allowed appears to support this idea of “unspoken” rules. However, we see repeatedly throughout the novel that people frequently do explicitly articulate these “unspoken” rules (22). Furthermore, since the enforcement of rules is often enacted by gossip – this unofficial, unregulated, and feminised speech act – it appears as though the rules are unspoken when in reality they are continually vocalised and enforced by the community consciousness.

Hence, “gossip” comes to embody many aspects of women’s covert operations in the community as the means through which information travels undetected and/or is ignored by ruling powers. The power of gossip to both empower and oppress women within middle sister’s community partly stems from its utilisation of shame: those who are shamed are suppressed by their community, and those who do the shaming use one another’s transgression as evidence of their own adherence to community values. Middle sister articulates this early in the novel:

I knew the feeling of shame and I knew everybody around me knew that feeling as well. In no way was it a weak feeling, for it seemed more potent than anger, more potent than hatred […] often it was a public feeling, needing numbers to swell its effectiveness, regardless of whether you were the one doing the shaming, the one witnessing the shaming, or the one having the shame done unto you (53).

Here it is evident to middle sister that shame needs the participation of the community in order to retain its power. Community survival relies upon the participation of “everybody” in the same rituals and labour – whether that’s “killing people, doing verbal damage to people, doing mental damage to people and, not least, also not infrequently, doing those things to oneself” (53). Milkman’s is a system that sustains itself through hostile interpersonal acts and labour with the rationale of self-preservation and the “greater good” of the Republican cause. It is by this logic that middle sister allows her reputation to be tarnished. By deliberately staying silent and unreadable, “almost-inordinately blank, almost-lifeless, almost-sterile, almost-counter-intuitive […] [n]ear-expressionless too” (179) in the face of gossip and hostility, she echoes Seamus Heaney’s iconic instruction in North to “Whatever you say, say nothing.”³⁰ This exhortation to silence and obfuscation of speech is one of the only ways for women to exist in this community under the double policing of the British state and paramilitary rule so that one of the few forms of participation in the conflict available to them is also the means by which they are policed.

The typically demilitarised persons of the community – namely, women – constitute a group primed for the perpetuation and spread of shame through their unique form of verbal labour. Deborah Gould has articulated an “emotional habitus,” (rooted in the Bourdieu-sian conception of a habitus) as:

taken-for-granted understandings or schemas in any social grouping that, operating beneath conscious awareness, on the level of bodily understanding, provide members with a disposition or orientation to action, a “sense of the game” and how best to play it.³¹

In the emotional habitus of Burns’ novel, women acutely understand “the game” and “how best to play it,” often actively enforcing the “taken-for-granted” rules of the community to ensure survival. By subverting expectations of gendered spaces and behaviour, Burns illustrates how women’s labour exists at the margins, how they use their safety in numbers to participate in the conflict through the means available to them from within their designated role, creating a space in which gossip is easily circulated and seamlessly interwoven into the already existing militarised domesticity.

Conclusion

Northern Ireland witnessed “various forms of the political instrumentalization of language” amidst the sectarian conflict and Milkman exposes the “belligerency” in inter-personal and inter-group communication.³² Indeed, Burns highlights how this violence operates in one-to-one relationships and on the level of “structural interactions between state institutions and private citizens” as rumours about paramilitaries and renouncers whispered in drinking clubs and front rooms become fatal cases of mistaken identity at the hands of the state police force and British Army.³³ The importance of language in the novel underpins the importance of gossip for both the narrative and the sectarian conflict. Burns explores the effects of a conflict that “cannot be named […] where the line between civilian and combatant is vanishingly narrow” and the impact this has on language and the mental landscape of those living in this system.³⁴ Middle sister’s retrospective exposure of the attitudes and actions of those around her remind readers that:

many of those who were “affiliated” with one “side” or another during this conflict were not actively engaged in paramilitary action; were, instead, simply trying to survive in a state of chaos where rules were unspoken, changeable, and not of their own making (9).

Therefore, participating in and endorsing these unspoken rules and prejudices was a way of both safeguarding against suspicion, but also of participating in the conflict. Clare Hutton claims that middle sister’s distinctive style of narration uses “neutralised” language to refer to the figures and mechanisms of warfare, “military intelligence,” “plainclothes people,” and “anti-personnel devices.”³⁵ These linguistic features are a form of “making strange” in order to force a “reconsideration of the kinds of things that happened in Ireland at this time” by removing them from their associations with any one country or sect.³⁶ Conversely, Patricia Malone argues that middle sister’s language is far from “neutral.” Instead, Malone holds, it is “precise,” naming things “as they are, without the baggage of cultural signification” and recognising that “language may obscure meaning through these additional significations.”³⁷ Although opposing, both Hutton and Malone’s arguments ring true when exploring gossip and language as a form of women’s participation in conflict: Burns highlights that language must be used carefully and precisely in the “hair-trigger” society, yet also charts the difficulties of communicating in a language steeped in signification which cannot truly be neutral (6). Malone argues that this form of language illustrates “the way in which we say more than we might mean to by the words that we choose,” and therefore succinctly illustrates the importance of gossip for the conflict.³⁸ Women in the novel, as overlooked and demilitarised agents, use loaded terms as a form of coded communication within their already marginal and overlooked verbal labour – this labour is, as I have shown, vital to the resistance effort.

Gossip, with its domestic and feminine significations, is removed from overt associations with military action in Milkman, and charges seemingly “neutral” terms and conversational topics with additional significance, if one has access to community codes. In this light, gossip is an ideal representation of the position of women and their labour during the Troubles. Gossip is inextricable from the physical and observable labour of curfew breaking and medical care, whilst also carrying a destructive and marginalising force for its individual subjects even as it operates as a tool of the decolonial conflict. Gossip as a form of women’s work in Milkman and the wider historical moment of the Troubles is fraught but necessary, highlighting the importance of unspoken rules and the ways in which they travel through and become ingrained in the community by actually being spoken covertly by women, who do not constitute political actors. Burns manages to capture both the negative effects and feminised connotations of gossip, as well as illustrating its necessity to the marginalised, creating a matter-of-fact portrayal of a community both at the mercy of and reliant on gossip.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Magennis, Moving Through Milkman.

2. Derry’s Women’s Living History Circle, Jukin’ Back, 38; Yentsch, “The Symbolic Divisions of Pottery,” 205; and Crossan, “Bin Lids, Bombs and Babies in Free Derry,” 120.

3. Burns, Milkman, 321. Further references will be given parenthetically.

4. Spacks, “In Praise of Gossip,” 19.

5. Ibid., 22.

6. Aretxaga, Shattering Silence, 59.

7. Ibid., 70.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. White, “Hair Trigger Society,” 121–2.

11. Ibid., 122.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Spacks, “In Praise of Gossip,“ 22; Kirkegaard and Heidegger disparage gossip, arguing that it opposes so-called “real talk” or “discourse” which is “the way in which we articulate significantly the intelligibility of Being-in-the-world” rather than gossip which concerns only the superficial and external. Ibid.

16. Kirkegaard, “The Present Age” quoted in Spacks, “In Praise of Gossip,” 22.

17. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 23.

18. Ibid; and Wielechowski, “Invented Histories,” 71.

19. See note 17 above.

20. Ibid.

21. Spacks, Gossip, 4.

22. Ibid.

23. Wielechowski, “Invented Histories,” 71.

24. Burns, Milkman, 5; Indeed, middle sister also states: “As for that official ‘male and female’ territory, and what females could say and what they could never say, I said nothing when the milkman curbed, then slowed, then stopped my run. Once again, least not intentionally, he didn’t seem rude, so I couldn’t be rude and keep on running. Instead I let him slow me […] I wished he hadn’t spoken or else that I hadn’t heard at all” (9).

25. Darling, “Systemic, Transhistoric, Institutionalized, and Legitimized Antipathy,” 4.

26. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 299.

27. Wielechowski, “Invented Histories,” 66.

28. Burns, Milkman, 27; and Wielechowski, “Invented Histories,” 65.

29. Wielechowski, “Invented Histories,” 65.

30. Heaney, North, 52.

31. Gould, Moving Politics, 33.

32. Bartnik, “Northern Ireland’s Interregnum,” 76.

33. Ibid.

34. Malone, “Measures of Obliviousness,” 1144.

35. Hutton, “The Moment and Technique of Milkman,” 359.

36. Ibid., 366.

37. Malone, “Measures of Obliviousness,” 1151.

38. Ibid.