On Violence And Women’s Survival Predicaments In Milkman

Born in Belfast,the capital of Northern Ireland,Anna Burns(1962-)grew up in a working-class Catholic block,now living in East Sussex on the south coast of England.As a late-bloomed Northern Irish female writer,Burns has been paid more and more attention by the academic circles at home and abroad in the past two years.The Troubles have always been the focus of Burns’s works.She has experienced numerous conflicts caused by it in Northern Ireland,and thus forms her own unique and profound views on the social problems left by it and her special writing styles.Therefore,most critics tend to focus on the exposure to social contradictions and collective trauma under the Troubles,as well as the artistic skills and narrative style in her works.Milkman is Anna Burns’s third novel,which won the Booker Prize in 2018,so it has not yet been studied in depth by critics and scholars who mainly focus on the summary and introduction of its plot and practical significance,and their research on violence and women issues still stay at the surface.Therefore,based on close reading of the text and with support of relevant theories,this thesis studies the multiple oppression and exploitation of women by violence in Milkman from three aspects:subjective violence,verbal violence and systemic violence.This thesis is divided into three parts:introduction,main body and conclusion.The introduction part presents the life and literary experience of Anna Bums as well as the gist of Milkman;sorts the literature review of the novel studies at home and abroad;and accordingly expounds the research task with its significance,and the thesis structure.The main body consists of three chapters.Chapter Two deals with the subjective violence,the most recognizable form of violence,caused by the Troubles in the novel,which politically marginalizes women and deprives them of plural identities.Firstly,it analyzes that the violent confrontations between Protestants and Catholics in Milkman have become the "zero-level protest",which deviates from the original reasonable political demands and becomes a distorted form of struggle without any appeals under the exclusive sense of group belongingness.Secondly,it analyzes the identity crisis of the politically marginalized women caused by political struggle and violent conflicts,which leads to women’s resort to subjective violence as the wrong way out of fear of violent environment and desire for multiple identities.Chapter Three discusses the tragedy of women losing their voices caused by verbal violence in the novel.The violent nature of language leads to the unequal discourse space,which embodies the unequal power relationship,becoming one of the important media of violence.As male domination has become a definite social system,and a set of moral order has been formed to maintain and legitimate male privileges and powers,men instill rules of male domination into women’s cognitive structure and thus place women in a subordinate position by labeling.And it interprets that the gossip has played an vital role as the catalyst of both verbal violence and subjective violence.By abusing of the inherent unequal power relationship,verbal violence strengthens men’s control and oppression of women,making women unconsciously involved in complicity with men of violence in silence.Chapter Four elaborates on the novel’s systemic violence,that is,patriarchal capitalism.It is the hidden social root of the other two kinds of violence that limits women’s diverse development and leads to their rigid thinking.The internal logic of capital requires women’s labor to be "free" and "unproductive",thus restricting women’s development space to the private sphere;and under the influence of the new form of patriarchal capitalism,consumerism,women are regarded as the object of consumption to cater to men under the male gaze.As a result,women are completely subordinated.It also reveals the commercialization of women’s bodies leads to the neglect of their spiritual connotation,which reduces women to the tool of capital accumulation and self-expansion.Under systematic violence,a small number of women who have initially awakened their subject consciousness have tried to exploring the way out of survival predicaments,but they have failed to touch the root of patriarchal capitalism as well as to change their living status of marginalization.The last chapter is the conclusion which is intended to encapsulate the main ideas and core findings in this thesis:the survival predicaments of women in Milkman and the various covert forms of violence in modern society are closely related.Systemic violence is the most fundamental social root and the invisible dominator,penetrating into all aspects of capitalist society and deriving subjective violence and verbal violence.Under the combined force of various violence,women are gradually marginalized,losing their subjectivity and female consciousness,unaware of their difficult situation.Accordingly,to recognize the whole system of violence is the key for women to get out of their predicaments.This thesis not only offers a relatively fresh angle in studying Milkman,but also exerts certain enlightening influence on studying Burns’s other works.