In Milkman, joy is not simply discouraged for women—it is treated as a transgression. Burns crafts a world where emotional expression, personal pleasure, and even harmless eccentricity are so policed that to feel happy is to risk social obliteration. The feminist women, dismissed as “issue women,” (Burns 116), exemplify this: for daring to speak publicly about street harassment, menstruation, and the unspoken layers of male violence, they are labeled “beyond-the-pale,” (Burns 116), exiled even by the traditional women who ultimately save their lives. “The word ‘feminist’ was beyond-the-pale. The word ‘woman’ barely escaped beyond the pale,” the narrator explains, as if joy and visibility themselves are dangerous. Even harmless acts like walking while reading are weaponized—viewed not as quirks, but threats to community order. “Not self-preservation,” her friend warns her, “Not normal.” (Burns 230). These warnings extend to all forms of selfhood that resist erasure. When real milkman gently suggests she seek out the feminist women for support, she instantly recoils—not because she disagrees with their values, but because association with them would be social suicide. The danger of joy is so acute that the narrator herself internalizes it, instinctively hiding not only pain, but even the desire for relief.

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            This logic—joy as betrayal—echoes most poignantly in her relationship with her eldest sister, whose own life has been defined by grief and forced emotional containment. Eldest sister, having lost the man she loved to political violence and been forced into an unhappy marriage, observes the narrator’s possible joy—and seeks to crush it. She rushes to reveal the “bad news” that Milkman has been killed, not out of concern, but to ensure her sister suffers too. In this moment, Burns shows how women who have been denied happiness often become complicit in maintaining the very structures that repressed them. This was ritualized cruelty—the narrator recognizes that as she says, “this was everything to do with her not wanting me to have what long ago she had stopped allowing herself.” (Burns 242). Eldest sister’s delivery of the bad news becomes an emotional leveling: if she cannot have joy, no one else can either. In this way, Burns shows how patriarchal systems of emotional repression are not only enforced by men, but also perpetuated by women who, having been denied joy themselves, can no longer stomach its possibility in others. The narrator’s emotional safety is compromised not just by paramilitaries or gossip, but by the deep, inherited belief that happiness is dangerous—and worst of all, unearned.

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            In Milkman, love is treated not as a guiding force, but as a liability. The community does not value emotional connection unless it is tinged with regret, punishment, or unattainability. This logic plays out most clearly in the stories of women who, when faced with real love, choose repression over risk. The narrator’s mother still mourns real milkman—not because they were together, but because they weren’t. “Of course I got over him,” (Burns 205), she insists, only to later reveal she never did. The woman she envied, Peggy, renounced romantic love to devote herself to God, and in response, real milkman—heartbroken, stubborn—decides to love no one ever again. This is not seen as tragic, but romantic. “He was the man who didn’t love anybody,” (Burns 114), the community says, and they almost admire him for it. Love, when it threatens to be mutual, is sabotaged in advance. Even the narrator herself believes she is protecting herself by avoiding romantic attachment. “If you married that one…who loved and desired you back, are you sure, really, really sure, you could cope with the prospect of that? The community decided that no.” (Burns 206). Burns suggests that emotional deprivation becomes a point of pride in this world. The right partner is a risk too great—so everyone settles.

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            This theme—of choosing the “wrong-spouse” (Burns 210) in order to avoid the terrifying vulnerability of joy—is echoed throughout the novel, most notably in the story of third brother and tablets girl’s sister. Everyone in the community believes they were meant to be together, including the narrator. But third brother, overwhelmed by the intensity of being truly loved back, ends the relationship before it can end him. “He ended the relationship to get it over with before he lost it,” (Burns 217), the narrator observes, capturing the deeply ingrained fear that happiness, if attained, will only be snatched away. Years later, he returns, devastated, admitting his mistake in a desperate outpouring: “Because I loved you…Afraid. Risky.” (Burns 217). The reunion is emotionally raw, complicated, even physical— a love delayed so long it’s nearly destroyed. It is only through emotional collapse and the looming possibility of loss that he finally claims her, carrying her to the hospital with urgency, as if to undo a lifetime of emotional restraint. In this way, Burns reveals that the decision to marry the wrong-spouse—or to marry no one at all—is not a failure of love, but a survival mechanism in a culture where real joy is too dangerous to sustain. It is not that love does not exist in Milkman—it is that the community has no space for it. Love, when recognized, is so harrowing and so rare that its presence becomes unbearable, and its absence becomes tradition—this is starkly evident in the long life lived by the narrator’s mother. Ma remains startingly passive about her husband—a man she did not love, did not seem to like, and openly blamed for everything from illness to death. She treats this emptiness not as a tragedy but as a given. It is only when she reminisces about real milkman—checking her reflection, bringing him soup, reading to him late into the night—that the narrator sees how deeply she once felt. By the time she had her children, that version of herself has been buried, and she no longer believed joy is an option. The community does not discourage joy—it refuses to believe in its legitimacy. In this way, Burns reveals how love is not lost by accident in Milkman. It is forfeited, disfigured, or never pursued at all—not because it's missing, but because its very presence is unbearable.

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            The inevitable consequence of repressing joy is not peace, but collapse. For the narrator, this repression builds until she is no longer able to feel, speak, or even recognize herself. In her effort to survive rumor, surveillance, and the Milkman’s constant, ambiguous pressure, she disappears inside her own mind. “Successfully am I fooling them…now began itself to doubt I was even there.” (Burns 144), she says, describing a state of psychological vanishing so complete that her own inner voice begins to question her existence. Her coping strategies—disassociation, silence, “I don’t know”—which once protected her, become the very tools that erase her. This emotional breakdown culminates in the moment she steps into Milkman’s van. It is not resistance, nor is it consent. It is detachment so profound that it reads like hypnosis. “What was there then, to get emotional and tumultuous about? What remained was to get in, to get it over.” (Burns 240). This moment is the end point of emotional suppression—a girl so hollowed out by communal control, social cruelty, and internalized guilt that she forgets she ever had the right to say no. Burns stages this scene not as a sensational climax, but as a quiet resignation—an embodiment of what happens when repression becomes identity. Even afterward when the Milkman is dead and the community turns to cheer her survival, she cannot fully celebrate. “I was happy…I myself was trying not to be happy.” (Burns 244). Her relief is tainted by the weeks she lost to fear, by the understanding that she had been “thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness.” (Burns 243). That line captures the novel’s emotional thesis: the real violence is not always visible. It is not the van. It is the way a person can be sculpted out of existence long before anyone ever lays a hand on them.

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            In Milkman, Anna Burns constructs a world where joy is treated not as a right, but as a threat. It is quietly, systematically outlawed—especially for women—and its absence becomes tradition. The result is an erasure of self that echoes across generations: mothers who bury their longing, sisters who weaponize their despair, lovers who abandon each other before they can be left. The narrator’s breakdown is not an anomaly; it is the expected trajectory of anyone who dares to feel too much. And yet, in surviving her poisoning, her stalker, her destroyed reputation, something begins to shift at the former. Though she makes no declaration of escape, she has mentally severed himself from Milkman and from the emotional architecture that made him possible. She begins to notice joy again—recognizing its absence in others, its quiet emergence in herself. After watching so many choose the wrong spouse, watching happiness deferred, disfigured, or punished, she begins—at last—to resist that fate. Burns does not offer a triumphant liberation. Instead, she offers something rarer: a woman who does not leave, but who stays and changes anyway. And that change, in a place like this, is its own form of rebellion.