Gendered, National, and Conscripted: The Policing of Attention in Anna Burns's Milkman

Anna Burns's 2018 Man Booker prize winner, Milkman, depicts a young woman whose community labels her "beyond the pale" because of her predilection for reading-while-walking. She asks a friend: "Are you saying it's okay for [Milkman] to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre in public?" Her friend replies, "Semtex isn't unusual... It fits in—more than your dangerous reading-while-walking fits in." The retort suggests that, within the context of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, inattention is more offensive to local sensibilities than bomb making. The passage offers two insights that will be central to this article. First, the attention of human subjects is always under scrutiny; it is policed and regulated by the communities and groups with which individuals are affiliated. Second, attention is often the tool that allows the subject to escape the limitations and punishments that such communities enforce. This article addresses the literary, social, and psychological expressions of attention and the ways in which they are dynamically interconnected in the representation of the tensions between national and personal trauma.