Feminist Lens - Critical Lens Experts (SOS)

As discussed in the previous entry, the character Milkman is depicted as being selfish, thankful, and otherwise self-centered towards everybody, including his own mother and sisters as detailed in the rant he gets from his sister, Lena, stating, “You have yet to wash your own underwear, spread a bed, wipe the ring from your tub, or move a fleck of your dirt from one place to another. And to this day, you have never asked one of us if we were tired, or sad, or wanted a cup of coffee.” To an extent Milkman had begun to take after his father’s attitudes, in which he only values material wealth and the respect of others as a result of said wealth, with no real respect towards any other person if it means to inconvenience him. As Jan Furman writes in her analysis of gender roles in Song of Solomon titled Male Consciousness, “As it was with his father, family for Milkman was a burdensome afterthought… His interactions with them -all women- is mostly an exercise of male prerogative.” By this, Furman goes on to describe that, because Milkman only extends favors to anybody if it benefits himself, when he struck at his father for beating his mother, Milkman described the feeling as a “snorting, horse-galloping glee as old as desire.” This goes to show that his intentions for besting his father were not so much as to defend his mother as it was to exert his own dominance within his family household. 

Before reading Furman’s analysis, I interpreted Milkman’s attitudes simply as a result of society’s elevating of masculine roles above feminine ones, which would thus explain his egocentrism in the face of the other women in his life, but I didn’t really connect it to being a result of his Father’s influence on him additionally. This understanding of Milkman's influences and priorities as a result of them aided my comprehension of his character development as the book progresses, most particularly through the events following Milkman’s “necessary but unfortunately shallow self-examination,” as a result of Lena’s rant.