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Character analysis

Milly

in House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

Milly is a social worker in Los Angeles and Abel's girlfriend during the novel's urban segment, representing the well-meaning yet ultimately limited impact of assimilationist institutions. Tasked with helping relocated Native Americans adjust to city life, she reflects the bureaucratic compassion of mid-twentieth-century federal relocation programs—earnest and caring, but functioning within a system that fails to truly address the spiritual and cultural dislocation that Abel feels. Her own background, hinted at through her experiences of rural poverty and her father's unsuccessful Oklahoma farm, gives her a level of genuine empathy that sets her apart from mere bureaucratic figures; she understands hardship, even if she cannot fully grasp Abel's specific pain.

Their relationship is tender yet uneven. Milly provides stability—a cozy apartment, dependable companionship, and emotional support—while Abel remains largely distant, troubled by the tragedy of the Albino's death and his struggle to reintegrate. Their connection is real but fragile; Milly loves Abel in a practical, present-focused manner, in contrast to Angela St. John's more idealized, self-serving attachment. Milly doesn't romanticize Abel; she simply tries to hold on.

Her character arc is one of quiet, unresolved devotion. She does not save Abel—no one in Los Angeles can—and as he descends toward the beating by Martinez and his eventual departure, Milly is left behind. Thematically, she represents the limits of secular, institutional goodwill: necessary and humane, but inadequate to address the depth of Abel's disconnection from his Jemez Pueblo roots. Her presence emphasizes that true healing, when it eventually arrives, must be found in the land and ceremonial life to which Abel returns, rather than in the city where she resides.

About this character

Form
Novel
Author
N. Scott Momaday
First published
1969

The person01–03

01·Who they are

Who is Milly?

Milly is a social worker employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs relocation program in Los Angeles, appearing primarily in the novel's second and third sections—"The Priest of the Sun" and "The Night Chanter"—set in the mid-1950s urban world Abel inhabits after his release from prison. She is a young white woman whose biography reflects rural hardship: her father worked a failing Oklahoma farm, a detail Momaday includes purposefully to distinguish her from the purely bureaucratic figures surrounding Abel. She is aware of poverty and failure. Yet she works within a federal apparatus—the relocation program—that was an instrument of assimilation, intended to draw Native Americans away from reservation life and toward wage labor in industrial cities. Milly embodies that apparatus: warm, conscientious, and genuinely caring, but structurally bound to a project she cannot fully critique from the inside.

02·Arc & motivation

What is Milly's arc and motivation?

Milly enters the narrative already involved in the social-work machinery that processes Abel's relocation. Her arc is less a journey than a sustained, increasingly strained act of holding on. Her motivation is straightforward and sincere: she wants Abel to survive the city, to hold a job, to stabilize. She offers him her apartment, her time, and uncomplicated affection that asks for very little in return—or at least asks for less than Abel can give. What she cannot offer, and what becomes the novel's quiet verdict on her role, is any path back to the ceremonial world that alone might reconstitute Abel's selfhood. Her arc ends not in rupture but in absence: when Abel is savagely beaten by the loan shark Martinez and eventually departs Los Angeles for Walatowa, Milly is simply left behind. There is no dramatic farewell; she does not save him, and the novel does not punish her for failing—it simply moves on, which serves as its own judgment.

03·Key moments

What are Milly's key moments?

Because Ben Benally's stream-of-consciousness narration mediates most of what readers know about Milly, her key moments arrive filtered through his memory and sympathy. Ben describes the domestic evenings at Milly's apartment—evenings that represent the closest Abel comes to comfort during his Los Angeles years—as genuinely tender but somewhat sealed off from Abel's interior life. Abel is present physically while remaining unreachable. The scene of Abel's deterioration after the Martinez beating is another pivot point for understanding Milly: her care cannot intercept the violence that the city's predatory undercurrent inflicts on Abel, and her absence from that moment of crisis is significant. She is the person who held the domestic space together, but that space offers no protection against what Martinez represents. Her backstory—the Oklahoma farm, the father's failure—surfaces in Ben's narration as context for why she is not merely performing compassion. It is one of the few moments in the novel where Milly is granted interiority rather than function.

The cast04–05

04·Relationships

What are Milly's most important relationships?

The axis of Milly's significance is her relationship with Abel, which is asymmetrical in exactly the way the novel needs it to be. She loves him in a present-tense, practical register—she makes a home, she shows up—while Abel carries a past so fractured by war, imprisonment, and the killing of the Albino that he cannot fully inhabit any space she creates. Ben's narration positions Milly sympathetically, and his perspective matters: he is the novel's most reliable guide to the Los Angeles world, and his respect for her separates her from mere institutional function.

The contrast with Angela St. John is thematically essential. Angela, in the novel's Walatowa sections, aestheticizes Abel—she desires him partly as an encounter with something mythic and Other. Milly does not mythologize him. Hers is the more ethical orientation, yet the novel suggests that ethical goodwill, unaccompanied by cultural understanding, reaches a structural limit. Tosamah, in the same urban orbit, offers a cynical counter-discourse: his rhetorical brilliance tears apart the very institutions Milly represents, and the two figures bracket Abel between institutional care and communal skepticism without resolving his crisis.

05·Connected characters

How is Milly connected to the other characters?

Abel

Milly's most consequential relationship.

Full commentary

Milly's most consequential relationship. She is Abel's girlfriend and social-work caseworker in Los Angeles, providing him with companionship and material support during his relocation. Their bond is genuine but one-sided in depth: she loves him openly while he remains emotionally sealed. Her inability to reach him despite real affection highlights the novel's argument that institutional care cannot substitute for cultural and spiritual wholeness.

Ben Benally

Ben is Abel's roommate and closest friend in the city, and he interacts with Milly within the shared social world of relocated Native Americans in Los Angeles. Ben's narration provides much of what readers know about Milly's relationship with Abel, framing her sympathetically as someone who genuinely tried to help.

Angela St. John

A thematic counterpart rather than a direct scene partner. Both women are drawn to Abel, but where Angela's attraction is romanticized and exploitative, Milly's is grounded and domestic. The contrast illuminates different ways non-Native characters project meaning onto Abel without fully seeing him.

Martinez

Martinez's brutal beating of Abel represents the violent terminus of the Los Angeles episode that Milly's care could not prevent. Her powerlessness in the face of Martinez's predatory violence underscores the limits of her protective role in Abel's life.

John Big Bluff Tosamah

Tosamah occupies the same urban Native community as Milly but represents a cynical, rhetorical response to displacement that implicitly critiques the kind of institutional help Milly offers. They exist in the same social orbit without direct confrontation, their contrasting stances framing Abel's impossible position in the city.

Study06–07

06·Questions

Questions readers ask about Milly

What is Milly's job in 'House Made of Dawn'?

Milly is a social worker employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs relocation program in Los Angeles, tasked with helping relocated Native Americans adjust to city life. She works within a federal apparatus designed to draw Native people away from reservation life and into urban wage labor—a program Momaday presents as earnest but structurally inadequate to address the spiritual and cultural dislocation Abel experiences.

What is Milly's relationship with Abel in the novel?

Milly is both Abel's caseworker and his girlfriend during the Los Angeles segment of the novel, providing him with companionship, her apartment, and practical emotional support. Their bond is genuine but asymmetrical: she loves him openly and in a present-tense, unromantic way, while Abel—scarred by war, imprisonment, and the killing of the Albino—remains emotionally unreachable despite her consistent care.

How does Milly differ from Angela St. John in her relationship with Abel?

Milly loves Abel pragmatically and without idealization, simply trying to hold on and help him survive the city, whereas Angela St. John aestheticizes and romanticizes him, desiring him partly as a mythic, exotic Other. Momaday frames Milly's orientation as the more ethical of the two, yet suggests that ethical goodwill without cultural understanding still reaches a structural limit it cannot surpass.

Why can't Milly save Abel or heal him?

Milly cannot heal Abel because the novel argues that true healing requires a return to ceremonial life and the ancestral land of Walatowa—things no amount of domestic comfort or institutional support can substitute. Her care is genuine and humane, but it operates entirely within a secular, bureaucratic framework that is constitutionally unable to address the depth of Abel's disconnection from his Jemez Pueblo roots.

What happens to Milly at the end of Abel's time in Los Angeles?

Milly is simply left behind when Abel departs Los Angeles for Walatowa after being savagely beaten by the loan shark Martinez. There is no dramatic farewell; the narrative moves on without her, and her absence from the crisis of the Martinez beating underscores that the domestic space she maintained offered Abel no protection against the city's predatory violence.

Why does Momaday give Milly a background of rural Oklahoma poverty?

Momaday includes the detail of Milly's father's failing Oklahoma farm to distinguish her from a purely bureaucratic figure and to give her a genuine, experiential empathy for hardship and failure. This background makes her compassion feel earned rather than performed—yet the novel also raises the question of whether a shared experience of poverty truly bridges the specific cultural and spiritual gulf between her world and Abel's.

How does Ben Benally's narration shape the reader's understanding of Milly?

Almost everything readers know about Milly is filtered through Ben Benally's stream-of-consciousness narration, which frames her sympathetically as someone who genuinely tried to help Abel rather than merely processing him as a caseworker. Because Ben is the novel's most reliable guide to the Los Angeles world, his respectful perspective grants Milly interiority and moral weight she might otherwise lack as a supporting figure.

What does Milly represent thematically in 'House Made of Dawn'?

Milly represents the limits of secular, institutional goodwill—the mid-twentieth-century federal relocation program made human and sympathetic. Her character embodies Momaday's critique that compassion operating inside an assimilationist structure, however sincere, cannot restore what displacement has taken from Abel. She is necessary and humane, yet the novel's movement toward ceremonial healing at Walatowa implicitly judges her care as insufficient.

07·Essay angles

Use this in your essay

Tool · Essay angles

  • The limits of secular compassion: Argue that Milly's character functions as Momaday's critique of mid-century federal Indian policy—not as malice but as structural inadequacy. How does the relocation program, embodied in Milly, fail Abel despite genuine human warmth?

  • Competing female relationships and the gaze: Compare Milly and Angela St. John as contrasting models of how non-Native women relate to Abel. What does the difference between romanticization and pragmatic affection reveal about who truly "sees" Abel in the novel?

  • Mediated interiority and narrative form: Milly is known almost entirely through Ben's narration. Analyze what Momaday's choice of narrative filter implies about Milly's access—or lack thereof—to Abel's inner world.

  • Domesticity as insufficient healing: The apartment Milly provides is a space of relative safety, yet Abel cannot be healed there. Build a thesis around the novel's argument that home, in its truest sense, is ceremonial and geographic rather than domestic and interpersonal.

  • Class, empathy, and the white ally figure: Milly's Oklahoma poverty is the detail that makes her more than a bureaucrat. Examine whether that shared experience of hardship creates genuine cross-cultural empathy or merely the illusion of it, and what Momaday suggests about the limits of personal history as a bridge across cultural difference.

House Made of Dawn

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