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Chapter 9
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Silence of the Girls, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Mythology and Oppressed Perspectives
The Effects of Misogyny
Honor and Violence
Slavery and Dehumanization
Grief and Revenge
Summary
Analysis
After dinner, Briseis goes outside and comes upon Patroclus on Achilles’s veranda. He says that Achilles is swimming and invites her to sit with him. Briseis, conscious of the difference in their status, at first says nothing—but then asks Patroclus why he’s always kind to her. Patroclus replies: “I know what it’s like to lose everything and be handed to Achilles as a toy.” He explains that, at age 10, he killed his best friend: the friend accused Patroclus of cheating at dice, Patroclus punched him, the friend broke his nose, and Patroclus hit him with a stone, killing him.
Here, Patroclus reveals that he identifies with the enslaved women, perhaps Briseis in particular, because he feels that he too was “handed to Achilles as a toy”—though he does not yet explain what he means by that. The story of Patroclus at age 10 killing his friend with a stone emphasizes that in the ancient Greek cultures represented in the novel, boys are indoctrinated to be violent and honor-obsessed—Patroclus became violent because he was accused of cheating—often to their own detriment, as Patroclus presumably regrets having killed his best friend in an angry moment.
Themes
Patroclus was exiled to the court of Peleus, where he met Peleus’s son Achilles, the saddest boy Patroclus had ever met, excepting himself. Achilles’s mother, the “sea goddess” Thetis, had just left her land family for the sea. Achilles was refusing to eat. Patroclus had no choice but to become Achilles’s friend—and, surprisingly, Achilles moderated Patroclus’s temper. Patroclus notes that Briseis is always observing the Greeks. When she denies it, he insists. He also admits that he overhears her crying. She claims that sometimes women must cry, though she’s sure Patroclus didn’t cry in exile. When he replies that he cried “every night for a year,” she’s not sure whether he’s joking.
While earlier Briseis didn’t believe her ears when she heard Achilles calling to the sea for “Mummy,” Patroclus’s story suggests that Achilles found his mother’s abandonment traumatizing despite a cultural context in which men are considered violent and independent and women largely inessential. Briseis’s confused, partly disbelieving reaction when Patroclus says that he cried “every night for a year” after he was exiled shows that she has imbibed the misogynistic, patriarchal cultural attitudes of the culture around her: she thinks that women, being weak, must cry, while men, being strong, don’t.
Themes
Briseis says that Achilles has been swimming for a long time. Patroclus explains that he might see his mother (Thetis), who still visits him. Briseis recalls Achilles crying to the sea for “Mummy” and wonders what it would be like to love Achilles. She asks whether Patroclus regrets his fate. Patroclus says no: he wishes he hadn’t killed his friend, but Achilles’s family treated him well.
Patroclus’s ongoing regret for having killed his friend at age 10 makes clear that the Greeks’ patriarchal honor culture has severe negative consequences for the boys and men it trains in violence. Moreover, it isn’t clear how reliable Patroclus is when he claims not to regret his exile—even if Achilles’s family treated him well, he still identifies with the enslaved women Achilles rapes, which hints that in some moods he views his exile and subordination to Achilles extremely negatively.
Themes
Patroclus stands to go check on Achilles. Briseis asks why he worries about Achilles, and he replies, “Habit.” Briseis goes to walk along the beach alone and spies Achilles and Patroclus in conversation: first they fight, and then Achilles rests his forehead against Patroclus’s. Briseis has heard the rumors that Achilles and Patroclus have a sexual relationship—Agamemnon and Odysseus are constantly making insinuations—but the intimacy she witnesses between them seems to go beyond sex or perhaps even love.
Patroclus’s response that he worries about Achilles out of “habit” suggests that he sometimes sees Achilles not as the warrior out of myth but as the little boy who wouldn’t eat because his mother had left. The inability of anyone else to recognize this part of Achilles may form the basis of his and Patroclus’s intimacy, but it also speaks to how the Greeks’ patriarchal, violent honor culture limits what the men it idolizes can do and be.
Themes
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