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Chapter 14
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
Briseis sneaks out of Achilles’s compound to see Chryseis off. Many women watch from the shore as Odysseus leads Chryseis out of Agamemnon’s building and onto a ship. Briseis notices that Chryseis looks terrified, afraid her freedom will be snatched away at the last moment. All the women are jumping and yelling that they wish Chryseis luck, not begrudging her good fortune—and Chryseis waves goodbye. After the ship carrying her vanishes, however, Briseis feels devastated. The Greek men charge into the sea to wash themselves and pray to Apollo, after which they feast somberly. Briseis spots Agamemnon and hopes that he won’t remember her—though she’s inwardly sure that he will.
Chryseis’s terror even as she is sailing to freedom highlights the severity of the dehumanizing sexual and physical abuse that Agamemnon inflicted on her. Meanwhile, the enslaved women’s cheering for Chryseis betrays their own longing for freedom and desire to live vicariously through Chryseis’s escape.
Themes
Briseis returns to Achilles’s compound and sits in her tiny room. She hears Patroclus telling Achilles that Nestor and his son Antilochus have come to visit. Briseis opens her door to peer through. After Patroclus serves Nestor wine, Nestor predicts that Achilles won’t desert, staying in the camp to “sulk” while other men fight. Achilles insists that he won’t fight after Agamemnon takes his trophy: after all, Agamemnon “hasn’t earnt it.” Achilles and Nestor go on talking about honor and reputation, but Briseis tunes them out, thinking only of the word “it.”
Achilles thinks of his trophy as an “it,” a stand-in for his masculine warrior reputation and his honor. Yet this “it” is Briseis—a human being. Achilles’s casual reference to her as “it” rather than “she” shows how slavery dehumanizes the enslaved and how the Greeks’ patriarchal honor system treats women as objects rather than people.
Themes
Alcimus rushes in and announces that Agamemnon’s heralds have arrived. Achilles tells Patroclus to go get Briseis. When Patroclus enters Briseis’s room, he tries to put an arm around her, but she waves him away and asks sarcastically whether he still believes he can get Achilles to marry her. Patroclus silently leads Briseis into the larger room where, to her shock, she sees Achilles weeping quietly. She’s proud that she didn’t cry at that moment—though she cries later that night.
Briseis’s sarcastic question to Patroclus underscores that his individual kindness to the enslaved women in no way mitigates the violence and dehumanization of the slave society in which he participates. Achilles’s surprising tears, meanwhile, are ambiguous: he could be crying over the deeply felt insult to his masculine honor, or he could be crying over the loss of Briseis because she reminds him of his mother Thetis, whom he likewise “lost” at a young age.
Themes
