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Chapter 15
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
(The narrator switches for this chapter from Briseis’s perspective to the third-person point of view.) Achilles knows that he’s going to die soon rather than return home, have a family, live in peace, and eventually be forgotten. The gods have offered him instead an undying reputation in exchange for his death in the Trojan War.
Achilles chooses to die young and have an eternal afterlife as a powerful myth rather than live a full life—a choice that shows the iron grip that mythology and masculine glory have on Achilles’s psyche.
Themes
The sea has been acting strangely. The night Agamemnon’s men take Briseis, the moorings on one of Achilles’s ships snap and Patroclus summons him and the other men to keep it from washing away. Now, he walks down to the seashore and recalls how, when he was small, he shared a sea-facing bedroom with his mother (Thetis). After she abandoned him, he sometimes pretended the sea-noises were her voice. He stopped eating or growing. The noble children brought in to be his companions sensed something wrong with him and wouldn’t socialize with him.
The misogyny of ancient Greek society as represented in the novel clearly harms women more than it harms men—yet it harms men as well. Thetis eventually fled her husband and son because she was forced into marriage and childbearing in the first place—an abandonment that clearly traumatized and isolated Achilles as a child.
Themes
Achilles first saw Patroclus as a larger boy with a broken nose. As they gazed at one another, Achilles felt “recognition”—but refused to shake Patroclus’s hand when it was offered. When the other boys learned that Patroclus had killed someone, an act they were all being educated to accomplish, they tried to fight him. Patroclus constantly got into violent scuffles. Yet eventually, somehow, Patroclus and Achilles became friends: they did everything together, and Achilles fought by Patroclus’s side, so that by the time Achilles turned 17, they were prepared for the war. While they looked like “virile” masculine friends, the fact was that Patroclus served Achilles as a mother-substitute.
The “recognition” that Achilles felt upon looking at Patroclus suggests that Achilles’s abandonment by his mother Thetis was an emotional trauma on par with Patroclus’s exile from his family home. The boys recognize one another’s deep loneliness. Achilles’s latent understanding that he bonded with Patroclus to replace his lost bond with his mother shows how misogyny has downstream effects on relationships among men, too. Meanwhile, the other boys’ desire to fight Patroclus after learning he had killed someone shows the inextricability of violence and masculine achievement in ancient Greek society as the novel represents it.
Themes
Achilles thinks that Patroclus can wait for a while. Achilles doesn’t want to return to his room and empty bed: while he can have many women, he wants Briseis. He wonders whether it’s because she comes to bed smelling like sea, but he knows he could dunk any of the girls in salt water. Then he tells himself that it’s because she was the trophy representing his honor, and this trophy was stolen by an “inferior.” He resolves not to fight anymore and wonders whether he should just sail home—it’s what Patroclus wants, and Patroclus is “almost always right,” much to Achilles’s chagrin. Knowing his mother (Thetis) won’t visit him that night, Achilles walks back to his compound trying to think of practical projects for his men to accomplish.
Achilles can’t conceive of having an emotional attachment to Briseis herself because he doesn’t see her, an enslaved woman, as a full human being. To explain his sadness at her loss, then, he speculates that his pain is due to Briseis smelling like the sea (and Achilles’s sea-goddess mother) or to Briseis representing “inferior” Agamemnon’s attack on Achilles’s masculine honor. While both these speculations may be partly true, Achilles may also be an unreliable interpreter of his own psychological states—unaware that he has some attachment to Briseis in herself.
Themes
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