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Chapter 16
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 Agamemnon rapes Briseis, as she expected he would, he forces her mouth open, spits phlegm into her mouth, and tells her she can leave. She rushes away, scrubbing frantically at her mouth, and finds the women’s huts in Agamemnon’s compound just as she vomits. Ritsa and the other women gather Briseis in and try to comfort her. Briseis is terrified that as soon as Agamemnon bores of her, he’ll hand her over to the men as common property. Yet while Agamemnon doesn’t keep raping Briseis after the first night, he insists on her pouring wine to his guests at every dinner—presumably as a message that he is powerful enough to take any man’s trophy, even Achilles’s.
Agamemnon spits phlegm into Briseis’s mouth to humiliate her—a humiliation that reveals Agamemnon’s personal sadism while also highlighting the utterly dehumanizing hierarchy of the ancient Greeks’ misogynistic slave society. His insistence that Briseis serve his wine as a message to his guests, meanwhile, illustrates yet again that the Greek warriors consider the enslaved women as tokens in games of honor between men rather than as human beings.
Themes
Between working in the weaving huts and serving wine in the evening, Briseis sometimes walks down to the sea. Once, she spies Achilles in armor sprinting along the sand. When he finishes, he spots her but doesn’t speak to her—he just turns and sprints the other way. Meanwhile, she notices that while initially Agamemnon’s guests are in a good mood—the plague has gone and the battles are going well—that mood soon turns as they begin to lose ground against the Trojans. One night, Agamemnon suggests that Achilles’s prowess might be due to his god-given armor, and Odysseus says that Agamemnon should brawl “bareknuckle” with him and find out—a retort showing that Agamemnon’s position is weakening.
When Agamemnon insinuates that Achilles is an excellent fighter due to his armor, he is trying to attack Achilles’s masculine honor yet again. When Odysseus responds that Agamemnon should fight Achilles “bareknuckle” to see, he effectively points out Agamemnon’s cowardice (he would never challenge Achilles to a fight) and Achilles’s prowess (Agamemnon would certainly lose the fight). That Odysseus, a less powerful king, is willing to insult the Greek high commander in this way shows the Greek warriors’ anger at losing battles against the Trojans in the aftermath of Achilles’s refusal to fight.
Themes
Briseis senses that, as she serves wine, the men are beginning to look at her angrily because she was the supposed reason for Agamemnon and Achilles’s fight. They now blame her for the increased deaths among their ranks. Briseis remembers, as a girl visiting Troy, seeing a man spit on Helen’s shadow and thinks that she herself has become another Helen.
In The Iliad, Helen supposedly causes the Trojan War and Chryseis and Briseis cause the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles. However, as Briseis’s thoughts in this passage make clear, the women are being blamed for men’s behavior: Paris’s abduction of Helen, Agamemnon’s sacrilege against Apollo, and Achilles’s obsession with his masculine honor. Thus, the novel highlights the misogyny at the center of the original Greek myths.
Themes
