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Chapter 17
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
In a flashback, after Briseis’s mother dies, 12-year-old Briseis gets into so many fights with her father’s new young concubine that her father sends her to her sister Ianthe in Troy. Ianthe, unhappily married to a son of King Priam’s, often spends time with Helen (Briseis speculates that they were both “lonely”). Ianthe takes Briseis with her while visiting Helen.
By implication, Ianthe is “lonely” because her father gave her in marriage to an unloving husband, while Helen is “lonely” because the Trojans blame her—rather than her abductor, Paris—for the Trojan War. Both kinds of loneliness underscore the negative psychological effects on women of a misogynistic culture.
Themes
One day, Ianthe must go take care of a household problem, so Helen suggests that she and Briseis go walk to the ramparts. Though Briseis is already at an age where girls only leave domestic spaces in veils and only to visit other women, Helen is unbothered. She tells Briseis that the Trojan women already despise her and that the men are all thinking “the same thing they’d been thinking since she was ten years old.” Helen has already told Briseis about having been raped at age 10; Briseis believes it and is later surprised to learn that “nobody else” does.
Earlier in the narrative, Briseis claims some freedom by walking around alone without a veil. Interestingly, this wasn’t something she was able to do before she became an enslaved prisoner. In this small way, she is somewhat less policed. Similarly, Helen feels empowered to leave the domestic sphere only because she is already socially marginalized: the Trojan women hate her, and the Trojan men sexually objectify her. Briseis’s discovery that “nobody else” believes Helen was raped emphasizes that men’s stories and myths are believed in a way that women’s are not in misogynistic cultures.
Themes
Briseis follows Helen to the parapet, below which she hears battle. Though Briseis doesn’t look, Helen leans over the edge to stare. Helen always talks as if horrified to be the occasion for mass death, but Briseis wonders whether she never thinks, “this is about me?” After a while, King Priam comes up to the parapet and invites Helen to sit with him—he’s invariably polite to her, though his female relatives and the other Trojans despise her. When Helen introduces Briseis to Priam, Priam produces a coin, makes it vanish, pulls it from behind Briseis’s ear, and gives it to her. After this impressive sleight of hand, he turns to watch the battle, immediately looking terribly melancholy.
When Briseis wonders whether Helen ever looks at the battlefield and thinks, “this is about me?”, she could be wondering two things. First, she could be wondering whether Helen anticipates becoming a mythological figure due to her role in the Trojan War’s beginning and enjoys the idea of legendary status—even if myth and legend portray her negatively. Second, Briseis could be wondering whether Helen doubts that the war is about her—that Helen suspects the Greek and Trojan warriors are using her as a pretext to pursue masculine honor and glory in war.
Themes
Later, Helen takes Briseis back to her quarters, gives her wine, and mocks the Trojan women for imitating her fashion. Briseis, feeling very adult, loves it. She begins visiting Helen often and going to the battlements with her, seeing not only Priam but also Queen Hecuba and their youngest daughter Polyxena. Those trips always end with Helen saying, “Ah, well, back to work,” after which she returns to her quarters to weave. According to one legend, a soldier died in Troy every time Helen cut a thread. When Briseis sees Helen’s weaving, she realizes that Helen is the best weaver she’s ever met. Her tapestries depict the war, including all the Greek and Trojan heroes—except Paris, who never fights and whom Helen now likes less than his courageous brother Hector.
The myth that a man dies every time Helen cuts a thread makes her responsible for all the wartime deaths, misogynistically eliding the responsibility of the men who in fact started the war and who pursue honor and glory through violence. Yet Helen’s excellent weaving hints that she is an artist and thus a meaning-maker herself, someone who might have an alternate story to tell about the war and her own role in it.
Themes
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Something troubles young Briseis about Helen’s tapestries. Later, she will comment to her sister Ianthe that Helen doesn’t represent herself anywhere. Ianthe replies that Helen won’t know where to weave herself in until either the Greeks or the Trojans win. Ianthe’s profound bitterness will later make Briseis wonder whether Ianthe was in love with Helen. The night that Briseis sees the tapestries, she lies in bed and thinks about them, nebulously sensing that they are an assertion of Helen’s personhood and narrative power.
Helen does not represent herself—does not objectify herself as an image—in her own tapestries. Instead, she expresses her viewpoint, her subjectivity, through her art. Young Briseis nebulously realizes that Helen, through her weaving, is asserting a counternarrative to the dominant, misogynistic narrative that views Helen as a sexual possession to be fought over while simultaneously blaming her for the fight.
Themes
Supposedly, in the first year of the Trojan War, Menelaus and Paris agreed to fight over Helen in single combat. Though nearly everyone watched, no one informed Helen that the duel was occurring, so she only learned of the outcome later. Briseis conceives of Helen’s tapestries as a response to that duel. Back in Agamemnon’s women’s huts, Briseis briefly wonders whether her memories do her any good—but then she forces herself to remember King Priam’s kindness as an antidote to the Greeks’ hostility and Agamemnon’s sadism.
When Helen is not even informed that her husband (Menelaus) and her abductor (Paris) will be fighting over her to decide her face, it emphasizes yet again that the Greek and Trojan warriors see women as tokens in a deadly game of honor between men rather than full human beings whose desires and preferences need to be considered. Against this cultural context, Helen’s tapestries assert her individual artistic viewpoint—the myth as she would tell it—and thus her humanity.
Themes
