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Chapter 1
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
When Briseis returns to the citadel, Ritsa asks how Maire is. Briseis says Maire won’t live long, and Ritsa says that that may be for the best. When the women hear the gates break, Briseis rushes to the citadel roof and sees Greek soldiers entering Lyrnessus. Achilles fights his way to King Mynes and his followers on the palace steps. He spears Briseis’s youngest brother, age 14, and puts his foot on the boy’s neck to pull the spear out. As he does, it seems to Briseis that he looks up at her on the citadel roof—though she thinks the sun must blind him to her. Later, Achilles kills Mynes. Briseis’s three other brothers are killed as well. Eventually, all the Lyrnessus men are slaughtered.
Boys as young as Briseis’s 14-year-old brother fight to defend Lyrnessus, which reveals that in the patriarchal warrior cultures of ancient Greece and Troy, boys are exposed to violent death from adolescence. As such, their privilege relative to oppressed women and girls comes at the cost of possible horrific early deaths in battle.
Themes
Briseis watches the Greeks loot Lyrnessus. Then they herd the female slaves from the citadel basement and start raping them. Briseis’s cousin Arianna grabs her by the arm and says to come with her. When the Greeks burst onto the roof, Arianna jumps to her death. The Greeks look surprised and uneasy. An elderly soldier, who says he is King Nestor of Pylos, bows to Briseis. She thinks that this is the last time anyone will treat her as a queen. When Nestor tells Briseis that they will not harm her, she recalls the boys who have been taken away and killed and thinks to herself that she will hate Nestor until she dies.
Nestor promises Briseis that the Greek soldiers won’t harm her—yet everyone knows that the Greek soldiers are going to enslave and likely rape the women of Lyrnessus. Nestor’s promise suggests that he assumes a woman being owned and sexually used against her will doesn’t constitute “harm.” This assumption in turn betrays how normal sexual ownership of women by men seems to Greek and Trojan men in the world of this novel.
Themes
The Greek soldiers take the women to the beach and load them onto their warships. Briseis, looking back at Lyrnessus, sees it on fire and hopes Maire managed to die by suicide rather than burn to death. She hopes, too, that the fire burns the men of Lyrnessus rather than the dogs and birds eating their corpses. After a short sea voyage during which many captives vomit, the ships pull up onto a beach crowded with many more warships. The soldiers lead the captive women to a row of huts, where two men poke and prod the women. Briseis understands that she and the others are “being assessed for distribution.”
The women of Lyrnessus are “assessed for distribution” just like any other loot would be, whether gold or food or textiles. This assessment emphasizes that the Greek soldiers see women and slaves as objects for sexual or economic use, not as full human beings.
Themes
The soldiers put Briseis and several other women into a single hut; the rest, including Ritsa, are taken away. Once her eyes adjust to the dark hut, Briseis realizes that her group consists solely of young, attractive women. The next morning, the two men who examined the women bring them fresh clothes, which the women change into. Then they are led from the hut. Briseis, who has not left her house without a veil and a chaperone since age 14, stares at her feet and hears Greeks yelling sexual and sometimes violent things about her. King Nestor approaches Briseis and advises her to put her old life behind her. Told to forget, Briseis resolves to remember.
In ancient Greek and Trojan societies, aristocratic women wore veils. In this scene, Briseis reveals that she has not left the house without a veil since she was 14 years old—the age at which she was married. This context suggests that Briseis’s veil marked that she was the wife and sexual possession of a single, high-status man. Appearing unveiled thus represents that Briseis is under sexual threat from any and all the Greek soldiers. Briseis’s resolve to remember her old life under conditions of slavery and the threat of rape shows her refusal to bow to her enslavers.
Themes
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The Greeks begin shouting Achilles’s name. Briseis covers her ears and imagines Lyrnessus as it was before the Greeks sacked it. Achilles’s name, shouted again, reminds her of Achilles spearing her brother and then looking at her—but she pushes the memory away, recalling peaceful Lyrnessus again. Then a hand grabs her face and turns her head about. The sun blinds her, so she only sees the man once he’s walking away from her: Achilles, who puts his hand up for silence and says: “Cheers, lads […] She’ll do.” All the Greek soldiers laugh.
Briseis tries to control her narrative by picturing Lyrnessus whole—but this attempt falls apart under the weight of her brutal reality. Though many English translations of The Iliad use poetic language, The Silence of the Girls imagines the Greek hero Achilles speaking crude, slangy English (“Cheers, lads […] she’ll do.”). This choice emphasizes that the poetic treatment of murderous Achilles in The Iliad betrays a biased perspective; Achilles’s crude behavior as he claims Briseis as his slave, meanwhile, underscores the horror of ancient Greece’s misogynistic slave societies.
Themes
