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Chapter 19
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 enslaved women know that the war is going badly for the Greeks. Some, mostly long-time slaves, don’t care which side wins: “No likely end would bring them loss or leave them happier than before.” Others, formerly free Trojans, hope that the Trojans will win and rescue them—but Briseis secretly suspects that the Trojan soldiers would see them as enemy property to plunder. Moreover, the enslaved women might die in battle: the men lock them in their huts at night, and the Trojans might hit the huts with fire arrows.
The phrase “No likely end would bring them loss or leave them happier than before” is an almost direct quotation of a line in the Irish poet W. B. Yeats’s 1918 poem “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” In the poem, the line refers to rural Irish people’s indifference to the outcome World War I (1914–1918), because neither victory nor defeat will free them from British colonial rule. The quotation thus compares the enslaved women to a colonized people—it doesn’t matter to most of the women which group of men “wins” because either way, the women will remain enslaved and oppressed.
Themes
One morning, Ritsa tells Briseis that Machaon has agreed to let Briseis help Ritsa. Briseis, happy to escape the weaving huts, follows Ritsa to the hospital area. Ritsa takes Briseis to the back of a hospital tent, where she’ll be grinding herbs to make anesthetics and disinfectants. Briseis, observing the wounded soldiers, feels sympathy for them, especially the very young ones—she knows that some didn’t want to come to Troy—and yet hates them as enemies. When she mentions this to Ritsa, Ritsa shrugs and keeps tending the wounded. Despite this reaction, Briseis wants to maintain certain boundaries: as an enslaved woman, she is suffering from the war differently than these free men. Nevertheless, she unexpectedly loves and finds joy in her nursing work, which makes her feel like a competent person rather than an object belonging to Achilles or Agamemnon.
Briseis acknowledges that many of the Greek soldiers suffer and die terribly and that many of them were forced to fight in the war. This acknowledgment emphasizes that while men oppress women in the context of the Greeks’ misogynistic, militaristic culture, this same culture exposes men to unnecessary violence and death. Yet Briseis refuses to feel solidarity with the unwilling soldiers as fellow victims of the war: she feels that as an enslaved woman, she has fundamentally less freedom to escape the war and is thus less culpable for and more of a victim of the violence than they are. When Briseis finds that she loves nursing because it makes her feel like a human being, it emphasizes how slavery has forced her to objectify and dehumanize herself as well as to suffer others’ objectification and dehumanization of her.
Themes
One day, the fighting is particularly bad and several generals, including Odysseus and Agamemnon, are wounded. In the hospital tent, the common soldiers complain about Agamemnon’s alienation of Achilles and suggest that he should beg Achilles to fight again. Briseis overhears one man say to another that Agamemnon should “give the bloody girl back.” Achilles’s name is on everyone’s lips.
The soldiers presumably know who Briseis is—Achilles and now Agamemnon have been publicly displaying her as a trophy at feasts—yet they feel free to call her “the bloody girl” as if she isn’t in the room with them. This fact emphasizes yet again that the Greek warriors see the female slaves as objects, more furniture than people.
Themes
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