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Chapter 25
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
Walking back to Achilles’s compound, Patroclus spots a friend named Eurypylus with an arrow through his leg. Patroclus helps him walk to a medical tent, pulls the arrow from his leg, and searches for bandages and painkillers. In the back of the tent, he sees Briseis and asks what she’s doing there. As she explains that she works in the medical tent, Patroclus notices that her face and neck are covered in bruises. Briseis helps Patroclus locate the supplies he needs and clean Eurypylus’s wound.
The bruises on Briseis’s face and neck imply that Agamemnon brutally beat her as well as raping her, emphasizing yet again the impunity with which the Greek warriors can abuse the enslaved women under their power.
Themes
Before Patroclus leaves, he asks Briseis about her face. She says that Agamemnon blames her for Achilles’s rejection of the deal—and suggests that she wishes she had tried to deceive Achilles. Patroclus tells her that her circumstances will change—and if they don’t, she should make them change. Briseis replies, “Spoken like a man.” Patroclus tells her to seize the day when it arrives. As he walks away, he glances back and sees her waving to him.
Agamemnon blames Briseis for Achilles’s behavior much as the Trojans blame Helen for Paris’s behavior, showing how in misogynistic myths and cultures women are often blamed for men’s behavior. When Patroclus encourages Briseis to change her circumstances somehow, she retorts, “Spoken like a man,” which suggests that Patroclus has failed to consider how much more agency men are afforded than women to change their lives in Greek and Trojan cultures. Meanwhile, when Patroclus advises Briseis to seize the day, it implies that he sees himself as “seizing the day” by petitioning Achilles to let him lead the Myrmidons without Achilles—he thinks that he is changing his circumstances and perhaps increasing his own honor.
Themes
