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Chapter 27
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 next morning, everyone has heard that Achilles has agreed to fight. Briseis, not believing it, creeps to his compound, sees what appears to be Achilles in armor speak to his men—and then sees an unarmored Achilles emerge from this building. It’s extremely eerie, as though Patroclus has become Achilles’s “fetch, the double that appears to herald a man’s death.” Achilles seems to feel the eeriness but hugs Patroclus anyway. As the two men walk together, Briseis notes that Patroclus is walking exactly like Achilles and wonders whether commingling identities is love’s ultimate goal—the same commingling she saw between the two men on the beach.
When Patroclus, during his conversation with Nestor, suggested that his asking Achilles to fight might end with Achilles murdering him, it foreshadowed trouble. In the same way, Patroclus appearing as Achilles’s “fetch, the double that appears to herald a man’s death,” suggests that Patroclus’s assumption of Achilles’s identity bodes ill for one or both men. Since the situation has arisen in large part due to Achilles’s insulted honor and Patroclus’s repressed desire for honor, the novel is emphasizing that the ancient Greek value of martial honor-seeking exposes young men to the danger of violent death.
Themes
Automedon is driving Achilles’s chariot that morning instead of Patroclus. As Briseis watches Automedon and Patroclus (in Achilles’s armor) leave for battle, she realizes that every ambitious Trojan will be trying to kill “Achilles”—and that she feels “divided loyalties,” not knowing what outcome to pray for. Walking away to be by herself, Briseis spots Achilles alone and freezes until, not seeing her, he walks in the direction of his quarters. Then she heads for the beach.
Up to this point, Briseis has felt no “divided loyalties”: she prayed for Apollo to kill the Greeks with plague and refused to feel a common entrapment with the young Greek soldiers forced to go to war. Yet despite her grief over Lyrnessus and her desire for revenge against the Greeks, she finds that she cannot wish for Patroclus’s death—perhaps because he alone among the Greeks has treated her as a human being even though she is an enslaved woman.
Themes
As Briseis is walking around a ship, she almost runs into Achilles. He goes white, and Briseis infers that he momentarily mistook her for his mother, Thetis. He demands to know what she’s doing, and she explains that she came to see Patroclus off. When she asks whether Patroclus will be all right, Achilles says yes, if he follows instructions. Then he says it should have been him, grabs Briseis, and declares that he wishes they’d never met—that she’d died when Lyrnessus fell. He shoves her against the side of the ship and climbs up to the ship’s stern, staring at the battlefield. Briseis flees back to the hospital tents.
Achilles’s wish that Briseis had died at Lyrnessus is nonsensical. If she had died, Achilles would just have taken another enslaved woman as his “prize,” and Agamemnon would have insulted Achilles’s honor by appropriating that woman after returning Chryseis to her father. Yet Achilles blames Briseis as if she caused his falling-out with Agamemnon, highlighting the misogynistic tendency in ancient Greek myths to blame women for men’s actions (e.g. to blame Helen for starting the Trojan War).
Themes
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