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Chapter 2
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
Guards lead Briseis to the camp building that belongs to Achilles, put her in a tiny back room, and leave her there. After a long wait, in which Briseis tries not to vomit, a tall man who introduces himself as Patroclus comes in bringing her food and wine. Briseis has heard of Patroclus, Achilles’s “second in command,” and wonders why he would be waiting on a slave. He urges her to drink, telling her that it will help her “feel better,” and assures her that she won’t be harmed. When she doesn’t reply, he smiles in a “lopsided” fashion,” puts the food and wine down, and leaves.
Patroclus’s introduction immediately characterizes him as unusual relative to the other Greek warriors. He is polite and considerate toward a slave, where the other Greeks treat slaves more as objects than as people. He even tries to make Briseis “feel better” by giving her wine. Yet his “lopsided grin” at Briseis’s nonresponse hints that he knows his efforts are entirely inadequate: he cannot make her feel better about her enslavement with wine, and though he himself may not want to harm her, she is going to be raped. Thus, the novel illustrates that the kindness of individual privileged people cannot solve structural horrors like violent misogyny and slavery.
Themes
Briseis can’t swallow the food. She drinks the wine, which makes her feel physically numb, matching her emotional numbness. From the building’s great hall, she hears men shouting, laughing, and singing. She creeps from her room and witnesses the Greeks eating crowded together at two long tables. The room reeks of new and ancient sweat (the war has been going on since Briseis was a young girl).
The contrast between Briseis’s horror and the Greek soldiers’ revelry underscores Briseis’s oppressed position as a female slave in a misogynistic, hierarchical society. The aside that the Trojan War has been going on since Briseis’s childhood, meanwhile, hints at the overwhelming loss of life and constant violent brutality to which all the novel’s characters have been exposed.
Themes
Achilles and Patroclus sit at a small table separate from the others. Achilles stands and says—with an accent that Briseis finds difficult to understand, though she can speak Greek—that while he doesn’t want to end everyone’s evening . . . One Greek shouts that they all know why Achilles wants to head to bed. Then they burst into a song calling Achilles a beautiful, useless “pain in the arsehole.” Briseis creeps back to her room and leaves the door ajar, Through the crack, she sees Achilles and Patroclus enter Achilles’s adjoining bedroom. When Achilles nods to the tiny room, Patroclus laughs and says that yes, “she” is in there. Achilles opens the tiny room’s door and silently indicates that Briseis follow him.
Yet again, the novel characterizes the Greek soldiers as using crude language like “pain in the arsehole” to contrast with the poetic language of many English translations of The Iliad and thus to emphasize that The Iliad represents a single, biased, Greek perspective on the Trojan War myth. That Patroclus, the kindest Greek warrior thus far, laughs when Achilles asks after Briseis—likely knowing that Achilles is about to rape her—underscores that even individually kind men are callous when it comes to the rape of women and slaves in this brutal, misogynistic, hierarchical slave society.
Themes
