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Chapter 31
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
Briseis hears Achilles’s war cry summoning the Greeks to the arena. Agamemnon arrives last. One of his servants grabs Briseis, who realizes that Agamemnon is pulling together the booty he promised Achilles if Achilles would fight—though Achilles will obviously fight regardless. From the arena’s center, Achilles proclaims that he’s ashamed he and Agamemnon fought over a girl—better if she had died at her city’s sacking, so that Greek soldiers could have survived. Briseis thinks, helplessly, that Achilles is blaming her for Patroclus’s death. Achilles then proclaims that he’s ready to fight again and won’t stop fighting until he drags Hector’s corpse back to camp.
In conversation with Thetis, Achilles blamed himself for Patroclus’s death, yet in the arena he blames Briseis. This vacillation suggests either that he feels a story blaming Briseis will be more palatable to an audience of misogynistic Greek soldiers—or that Achilles himself genuinely wavers between feeling guilty himself and blaming Briseis. In either case, Achilles is creating a public mythology according to which his fight with Agamemnon—and thus Patroclus’s death—was about Briseis rather than about masculine honor and hierarchy.
Themes
The Greeks cheer. Finally, Agamemnon makes himself heard, itemizing the gifts he’ll still give Achilles. Achilles replies that Agamemnon can deliver the gifts any time he likes—or not. Briseis hears the subtext: possessions no longer matter. Then Odysseus, with malicious glee, reminds Agamemnon to swear an oath that he never touched Briseis. Agamemnon swears by the gods that he never touched Briseis as a boar is sacrificed. Briseis, looking at Achilles, wonders whether he believes Agamemnon—but thinks that he likely doesn’t care either way now that Patroclus is dead. The Myrmidons take the “gifts,” including seven women from Lesbos and Briseis, to Achilles’s compound.
Briseis believes that Achilles is saying possessions no longer matter now that Patroclus is dead—which means that Briseis no longer matters because Achilles views her, an enslaved woman, as a mere possession. Since Achilles views the things he owns as mere outward signs of his martial honor, it is possible that Achilles also means that he no longer cares about his honor now that Patroclus is dead either: he only cares about revenging himself on Hector. Meanwhile, Agamemnon—at Odysseus’s malicious insistence—fabricates an official myth according to which he never raped Briseis, though it’s not clear whether anyone believes this particular narrative.
Themes
