Previous
Chapter 32
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
When Briseis sees Patroclus’s body laid out in Achilles’s compound, she drops to her knees, grabs his feet, and wails. Other women, hearing her cries, join her in mourning. Briseis suspects that they are all using Patroclus’s death as a channel for their grief at their own dead loved ones: she is thinking of her brothers and even of her ineffectual husband Mynes. Yet she and the other women are also genuinely mourning Patroclus, who always treated the enslaved women and their children well.
Achilles, a high-status warrior, immediately plans to act on his grief by killing Hector. By contrast, the low-status enslaved women must channel their primary grief at losing their families and homes into grief for a man who was, after all, one of their captors—even as they do wish Patroclus had not died. This contrast emphasizes the different affordances for grief allowed to a male warrior and an enslaved woman in ancient Greek and Trojan culture as represented by the novel.
Themes
Briseis imagines voices accusing her of reminding everyone that Patroclus had wanted her to marry Achilles, trying to use Patroclus’s much-grieved death to “arrange [her] marriage”—to a man who murdered her husband and brothers and sacked her city. Briseis protests that if these voices can’t understand her, they’ve never been enslaved. Then she says her really disingenuous behavior is framing the women’s grief for Patroclus as communal, when Briseis was individually grieving “one of the dearest friends [she] ever had.” Finally, she admits that she often fights with voices like this at night.
This passage implies that in the aftermath of Patroclus’s death, Briseis reminded the people around her that Patroclus wanted Achilles to marry her in an attempt to escape slavery through union to a high-status warrior. (In The Iliad, Briseis genuinely laments Patroclus’s death because he was going to arrange her marriage to Achilles.) Briseis imagines voices—perhaps the voices of later myth-makers—criticizing her behavior as manipulative and callous; she retorts that they can’t understand her behavior if they have never suffered slavery, even as she admits that she genuinely mourned Patroclus, whose death she is instrumentalizing, as “one of the dearest friends [she] ever had.”
Themes
