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Chapter 33
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
Though the Greeks party late that night, Achilles returns to his compound early and goes to sleep beside Patroclus. Briseis sees that Achilles’s delay in cremating Patroclus disturbs the other Greeks and speculates that Achilles hopes to die so quickly after killing Hector that he and Patroclus can be cremated in the same fire. The next morning, Achilles in his new armor seems calm. He flinches only once—when he sees Automedon serving as his charioteer in Patroclus’s place.
Briseis’s speculation that Achilles wants to die fast enough to be cremated with Patroclus shows the obsessive intensity of Achilles’s grief, while Achilles’s flinch when he sees Automedon serving as Patroclus’s replacement shows that he is not yet resigned to Patroclus’s death.
Themes
When Achilles rides into battle, a bloodbath begins. Briseis lists his kills: 18-year-old Iphition, Demoleon, Hippodamas, King Priam’s 15-year-old son Polydorus, Dryops, Demuchus, brothers Laogonus and Dardanus, Tros, Mulius, Echeclus, Deucalion—Briseis interrupts her list of the dead to point out that a mere list of names like that fails to elicit empathy.
Long lists of a warrior’s kills are not uncommon in epic poetry such as The Iliad; here, Briseis imitates the dominant form in which the Trojan War myths have been told, only to point out that this form limits the audience’s ability to feel for the men violently killed in war.
Themes
Briseis explains that later, wherever she goes, she will look for Trojan women in Greek territory. From these women, she will learn that Laogonus and Dardanus were twins, not just brothers, and that Laogonus translated Dardanus’s confused speech for adults for much of their childhood. Dryops’s mother took two days to give birth to him. Mulius never crawled—he went from nothing to walking at six months old. Some of the women Briseis will come across have children by their Greek enslavers. Though they love their younger children, they always reminisce about their Trojan children “who’d died fighting to save Troy.”
This peek into Briseis’s future reveals that while The Iliad and other male-oriented, violent stories like it may remain the dominant narrative of the Trojan War, the enslaved Trojan women who survive the war maintain a counter-narrative or counter-myth that humanizes their male relatives “who’d died fighting to save Troy” and whom The Iliad relegates to lists of Achilles’s kills.
Themes
Achilles kills more and more—Rhigmus, Areithous, and on and on. For some reason, the only one that will register to him is the death of King Priam’s son Lycaon. Achilles does not stop fighting to let the Trojans bury his kills and he does not take prisoners, killing everyone who crosses his path. He is aiming single-mindedly for Troy’s gates, where he anticipates killing Hector: he is “driving on to glory.”
While Briseis is narrating a female counter-narrative to violent, masculinist epic poetry like The Iliad, Achilles is still living in the dominant narrative, “driving on to glory” over the bodies of his enemies.
Themes
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