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Chapter 35
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 sees Achilles drive his chariot into the compound yard with a “bloody lump” bumping along behind it and realizes only belatedly that the lump is Hector’s corpse tied to the chariot. She later hears that Achilles dragged the body three times around the walls of Troy with Priam watching. Achilles has Patroclus’s body taken outside; he drives Hector’s body around it until his horses are depleted. Then he dismounts, places his bloody hands on Patroclus’s chest, and tells the corpse that it can rest now that Achilles has kept his promises and Hector is dead.
Achilles does not simply kill Hector to revenge Patroclus’s death. He desecrates Hector’s corpse, turning it into a “bloody lump” in front of Hector’s father King Priam. The extreme, savage vindictiveness of Achilles’s behavior not only illustrates the depth of his grief but also suggests he is trying subconsciously to exorcise his grief through violence.
Themes
Though Achilles is obviously still grief-stricken, Agamemnon insists on celebratory feasting. Throughout the feast, Achilles looks distantly confused, as if unsure who the other celebrants are. Briseis speculates that perhaps he thought that somehow, if he killed Hector, he could bring Patroclus back to life. Later, Automedon commands Briseis and Iphis to go to the women’s huts and lock themselves inside in anticipation of a “wild night.” Yet Briseis, sleepless and preoccupied by Hector’s mutilated corpse, creeps out late at night, finds the body where it has been abandoned in the yard, and covers it with a white sheet.
According to the Greek warriors’ martial culture, their great enemy Hector’s death merits a celebration. Yet Achilles didn’t kill Hector for advantage in the war or for glory—he killed him, Briseis speculates, in a state of magical thinking, hoping against reason that killing Patroclus’s killer would bring Patroclus back. This speculation suggests that Achilles’s extreme grief separates him from his masculinist, martial culture and renders him irrational. Meanwhile, Automedon’s attempt to protect Briseis and Iphis from the soldiers’ “wild night” of celebration suggests that the Greek warriors’ celebration will involve group-raping available enslaved women, another indication of the war camp’s extreme brutality. Finally, the care Briseis shows to Hector’s body foreshadows that Achilles’s attempts to exorcise his grief by desecrating the corpse may be unsuccessful.
Themes
