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Chapter 3
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
Achilles rapes Briseis without inflicting physical pain, though Briseis expected pain. Afterward, she feels that something inside her has “died.” She loathes him, though she understands that he has a “right” to use her, as he would have the right to use new armor he’d won in battle. After a long while, lying stiffly beside Achilles, Briseis sleeps. The noise of the sea wakes Briseis, and she wishes she could “dissolve into it.”
Achilles’s rape clearly traumatizes Briseis, making her feel that part of her has “died” and that she wants to “dissolve.” Yet she also believes he has a “right” to rape her, a jarring admission that illustrates how the misogyny and brutality of Greek and Trojan slave societies indoctrinate women and enslaved people into believing their brutalization is normal or appropriate. When Briseis compares herself to a new suit of armor, it shows how she accepts the slave society’s dehumanizing view of her as an enslaved person.
Themes
Briseis sleeps again. When she wakes, Achilles is gone. She wonders whether she should be working. Then she thinks her only role may be of a sexual nature. After her mother died, her father’s concubine basically had only sexual duties. Briseis walks out of the building to the foggy sea, which sounds to her like a “sword-on-shield clash.” She hears her youngest brother calling her—as he wasn’t properly buried, he can’t go to Hades—and wades hip-deep into the sea to meet him. She washes Achilles’s semen out of her and wonders whether she should let the sea take her.
Briseis, like Achilles, grew up in a slave society: her father did to a young female concubine what Achilles is now doing to her. Yet, despite the apparent normalization of rape and slavery in this culture, they still utterly traumatize those who suffer them: Briseis feels utterly surrounded by violence, interpreting sea noises as a “sword-on-shield clash,” and she implicitly contemplates suicide by drowning in the aftermath of her rape.
Themes
Suddenly Briseis hears a man’s voice and sees Achilles swimming farther out in the sea. Terrified, she rushes to shore. On the way, she steps on something sharp, pulls it from her foot, and hears Achilles speaking a language she doesn’t know. She thinks she hears him call “Mummy,” though this strikes her as bizarre and unlikely. She freezes in place until he stops speaking and leaves, just as the sun is rising. Then she runs back to camp, where a girl named Iphis flags her down and bathes her.
Briseis thinks it is bizarre and unlikely that Achilles would call out to his mother in terms of endearment—a judgment revealing that Briseis has difficulty seeing Achilles as anyone’s son and that, given the misogynistic, patriarchal culture in which they both live, she finds it difficult to imagine Achilles feeling emotional dependency on any woman, even his mother.
Themes
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Briseis realizes that she is holding the sharp object she pulled from her foot: a green stone with a white stripe and a sharp edge. She cuts herself with it once, which makes her feel “relief,” but she stops herself from doing it again: she believes that the sea gave her the stone for a reason unrelated to self-harm. She notices that the sea usually wears stones smooth, but this one has “stayed sharp.” This seems significant to her, and she keeps it, slipping it into her girdle. It reminds her of “the girl I’d once been and could never be again.”
The stone reminds Briseis of “the girl I’d once been,” which implies that she believes she cannot “stay[] sharp” under the crushing weight of rape and slavery, as the stone has “stayed sharp” under the crushing weight of the sea. Yet Briseis’s decision to keep the stone hints that she will retain her “sharp[ness]”—her independence, intelligence, and judgment—despite the weight of oppression.
Themes
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