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Chapter 39
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
Two nights after the “disastrous” encounter, Achilles summons Briseis again. She thinks he’s going to tell her to get in bed, but instead he gives her scissors and asks her to neaten his chopped-off hair. The scissors are extremely sharp, and while Briseis is trimming his hair, she imagines him bleeding out with the scissors in his throat. He sees her expression in his mirror and urges her on, asking her why she doesn’t do it. She wants to retort that his soldiers would kill her slowly and painfully, but instead she just finishes the trim.
Achilles avenges the death of his loved one, Patroclus, by killing Patroclus’s killer. Here Briseis contemplates avenging her loved ones—her brothers, whom Achilles killed—by stabbing Achilles in the neck. Yet as a woman and an enslaved person, Briseis has no standing to take violent revenge: she would be slowly tortured to death if she did rather than dying a clean death on the battlefield. The difference between Achilles and Briseis’s ability to enact revenge emphasizes the lack of agency women and enslaved people are afforded in ancient Greek culture.
Themes
Every night after that, Achilles orders Briseis to stay behind after dinner—though not “to stay the night.” He takes her to examine Hector’s corpse by torchlight. Every night, the corpse has reverted to a perfect state and, after Achilles examines it, Briseis briefly sees its former injuries on Achilles’s own face. Some nights, they go home after that. Other nights, Achilles goes to drive the corpse around Patroclus’s burial mound in the dark. Briseis is terrified of Achilles’s loss of “humanity” and senses that Automedon and Alcimus are too. She wonders how she can escape the “never-ending cycle of hatred and revenge” if free men like them can’t.
That Briseis isn’t “stay[ing] the night” suggests that Achilles hasn’t tried to resume raping Briseis after the first time he failed to get an erection with her. Yet he seems to want her company, suggesting that he wants her—someone else who loved Patroclus—around as he grieves. Though Briseis claims that Achilles has lost his “humanity,” his behavior is only a more intense version of the enslaved Trojan women mocking their abuser Myron’s corpse after he died of plague earlier in the novel: in each case, a person takes revenge on a dead enemy by desecrating or humiliating their body. This parallel suggests that vengefulness is a common human reaction to grief or harm—Achilles is simply taking this common reaction to an extreme. Meanwhile, Briseis’s feeling that they are all trapped in a “never-ending cycle of hatred and revenge” suggests that violence and war trap even the free men who have greater agency in this violent, male-dominated slave society.
Themes
