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Chapter 41
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 and Automedon bring meat into Achilles’s rooms for Achilles and Priam. Afterward, Automedon leaves, and Briseis retires into a corner. Briseis can tell that competitive Achilles is wondering whether he would be brave enough to walk into an enemy camp unarmed, as Priam did. The two men stare at one another, mostly silently, while they eat. Afterward, Priam asks to see Hector’s corpse. Achilles promises to bring him to the corpse early the next morning. Then he tells Briseis to prepare a bed for Priam on the back veranda.
If Achilles is in fact wondering whether he would be brave enough to walk into an enemy camp unarmed, it suggests that he is protecting Priam out of a competitive respect for his courage as well as out of the cultural duty to honor one’s guests. This suggestion hints that grief has not entirely subsumed Achilles’s obsession with individual honor and glory.
Themes
Briseis, fetching bedding for Priam, keeps thinking of what he said about kissing Achilles’s hands and thinks that she is doing what many women have done, forced into sexual servitude by men who murdered all her male relatives. This thought plunges her into despair and makes her decide that she must escape.
Priam’s kissing of his son’s murderer’s hands is so unprecedented that it passes into myth, becoming a major incident in Homer’s Iliad. Meanwhile, Briseis’s sexual service to her brothers’ murderer goes unremarked upon because the rape of female slaves is commonplace in the misogynistic slave cultures of ancient Greece and Troy. This double standard—in which free men’s suffering and humiliation is mythologized, while enslaved women’s goes unremarked—motivates Briseis to escape the dehumanized condition of enslavement.
Themes
When Briseis helps an exhausted Priam toward the bed on the veranda, he asks whether he knows her. She explains that she lived in Troy for two years when she was younger. Priam recognizes her as “Helen’s little friend,” and Briseis corrects him: she’s Achilles’s slave. Gravely, Priam says that things go badly for the women when a city is sacked, and Briseis guesses that he's thinking about what will happen to his daughters when Troy falls. When she leaves Priam, reentering Achilles’s rooms, Achilles tells her they have to go wash Hector’s corpse and get Priam out of the Greek camp before dawn—or “they” will kill Priam.
Earlier, Priam appealed to Achilles’s love for his father to elicit sympathy for himself, a father trying to retrieve his son’s corpse. Now, Briseis is subtly appealing to Priam’s love for his daughters to elicit sympathy for herself, a woman enslaved in the war as Priam’s daughters will be enslaved if Troy falls. Briseis’s appeal hints that she may need Priam’s cooperation in her plan to escape slavery. Meanwhile, Achilles’s claim that “they”—i.e., the other Greek warriors—will kill Priam if they see him suggests that not all the Greeks have Achilles’s refined sense of honor about the guest-host relationship.
Themes
