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Chapter 43
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
Much later, while Achilles sleeps, Briseis sneaks from his bed, feeling strongly that her body belongs to her despite everything. She slips into the yard and goes to heat water for Priam to wash with. Unexpectedly, Automedon and Alcimus approach. She gives them her alibi; when she lifts the water bowl, Alcimus offers to carry it. Briseis, seeing Alcimus’s expression, is startled to realize that he wants to carry it not for Priam, the Trojan king, but for her, a captive slave.
In prior scenes, Briseis has claimed to think of herself as an object because she has been enslaved. Here, however, she asserts that her body still belongs to her despite her enslavement. This turning point for Briseis’s character may be due to her decision to escape, which shows her that she still has free will and agency even as an enslaved person. Meanwhile, Alcimus’s offer to carry things for Briseis reveals that he may have a crush on her.
Themes
When Briseis, Alcimus, and Automedon reach the veranda steps, she tells them she’ll take it from there: Priam knows her, because her sister is his daughter-in-law. Automedon seems to realize for the first time that Briseis is a human being with relatives—important ones, even. The men agree to stay on the steps while Briseis takes the water to Priam.
That Automedon has never before consciously realized that Briseis has a family shows the utterly dehumanizing nature of the ancient Greeks’ slave society.
Themes
Priam opens his eyes as Briseis approaches. After he has finished washing, Briseis begs him to take her back to Troy with her, where her sister Ianthe—her only living family since Achilles killed her husband and brothers—is living. Priam points out that Troy is going to fall in a few weeks, after which Briseis will be enslaved again, perhaps to someone worse than Achilles. When Briseis echoes, “Worse?”, Priam asks whether Achilles mistreats her. She repeats that Achilles murdered her family. Priam tells her dismissively that that’s war. Then he tells her that he can’t thieve Achilles’s woman after Achilles took him in as a guest, the way Paris thieved Helen.
Priam is so indoctrinated in militaristic, masculinist culture that he cannot understand why Briseis would object to being enslaved and raped by her brothers’ murderer in particular, dismissing the killings as mere “war.” In Greek mythology, Paris either abducted or eloped with Queen Helen while he was a guest of her husband King Menelaus. That Priam would compare his helping an enslaved woman escape sexual slavery to Paris abducting Helen reveals his misogyny: whether the woman wants to leave her “owner” or husband is not important to him—he only cares about the supposedly honorable duty one man owes to another as a host or guest.
Themes
Suddenly, Achilles speaks from behind them, saying that Briseis is taking good care of Priam. Briseis realizes that he likely overheard some of their conversation. Priam agrees that Briseis has been lovely and touches her face, but Briseis won’t look at him. Achilles tells Priam that they have to go—he doesn’t want to discover what would happen if Agamemnon realized Priam was in the Greek camp. Priam asks whether Achilles would fight to defend him, and Achilles says he certainly would—he understands how he must treat a guest.
Achilles’s willingness to fight other Greeks to protect his “guest” Priam makes clear how serious a cultural relationship the guest-host bond is. It also makes clear what an uphill battle Briseis was fighting in trying to get Priam to value her humanity as an enslaved woman more than his masculine honor as Achilles’s guest.
Themes
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Briseis helps Priam walk as he, Achilles, Automedon, and Alcimus process toward Priam’s cart in the stable yard. At the cart, Alcimus raises a torch to show Priam Hector’s corpse. Priam begins to sob. When Achilles abruptly asks how long Priam will need for the burial, Briseis at first thinks that Achilles is being brutal—but then realizes he’s trying to defuse an emotionally volatile situation by focusing on pragmatic questions. Priam says that he’ll need an 11-day cessation of battle. Achilles agrees to get it for him. Briseis momentarily wonders why they simply can’t declare the war over, if it’s so simple to pause.
Briseis’s question—why can’t the powerful warriors just declare the war over?—implicitly poses another question: how much agency do the male warriors in the Trojan War have? On the one hand, they have far more power than the women they abuse and enslave. On the other hand, they seem trapped in militaristic honor narratives that prevent them from seeing obvious possibilities, like ending a wasteful and destructive war, as viable.
Themes
Achilles insists that he and Priam drink “the parting cup” before Priam leaves. Automedon and Alcimus exchange annoyed glances at this delay, and Briseis finds it confusing too—but she thinks she can use the distraction. After the men have walked back inside, she hides herself in the back of Priam’s cart next to Hector’s corpse. Eventually, she hears Priam and Achilles return. Then Priam climbs into the front of the cart and begins driving it away as Achilles walks beside it.
Achilles unexpectedly delays Priam a moment after urgently hurrying him from bed early in the morning. Achilles likely also overheard Briseis begging Priam to help her escape. Given that Achilles’s strange delay for “the parting cup” allows Briseis to effect an escape plan, it seems possible that Achilles is actually creating a diversion to help Briseis sneak away, though she doesn’t realize it. Why would he help her? Given that she sneaks away in the same cart that carries Hector’s corpse, the novel may be hinting that he helps her for the same reason he gives up his revenge: Patroclus, who was an honorable man and who befriended Briseis despite her low status as an enslaved woman, would have wanted it.
Themes
Briseis thinks with hectic hope of being a free person with a family again—yet almost immediately, she also starts thinking that her actions are irrational. If Priam finds her before he gets back to Troy, he’ll leave her on the battlefield rather than insult his host Achilles and risk the cessation of hostilities he’s been promised. And if she does reach Troy, she’ll have to live through another sacking of a city, which will end with her enslaved again and perhaps horrifically punished by Achilles for running away. When the cart pauses at the gates while Achilles talks to the sentry, she slips out of the cart and walks as inconspicuously as she can back toward Achilles’s compound.
For much of the novel, Briseis has thought of herself as an object due to her enslaved status. She only consciously recognized that her body belonged by rights to her after she had resolved to escape. Yet, ironically, her failure to escape after all reaffirms her free will: she thinks through what the future likely holds if she escapes, judges it even worse than her present, and consciously decides to return to Achilles’s compound. Thus the novel makes clear that Briseis’s earlier comparisons of enslaved people with objects are false: slaves are human beings with free will despite the horrific, dehumanizing oppression they suffer and whether or not they attempt to escape.
Themes
When Briseis finally glances behind her, she sees Priam’s cart exiting the gates. Achilles waves goodbye to the cart and walks back to his hut. After a moment, Briseis follows him inside and asks whether he’d like food. He nods, and she prepares him a meal. After he’s eaten, he abruptly asks why she came back. Briseis, terrified, wonders why he didn’t stop her if he guessed what she was doing. When she replies, “I don’t know,” he pushes the food toward her and points at a chair. She sits down and eats with him.
When Achilles asks why Briseis came back, it makes clear that he knew she was trying to escape. It also bolsters the interpretation that he intentionally created a diversion with Priam so that she could hide inside Priam’s cart if she wanted. These facts suggest that while Achilles still feels empowered to order Briseis around, he has assumed some of Patroclus’s ability to see Briseis as a human being despite her status as an enslaved woman.
Themes
Briseis is slowly realizing that while everything she thought about the imminent fall of Troy was true, she actually returned because she intuited she needed to figure out how to live in this place. She also feels that her relationship with Achilles has somehow changed because he chose to let her escape and she chose not to go: “this was no longer, straightforwardly, a meeting of owner and slave”—possibly. She wonders whether her feelings of choice are illusions and suspects Achilles isn’t thinking about any of it anyway.
Briseis herself isn’t sure whether she’s deluded in supposing that her relationship with Achilles has changed: if their relationship is no longer “straightforwardly” that of “owner and slave,” what is it? Nevertheless, as Briseis has for most of the narrative viewed Achilles as an inhuman monster, this moment marks a turning point in their relationship: Briseis comes to see Achilles as a man who has at least the nascent potential to treat other people as human beings and equals, despite his obsession with occupying the top of a violent honor hierarchy where he has no peers.
Themes
