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Chapter 44
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
On the second day of battle cessation, while the Trojans hold Hector’s funeral games, Ajax and Tecmessa come to dinner at Achilles’s compound. While Briseis watches Achilles and Ajax play dice, Ajax suddenly collapses into a fetal position and wails. Achilles doesn’t react. After Ajax has finished wailing, the men resume playing dice. Tecmessa tells Briseis that Ajax has continued to have terrible nightmares and that whenever she asks about them, he tells her, “Silence becomes a woman.” Briseis and all the women she knows were raised with that saying. Thinking about it, she and Tecmessa burst into hysterical laughter. After that exchange, they unexpectedly become friends.
Ajax’s strange behavior suggests that he may be traumatized. His obvious suffering points out that the war harms the young men who are supposed to find honor and glory in it, even as the novel reminds the reader that women and civilians often suffer even worse during wartime. The phrase “Silence becomes a woman” is the opposite of The Silence of the Girls’s thesis, as the novel is devoted to recovering the stories centering women that male-centered myths have ignored or silenced. Briseis and Tecmessa’s shared laughter at the phrase confirms the novel’s mockery of the idea.
Themes
Briseis asks Tecmessa how quickly a woman can know whether she’s pregnant. Tecmessa tells her it depends and asks whether the baby is “his.” When Briseis says yes, Tecmessa asks how she can know, and Briseis mentions Agamemnon’s penchant for “the back gate.” Tecmessa is happier for Briseis than Briseis is for herself. Briseis suddenly notices that Ajax is staring with complete blankness at nothing while Achilles tries to distract him.
When Briseis mentions that Agamemnon likes “the back gate,” she is indirectly stating that she knows the baby is Achilles’s because Agamemnon only raped her anally. Her matter-of-fact recounting of her various rapes highlights the brutality of life for the enslaved Trojan women. Meanwhile, the transition between Briseis’s maternity and Ajax’s blank stare hints that misogynistic and traumatized Greek warriors constantly threatened by violent death may not make the best or most reliable fathers.
Themes
After dinner, Alcimus plays the lyre and Automedon the double flute while Achilles’s preferred songs—about men’s heroic exploits—are sung. Later, when Tecmessa’s little son gets fussy, Tecmessa takes him outside and sings a Trojan lullaby to him. All the Greeks outside stop and listen. Briseis, seeing “a slave singing a Trojan lullaby to her Greek baby,” realizes that Trojans’ women’s songs and stories will haunt Greek men for generations.
Earlier in the novel, the narrator claimed that the stories of defeated people tend to die with them. Briseis’s realization in this scene contradicts that claim. Yes, the dominant narrative of the Trojan War belongs to Achilles’s songs about men’s heroic exploits—which here stand in for Homer’s epic The Iliad. Yet the enslaved Trojan women’s counter-narrative (represented by the “Trojan lullaby” that Tecmessa sings to her Greek baby) will persist as a female shadow-side to men’s myths of the Trojan War.
Themes
After Ajax and Tecmessa leave with their son, Achilles and Briseis sit together in his quarters with wine. Since Priam came, Achilles has simply been expecting Briseis to come to him. Briseis feels as though she was attempting to escape not only the Greek camp but also Achilles’s narrative: the story is all about Achilles’s rage and grief, even though Briseis is angry and grieving too. She feels trapped inside his narrative without a “real part to play”—although she recognizes her pregnancy may give her a part. Yet she still hasn’t told him, despite the other women’s urgings, because she doesn’t yet want to assume the mantle of mother to a Trojan-Greek baby and thus confuse her “old loyalties.”
Briseis’s sense that she cannot escape Achilles’s narrative refers to her role in Homer’s Iliad, which focuses on Achilles and which will remain the paradigmatic account of the Trojan War. Her acknowledgment that she has not been allowed to grieve as Achilles has grieved emphasizes previous descriptions of her grief at her brothers’ and Patroclus’s death as muffled due to her status as a powerless enslaved woman. Finally, her desire not to confuse her “old loyalties” suggests that in the ancient Greek and Trojan cultures depicted, women get their identities from the men in their life—so that, if Briseis becomes the mother of Greek warrior Achilles’s baby, she will in some sense become less Trojan and more Greek.
Themes
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