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Chapter 46
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
The morning the battle-cessation ends, Achilles yells for Alcimus while Briseis is eating dry bread for breakfast. A priest walks in and marries Briseis and Alcimus, who gives Briseis “agonized” looks, leading her to wonder whether he was even asked whether he wanted to marry her. Afterward, Alcimus and the priest leave, and Achilles tells Briseis that this is “for the best”: Alcimus is a decent man, he’ll care for Briseis, and he’ll raise the child. Later that same day, Briseis hears that Achilles has been killed.
Since Alcimus has subtly expressed romantic feelings for Briseis, his “agonized” looks at her may be due to embarrassment or feelings of unworthiness rather than any personal reluctance to marry her. Yet Achilles did use the full force of his personality to get Alcimus to swear he’d marry Briseis, which shows how even high-status warrior’s choices are constrained in the highly hierarchal ancient Greek war camp. Meanwhile, Achilles’s claim to Briseis that this is “for the best” shows both his lack of interest in her input and his readiness to die and join Patroclus.
Themes
Briseis feels that Achilles would have disapproved of his own death: cowardly Paris shot him in the back with an arrow, perhaps a poisoned one, to avenge Hector. Some versions of the legend claim that Paris shot Achilles in the heel, his sole vulnerable body-part—but Briseis thinks that legend is stupid, having seen herself that Achilles’s body was covered in scars. She much prefers the legend that Achilles’s horses, a marriage gift to Peleus from the gods, are immortal, and vanished after his death. She likes to imagine them spending the rest of their immortal lives lazily eating grass somewhere.
The various legends that Briseis repeats about Achilles’s death make clear that his prowess in war has made him a great mythological figure even within the lifetimes of people who knew him. Her claim that he would have disliked his mode of death, meanwhile, emphasizes that he lived his life according to a highly stringent—if brutal and in modern terms thoroughly immoral—code of military honor.
Themes
During Achilles’s funeral games, Briseis sits alone in his rooms and feels a strong presence. She considers covering his mirror, as mirrors are known to be portals to Hades, but decides not to, because Achilles’s spirit wouldn’t harm her.
Briseis’s conviction that Achilles’s spirit wouldn’t harm her—though in life he enslaved and raped her—emphasizes how differently she has come to view him since he allowed her escape attempt from slavery and arranged her marriage to free her.
Themes
After three days of looting, the Greeks finally set fire to Troy. Achilles’s young son Pyrrhus is a guest of honor, having arrived at Troy just in time to butcher Priam during the city’s sacking. He seems utterly shocked at Achilles’s death and desperate for someone to compare him to his father, which no one does.
That 15-year-old Pyrrhus participates in the sack of Troy after having just lost his father emphasizes yet again the brutal violence that very young men participate in and are exposed to in ancient Greek and Trojan cultures as represented in the novel.
Themes
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Agamemnon, dead drunk at the feast, abruptly remembers that at one point he promised Achilles the 20 most beautiful women of Troy if he’d fight. Odysseus—also drunk but still shrewd—points out that, as Achilles is dead, Agamemnon can reasonably consider the promise void. Yet Agamemnon, terrified beyond reason of Achilles’s ghost, decides that he needs to sacrifice the most beautiful of the Trojan captives to Achilles’s ghost—and decides on Priam’s 15-year-old daughter Polyxena.
Agamemnon’s decision to make a sacrifice to appease Achilles’s ghost shows the power of Achilles’s mythos even in the immediate aftermath of his death. The decision to sacrifice a 15-year-old enslaved girl, meanwhile, highlights yet again the capricious brutality and violence to which girls, women, and enslaved people are exposed throughout the novel.
Themes
At breakfast the next day, a messenger summons Briseis to Nestor’s hut, where Nestor’s trophy Hecamede explains that Nestor wants her to accompany Polyxena to the sacrifice and asks whether Briseis will come with them too. Briseis, seeing Hecamede’s horror, agrees. They go to the hut where Priam’s female relatives have been imprisoned. (Helen has her own hut, and everyone believes that while Menelaus is still threatening to kill her once they get home, she’ll make up to him fast.) Walking through the camp, Briseis looks for her sister Ianthe—but having heard that some women threw themselves from the parapet rather than be enslaved, Briseis expects her sister was among them.
The fall of Troy has proceeded exactly as everyone predicted: all the men and boys have been slaughtered, the women have been captured and enslaved, and Helen is being returned as a possession to her husband Menelaus, who claims to want to kill her for eloping with—or having been abducted by—Paris. This dreary, brutal, misogynistic anticlimax shows that it makes little difference to the Greeks which individual warriors live and die, as this doesn’t impact their highly hierarchical slave-owning society.
Themes
In the hut, Briseis sees Hector’s widow, Andromache, looking utterly blank. Briseis has heard that Odysseus threw Andromache and Hector’s baby son from the walls of Troy during the sack—and now Andromache has been allotted to Achilles’s son Pyrrhus, who will likely rape her that night. Briseis, thinking of Achilles’s mournful lyre song, tells herself that young men’s deaths in war are terrible—but women’s fates are worse: “We need a new song.”
Briseis interprets Achilles’s final lyre song as a lament for his own early death or for Patroclus’s. While she acknowledges—as she has always acknowledged—that young men’s deaths in the Trojan War are wasteful and inhumane, she still thinks that there is something qualitatively different and worse about the mass enslavement and rape of female prisoners of war, perhaps because mass enslavement denies women freedom and agency for years rather than ending their lives once and for all. When she claims, “We need a new song,” she is suggesting that someone needs to tell the story of Troy’s enslaved women—and The Silence of the Girls implicitly is Briseis’s “new song.”
Themes
Meanwhile, Polyxena is trying to comfort her mother Hecuba, telling her that she’d rather be sacrificed than live a slave. The other women are taken away one by one. Alcimus is the man who takes Andromache away—which hurts: Briseis has been trying not to interact with him lately, in part because she doesn’t want to know what the man she’ll have to spend her life with did during the sack of Troy. Briseis asks him when they’re going to leave, and he replies that there’s still “that”—indicating Polyxena.
The Greeks no longer consider Briseis a slave now that she is Alcimus’s wife—yet she buys that qualified freedom at the cost of marrying an enemy who destroyed her city and culture and participated in the enslavement and rape of women just like her. As such, the novel makes clear that Briseis’s exit from slavery does not constitute a “happy ending” for her.
Themes
At last, soldiers come for Polyxena. Briseis and Hecamede accompany her out of the hut and up to the promontory where Achilles is buried. Agamemnon, Pyrrhus—who will sacrifice Polyxena—and other men are waiting. Nestor gives Hecamede a pair of scissors, and she and Briseis cut off Polyxena’s hair. When Polyxena suddenly begins to scream, a soldier stuffs cloth into her mouth to prevent her from cursing them. She screams around the gag. She is made to kneel in front of Achilles’s burial mount. Pyrrhus shouts “Achilles” twice and—his voice faltering—“father” once before cutting Polyxena’s throat.
The gagging of Polyxena symbolically represents traditional mythology’s disinterest in and silence about the women killed or enslaved and abused during the Trojan War. That Pyrrhus—who, like Polyxena, is 15 years old—is the one to slit her throat emphasizes that the men and women in the story were indoctrinated into misogyny, slavery, and violence at young ages, while Pyrrhus’s breaking voice when he says “father” suggests he is fruitlessly attempting to assuage his grief at Achilles’s death by taking “revenge” on a Trojan “enemy” (a bound and gagged teenage girl).
Themes
The men quickly disperse, including Agamemnon. Briseis wonders whether Polyxena’s death affected him at all. She recalls that he sacrificed his own daughter for good winds when his army first sailed for Troy. When she thinks of him as “a coward without dignity or honour or respect,” she realizes that she has the same view of him that Achilles did.
Agamemnon has his own daughter murdered the same way he had an enslaved “enemy” murdered, showing yet again that many men in the story view all girls and women, not just enslaved women, as property for men to use and dispose of as they see fit. When Briseis judges Agamemnon according to Achilles’s honor code, it reveals both that some of Achilles’s personality lives on in Briseis and that Agamemnon is reprehensible not only by modern moral standards but by his own ancient honor culture.
Themes
Briseis and Hecamede walk back to the Trojan captives’ hut together. They tell Hecuba that Polyxena died fast and with courage. Then, overcome by the smell of bodies in the hut, Briseis goes outside for air. She sees Alcimus approaching carrying a heavy shield and a small child’s dead body. He explains that Andromache begged Pyrrhus to let her baby son be buried on his father Hector’s shield—and that Pyrrhus said yes, though Hector’s shield would have been his greatest trophy from Troy. Alcimus explains that he washed the baby’s body in the river before bringing him because the Trojan women won’t have time.
Pyrrhus agrees to his new slave Andromache’s request that her murdered baby be buried—and Alcimus takes care to wash the body himself because he knows the Trojan women don’t have time. These gestures reveal that Greek boys and men can intermittently see and respond to the humanity in the people they kill, rape, and enslave—and yet, disturbingly, they continue to participate in an honor culture that thrives on loot, including the “human loot” of enslaved people.
Themes
Alcimus carries the child’s body into the Trojan women’s hut and places him at Hecuba’s feet. While Alcimus goes to dig the child’s grave, the Trojan women prepare the body. Hecuba, seeing a gash on the child’s head, keeps saying: “I can’t hide this.” After the body is prepared, Hecuba says that Hector will care for him in the afterlife. Automedon and Alcimus take the prepared body away and bury him. When they return, they march the women to various Greek ships.
When Hecuba keeps saying “I can’t hide this” in response to a wound on her dead grandson’s body, it symbolizes the horrors—such as the killing of little children—that ritual and myth cannot explain away and that remain horrific even when they are recounted in myths intended to praise the heroic deeds of male warriors.
Themes
Briseis walks back up to the burial mound. When one Greek tries to stop her, another explains that she’s married to Alcimus and is allowed to pass. Remembering the phrase “silence becomes a woman,” she rolls Polyxena’s corpse over and pulls the gag from her mouth. Then, watching the burial mound, she says her farewells to Patroclus and Achilles—the latter of whom she didn’t mourn, but who was important to her life. She remembers the women of Lyrnessus who chose to jump and Polyxena saying she’d rather die than live a slave—but then she feels her baby kick and feels glad to be alive.
When the Greek soldiers allow Briseis to pass because she is Alcimus’s wife, it makes clear that Achilles’s scheme has worked: she is “free” insofar as a woman married to an ancient Greek warrior can be free in a highly misogynistic society. When Briseis pulls the gag from Polyxena’s mouth, she is symbolically freeing to speak all the girls and women silenced in the Trojan War myths focused on male heroism—myths that ignore the suffering of female and enslaved civilians. The Silence of the Girls, then, symbolically stands in for those women’s stories.
Themes
Briseis knows that Patroclus and Achilles’s bones lie mixed together in a golden urn under the mound. She wonders whether the gods really will honor their promise to give Achilles eternal glory. She wonders, if they do, what the far future people will think of Achilles’s story. She suspects the story won’t focus on the massacres, mass enslavements, or rapes. She wonders whether they’ll turn it into a love story and “hope[s] they manage to work out who the lovers were.” Alcimus comes to lead Briseis down to the ships, and she thinks that she is leaving Achilles’s narrative and entering her own.
Briseis’s speculations about how future people will interpret Achilles’s myth is an implicit commentary on The Iliad, which does indeed focus more on male heroic exploits than it does on casually mentioned or implied enslavements and rapes (though it narrates massacres with gusto). When Briseis says she “hope[s] they manage to work out who the lovers were,” the novel may be making a joke about long-standing historical disputes on whether The Iliad’s Achilles and Patroclus were implied to have a sexual relationship. Finally, the novel’s end implies that Briseis will be allowed to live her own life now that she is no longer an accessory to Achilles’s war-hero myth.
Themes
