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Chapter 4
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 notices that while Achilles owns many exquisite possessions, the war camp is filthy. Fifty-thousand soldiers and their slaves live in the camp, and they never burn their garbage dump, which has attracted a huge number of rats. Her sole public task is to serve wine to Achilles and his high-ranking soldiers at dinner. It shocks her to perform this task without even wearing a veil, but she realizes that she is Achilles’s war “trophy” and that he wants to show her off. Though she loathes the task, her loathing ceases to matter to her because she has been enslaved and thus feels like a “thing.”
In this scene, the veil marks the difference between high-born women and prized slaves. Aristocratic women are considered the sexual possession of a single man, so they are veiled to keep any other man from seeing them. By contrast, prized slaves like Briseis are considered sexual objects to be put on display. Though Briseis hates being displayed, she believes that her feelings don’t matter because she’s essentially a “thing”—a judgment that illustrates how Briseis consciously accepts her own dehumanization even as she seems subconsciously to resist it.
Themes
As Briseis serves, no one gropes or catcalls her—Achilles would kill them. Achilles and Patroclus always sit together. If fights break out, Patroclus jumps up, smooths things over, and returns to Achilles. Briseis notices that while Achilles speaks to Patroclus with courtesy, Patroclus is clearly Achilles’s to command. Once, though, she sees Patroclus with his hand on the back of Achilles’s neck, like a man touching his son or younger brother. Briseis notices all these things because she watches Achilles intently, being entirely under his power.
Ironically, the threat of violence from Achilles functions much like the veil did when Briseis was a free, married woman: it marks her as the sexual possession of a single man whom others must not approach. Briseis pays close attention to the power hierarchies in Achilles’s camp because, as a female slave near the bottom of those hierarchies, she needs to understand those more powerful than her in order to stay safe.
Themes
After serving at dinner, Briseis sits with Iphis, a gift from Achilles to Patroclus, until they are called. Briseis senses that Iphis feels lucky that Achilles gave her to Patroclus, because Patroclus is kind and gentle. Briseis suspects Patroclus likes Iphis because Achilles gave her to him. She mistrusts Patroclus’s kindness, not understanding his motives. Once, he finds her crying and tells her that he can get Achilles to marry her, which strikes her as an “extraordinary” claim. Briseis often walks to the sea, where she feels her brothers’ presence. Achilles swims in the sea, but they never interact. Briseis feels that he doesn’t really see her, though he asks for her “every night.” She hopes he’ll soon ignore her in favor of some newly captured girl.
When Briseis suspects that Patroclus likes Iphis because she was a gift from Achilles, she notes both how the Greek soldiers view women as tradeable tokens in relationships between men and how emotionally intense the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is. Briseis views Patroclus’s claim as “extraordinary” presumably because Patroclus is casually admitting that he has enormous influence over Achilles’s behavior (even though Achilles is his commander) to an enslaved woman.
Themes
One night, Briseis goes to the sea after dinner and tries to drown, but her body refuses to inhale the water and eventually she goes back to camp. Waiting for Achilles, she hears him playing a piece on the lyre whose end sounds like “the last few raindrops at the end of a storm.” Achilles opens Briseis’s door and summons her to bed. When he gets into bed with her, he demands, “What’s that smell?” He sniffs her, shoves his face in her hair, and begins sucking her nipples. Briseis is shocked: he’s acting like a baby. Afterward, he seems disoriented and upset. Briseis thinks he may strike her, but he just rolls away from her and feigns sleep.
Briseis’s suicide attempt underscores how dehumanizing she finds the condition of slavery, even as she comes from a slave society and once enslaved people herself. In Greek mythology, Achilles’s mother is a sea goddess; when he suckles Briseis’s breasts like a baby while she smells of sea water, it is meant to imply that she has accidentally triggered an intense memory of his mother.
Themes
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