The Silence of the Girls

by

Pat Barker

The Silence of the Girls: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
After that night, Achilles begins raping Briseis with “passion.” He grabs onto her like he’s afraid she’ll vanish. Briseis slowly begins walking more outside. She notices that while some captives are unresponsive due to trauma, others have better lives—like, for instance, a former kitchen slave from Lyrnessus who has become a high-ranking lord’s favorite. Among the slaves, hierarchies are determined by age, beauty, and perceived “fertility.”
Achilles’s “passion” toward Briseis again implies that she has accidentally reminded him of his sea-goddess mother. Briseis’s realization that some women who were slaves in Lyrnessus have better lives in the Greek camp emphasizes that when she was a free woman, she was complicit in perpetuating the slave system that now oppresses her. The description of hierarchies among the slaves, meanwhile, makes clear that they are all women and that the Greek soldiers value them almost solely for their sexuality: their youth, attractiveness, and ability to bear children.
Themes
The Effects of Misogyny  Theme Icon
Slavery and Dehumanization Theme Icon
Briseis notices two female slaves, possibly sisters, who weave all day and go outside for one walk a day in heavy veils, feigning the attire of women with status. Briseis thinks these women are insane. She has started walking around the camp unveiled, looking at the far-off ruins of Lyrnessus, the battlefield, and the walls of Troy, on whose parapet she sees King Priam and Helen. The battlefield is a muddy wasteland after nine years of war, and it makes Briseis sad to look at Troy, where she spent pleasant times in her childhood.
The two enslaved women who walk only together and only in veils are attempting to preserve an appearance of aristocratic respectability: implicitly, aristocratic women only go outside chaperoned and in veils. Briseis thinks this behavior is insane because the women are now enslaved and aren’t part of the nobility—but perhaps also because they are ignoring the few ways in which slavery affords them more freedom than aristocratic womanhood did: they can now walk around alone and unveiled if they want to, and Briseis apparently wants to.
Themes
The Effects of Misogyny  Theme Icon
Slavery and Dehumanization Theme Icon
Briseis also meets with the other women given as trophies. Uza belongs to Odysseus, who talks about how much he misses his wife Penelope after sex. When Uza says that all men end up talking about their wives, Briseis thinks she can guess what Uza’s “profession” used to be. Ritsa belongs to the Greek doctor, Machaon, because she has experience healing. The Greek high commander, Agamemnon, chose 15-year-old Chryseis, a quiet girl from Tenedos who wanted to be a priestess of Apollo like her priest father. Agamemnon is obsessed with her. When Chryseis isn’t present, Uza wonders aloud why she isn’t pregnant already. Ritsa replies that Agamemnon “prefers the back door.” The other women know that Ritsa has goose fat for women treated roughly.
Briseis’s comment about Uza’s “profession” implies that Uza was a sex worker before the Greek soldiers captured her. Ritsa’s comment about “the back door,” meanwhile, implies that Agamemnon has been raping Chryseis anally. Ritsa, who works in the medical tent, has reserved goose fat either as lubricant or as salve for violently raped enslaved women—suggesting that physical damage from rape is common in the camp and, in turn, underscoring the brutality of life as an enslaved woman. 
Themes
The Effects of Misogyny  Theme Icon
Slavery and Dehumanization Theme Icon
Uza begins telling a story of a former favorite of Agamemnon’s, whom he later gave to the men. Briseis asks whether such things happen, and Uza says sometimes. Ritsa says that if Chryseis bears a son, she’ll be fine. Briseis points out that Chryseis won’t get pregnant if Agamemnon “prefers the back door,” and the women laugh—laughter that Briseis, looking back on it, will later find incredible.
Though Briseis’s life as Achilles’s personal slave is brutal and dehumanizing, her horrified question to Uza implies that being given to the soldiers would be even worse. The women’s laughter at the joke about Agamemnon’s anal rape of Chryseis suggests that they view themselves and each other in callous, dehumanizing ways as a defense mechanism against the psychological horror of their everyday existence.
Themes
The Effects of Misogyny  Theme Icon
Slavery and Dehumanization Theme Icon
Get the entire The Silence of the Girls LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Silence of the Girls PDF
Tecmessa, Ajax’s trophy, has lived in the camp for four years and has birthed a son. Briseis dislikes her: she claims to love Ajax, though he killed her father and brothers and raped her all on the same day. Tecmessa advises Briseis, telling her that Achilles only has one son, Pyrrhus, whose mother he didn’t marry. Briseis knows that Tecmessa thinks she should fill the “vacancy” in Achilles’s life, but she sees how relentlessly Tecmessa eats and wonders whether Tecmessa really likes her life with Ajax.
Along with Patroclus’s comment that he can get Achilles to marry Briseis, Tecmessa’s advice to Briseis implies that the women enslaved by the Greeks can improve their status and perhaps become free women again by marrying their captors. Yet Briseis views Tecmessa’s compulsive eating as a sign that a woman couldn’t truly live happily with a man who had raped and enslaved her.
Themes
The Effects of Misogyny  Theme Icon
Slavery and Dehumanization Theme Icon
One day, Tecmessa comes to a trophy meeting with finger-shaped bruises on her throat. Uza asks, “Trouble in Paradise?” Tecmessa explains that Ajax has nightmares in which he mistakes her for a Trojan. When Briseis points out that Tecmessa is Trojan, Tecmessa replies, “No, I mean a fighter.” As Tecmessa and Briseis walk back from the meeting together, Tecmessa tells Briseis that Ajax can’t help it and asks whether Achilles has nightmares. When Briseis says no, Tecmessa predicts he will: he’ll wake up one night thinking Briseis is his enemy. Briseis says that he’d be correct, but Tecmessa tells her she won’t talk that way once she’s pregnant.
Ajax seems to have symptoms of what modern readers would call post-traumatic stress disorder, presumably caused by his service in the Trojan War. His nightmares suggest that the Trojan War harms not only the men killed and the women enslaved but also high-status surviving warriors like Ajax, albeit to a lesser degree. Tecmessa’s kneejerk identification with the father of her baby against her original people, the Trojans, suggests that cultural identity is complicated for women in misogynistic societies: they may feel that they belong to their original culture, but they may also come to see themselves as parts of the culture to whom their husband or “owner” belongs, especially if they have children with him.
Themes
The Effects of Misogyny  Theme Icon
Honor and Violence Theme Icon
Slavery and Dehumanization Theme Icon
Quotes
Briseis did not become pregnant during her five-year marriage, so she has been assuming Achilles won’t impregnate her—and she still washes him away in the sea, though Ritsa would think it foolish if she knew. She is still attached to her past life because she was a human being then and does not want to relinquish those memories. When she parts ways with Tecmessa, she passes a fire surrounded by common slaves. She used to think she would never become like them; now she wonders whether Achilles, like Agamemnon, has ever given one of his former trophies to his men “for common use.”
Briseis’s father gave her in marriage to King Mynes when she was 14; if her marriage lasted five years, then she was only 19 during the sack of Lyrnessus. Again, Briseis’s youth emphasizes the brutality of her enslavement and rape. Meanwhile, her thought that she was a human being in her past life implies that she no longer sees herself as a human being now that she is a slave—another sign that she intellectually accepts her dehumanization, even if she seems to resist it subconsciously.
Themes
The Effects of Misogyny  Theme Icon
Slavery and Dehumanization Theme Icon