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Chapter 6
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
One night Patroclus invites Briseis and Iphis to join him and Achilles for wine. After that night, it becomes habit for them to drink together. If the day’s fighting goes badly, Achilles criticizes Agamemnon. After Patroclus calms him down, he plays the lyre—and Briseis feels free to look around. She notices Achilles has tan-lines on his face from his helmet. Though he’s beautiful, Briseis wonders, “How do you separate a tiger’s beauty from its ferocity?”
Once again, Patroclus treats the enslaved women (almost) like people, inviting them to socialize with him and Achilles—which, given that the men have enslaved the women, only illustrates that individual kindnesses cannot change the fundamentally dehumanizing structure of slavery. Briseis’s rhetorical question about separating “a tiger’s beauty from its ferocity” suggests that she cannot respond to Achilles aesthetically or sexually due to the extreme violence she has seen him commit.
Themes
The songs Achilles plays are all about glory in war. They often end in the hero’s death, though sometimes he goes home a victor. Briseis heard those songs as a child, though she realized in adolescence that such songs “belonged to [her] brothers,” not to any girl. When Achilles sings, the captive women often gather outside his building to listen. Later in the night, Patroclus and Iphis leave. Briseis sometimes hears them whispering to one another and wonders how Iphis can love him when he helped destroy her home. Once they’re alone, Achilles rapes Briseis without speaking while she waits for it to end. Every day she “pray[s] for [her] life to change.”
Achilles loves songs about glory in war. Here, the novel hints that myths of violent male heroism have indoctrinated Achilles and his fellow warriors into celebrating extreme danger and violence—as will myths about Achilles and his fellow warriors such as The Iliad. The Silence of the Girls, by rewriting The Iliad, subtly positions itself as a female response to these myths for boys and men, revealing the true brutality and horror of violence during wartime. Briseis’s daily prayers for her “life to change” emphasize the psychological horror of her enslavement and nightly rapes.
Themes
