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Chapter 8
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 next day, the priest’s prayers seem to have had no effect. The Greeks go to battle as usual. Briseis sees Chryseis walking as if in pain. Later, when Ritsa says she feels sorry for Chryseis, Uza retorts that a girl should be able to complete a sexual encounter before a man’s penis touches her. Ritsa protests that Chryseis is 15, and Uza replies, “I was twelve.” Briseis thinks that while many girls would be happy to have Agamemnon, the most powerful Greek king, obsessed with them, Chryseis just wants to go back to her father the priest and become a priestess. When Chryseis invites Briseis to join in her prayer, Briseis refuses, though she continues secretly praying to Apollo for plague.
Chryseis’s walk implies that Agamemnon raped her brutally. Prior to her enslavement, Uza was raped for the first time at age 12. Her cynical attitude toward the Greek soldiers suggests that she does not see her and the other women’s “owners” as fundamentally different from the men who may have frequented her in her implied past as a sex worker or from the other women’s husbands. In each case, the men have overwhelming power over the women—and so, in Uza’s view, the women must learn to manipulate men sexually to protect themselves. She judges Chryseis negatively because Chryseis does not even try to manipulate Agamemnon.
Themes
Later that day, as Briseis walks past the massive garbage dump, she feels as if she is garbage and blames herself rather than her captors for her state. Suddenly, near the dump, she sees a rat walking oddly and watches it spit blood and die. She notices many more rat corpses after that and wants to tell someone but doesn’t know what she’d say. While serving wine in Achilles’s compound that night, she overhears the Greeks complaining about Agamemnon’s bizarre behavior, turning down a massive ransom to keep some girl.
When Briseis sees herself as garbage and blames herself for that condition, it emphasizes how enslavement has harmed her psychologically, causing her to see herself as a disgusting object rather than a human being. Given that Briseis and Apollo’s priest have both prayed to Apollo, lord of plague-bearing rodents, to curse the Greeks, the sudden appearance of dying rats bodes ill for the Greek army.
Themes
Briseis notes that she has begun to understand the Greeks as “individuals.” One, Myron, is in charge of keeping Achilles’s boats in trim. Briseis “personally dislike[s]” him because he ogles her more than the other Greeks. That night, serving Myron wine, she notices he is wearing a tunic she sewed for her father just before her marriage—and prays again for plague.
The enslavement of the Trojan women is structurally dehumanizing, placing the women into the category of object/possession and the Greek men into the category of subject/owner. Despite this structure, Briseis can see the men as “individuals,” revealing that she retains her own personal judgment despite viewing herself as a passive object—and she “personally” judges that Myron is more odious than the other Greek soldiers due to the sexually harassing looks he gives her.
Themes
