Hector’s Corpse Symbol Analysis

In The Silence of the Girls, Hector’s corpse represents the inability of revenge to assuage grief. Prince Hector, son of King Priam of Troy, is the greatest warrior in the Trojan army. After Greek warrior Achilles allows his closest companion Patroclus to wear his armor into battle, Hector kills Patroclus thinking that he is Achilles. Achilles goes berserk with grief at Patroclus’s death. Once he has slain Hector in revenge, he ties it to the back of his chariot, drives it back to the Greek army’s camp, and leaves it uncovered in the stable yard. While the Greek soldiers are celebrating Hector’s death, Briseis—a young Trojan queen whom the Greeks have enslaved as a prisoner of war, sneaks into the yard and covers the corpse with a white sheet. Her action both models how a corpse ought to be treated—with respect, in contrast to the Greeks’ profound disrespect for Hector’s corpse—and foreshadows that Achilles’s attempts to assuage his grief by defiling Hector’s corpse will be unsuccessful.

The morning after Achilles returns Hector’s corpse, filthy and battered, to the Greek camp, the corpse has miraculously recomposed: though Hector is still dead, his body appears undamaged. Every night and sometimes in the morning, Achilles drives Hector’s corpse around Patroclus’s burial mound to defile the body. Yet the body always miraculously recomposes—while the damage Achilles has inflicted on the corpse mysteriously appears on Achilles’s own skin. The transference of the defilement from the corpse to Achilles shows that Achilles is only wounding himself psychologically and emotionally by grieving for Patroclus through revenge. It is only when Achilles agrees to return Hector to his father King Priam for burial, giving up on his obsessive attempts to revenge himself on Hector, that his grief for Patroclus becomes less acutely, agonizingly painful. Thus, symbolism of Hector’s corpse suggests that revenge cannot heal grief—and, indeed, is likely to make grief fester.