Veils Symbol Analysis

In The Silence of the Girls, veils symbolize how even high-status women are considered the possessions of men in the misogynistic societies of ancient Greece and Troy. The novel first mentions the heavy veils that high-status women wear when Briseis recalls how, when she was 14 years old, her father gave her in marriage to King Mynes of Lyrnessus. She wore heavy veils as servants carried her on a litter to his palace but was stripped of her veils when she stood before him, signaling that other men ought not look at her as she is Mynes’s exclusive sexual possession. When Greek soldiers later capture and enslave Briseis, they display her in public without veils, which represents how she has lost her high social position—and status as one man’s property—and will now belong to whichever Greek warrior claims her.

Though Briseis loathes her enslavement—including her sexual enslavement to the Greek warrior Achilles—she comes to see her lack of veils, which in peacetime Lyrnessus would have marked her as a sex worker, as a kind of freedom. When other enslaved women keep up a routine of wearing veils and walking outside only with chaperones, she scorns their self-limiting behavior as unsuited to their lower, more perilous (yet also less surveilled) social position—Briseis prefers to take solitary walks bareheaded, as she would not have been allowed to do while queen of Lyrnessus.

Finally, after Greek high commander Agamemnon takes Briseis from Achilles, rapes her, and eventually offers her back, Briseis is brought to Achilles covered in veils to support the fiction that Agamemnon never sexually assaulted her. The scene in which Agamemnon sends Briseis to Achilles oddly echoes the flashback in which Briseis’s father first sends her to her husband Mynes, which implies that even before Briseis’s enslavement, she was considered the possession first of her father and then of her husband. Thus, the novel suggests that in the severely misogynistic cultures of ancient Greece and Troy, society treats even nominally free and high-status women as possessions to be traded between men.