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Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
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
When Briseis returns to the citadel, Ritsa asks how Maire is. Briseis says Maire won’t live long, and Ritsa says that that may be for the best. When the women hear the gates break, Briseis rushes to the citadel roof and sees Greek soldiers entering Lyrnessus. Achilles fights his way to King Mynes and his followers on the palace steps. He spears Briseis’s youngest brother, age 14, and puts his foot on the boy’s neck to pull the spear out. As he does, it seems to Briseis that he looks up at her on the citadel roof—though she thinks the sun must blind him to her. Later, Achilles kills Mynes. Briseis’s three other brothers are killed as well. Eventually, all the Lyrnessus men are slaughtered.
Boys as young as Briseis’s 14-year-old brother fight to defend Lyrnessus, which reveals that in the patriarchal warrior cultures of ancient Greece and Troy, boys are exposed to violent death from adolescence. As such, their privilege relative to oppressed women and girls comes at the cost of possible horrific early deaths in battle.
Active
Themes
Briseis watches the Greeks loot Lyrnessus. Then they herd the female slaves from the citadel basement and start raping them. Briseis’s cousin Arianna grabs her by the arm and says to come with her. When the Greeks burst onto the roof, Arianna jumps to her death. The Greeks look surprised and uneasy. An elderly soldier, who says he is King Nestor of Pylos, bows to Briseis. She thinks that this is the last time anyone will treat her as a queen. When Nestor tells Briseis that they will not harm her, she recalls the boys who have been taken away and killed and thinks to herself that she will hate Nestor until she dies.
Nestor promises Briseis that the Greek soldiers won’t harm her—yet everyone knows that the Greek soldiers are going to enslave and likely rape the women of Lyrnessus. Nestor’s promise suggests that he assumes a woman being owned and sexually used against her will doesn’t constitute “harm.” This assumption in turn betrays how normal sexual ownership of women by men seems to Greek and Trojan men in the world of this novel.
Active
Themes
The Greek soldiers take the women to the beach and load them onto their warships. Briseis, looking back at Lyrnessus, sees it on fire and hopes Maire managed to die by suicide rather than burn to death. She hopes, too, that the fire burns the men of Lyrnessus rather than the dogs and birds eating their corpses. After a short sea voyage during which many captives vomit, the ships pull up onto a beach crowded with many more warships. The soldiers lead the captive women to a row of huts, where two men poke and prod the women. Briseis understands that she and the others are “being assessed for distribution.”
Active
Themes
The soldiers put Briseis and several other women into a single hut; the rest, including Ritsa, are taken away. Once her eyes adjust to the dark hut, Briseis realizes that her group consists solely of young, attractive women. The next morning, the two men who examined the women bring them fresh clothes, which the women change into. Then they are led from the hut. Briseis, who has not left her house without a veil and a chaperone since age 14, stares at her feet and hears Greeks yelling sexual and sometimes violent things about her. King Nestor approaches Briseis and advises her to put her old life behind her. Told to forget, Briseis resolves to remember.
Active
Themes
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The Greeks begin shouting Achilles’s name. Briseis covers her ears and imagines Lyrnessus as it was before the Greeks sacked it. Achilles’s name, shouted again, reminds her of Achilles spearing her brother and then looking at her—but she pushes the memory away, recalling peaceful Lyrnessus again. Then a hand grabs her face and turns her head about. The sun blinds her, so she only sees the man once he’s walking away from her: Achilles, who puts his hand up for silence and says: “Cheers, lads […] She’ll do.” All the Greek soldiers laugh.
