Earlier this year, I
read Circe by Madeline Miller which
gives voice to one of the lesser-known women in Greek mythology. I really enjoyed it so decided to read The Silence of the Girls which is a
retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of a woman.
Briseis is the queen
of Lyrnessus, a city allied to Troy, when it is captured by the Greeks led by
Achilles. All the men of the city are
killed, but the women are taken as slaves and brought to the Greek camp outside
of Troy. Briseis is awarded to Achilles
as a prize but, in essence, she becomes his “bed-girl”. Later she becomes central to an argument
between Achilles and Agamemnon.
Winston Churchill said
that history is written by the victors and this sentiment is echoed in the
novel: “The defeated go down in history
and disappear, and their stories die with them.” The novel opens with Briseis mocking the way
Achilles is always described as a hero because he is not so regarded by her and
the other slaves: “Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike
Achilles . . . How the epithets pile up.
We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’.” Later, Briseis describes Achilles as “Blood,
shit and brains – and there he is, the son of Peleus, half beast, half god,
driving on to glory.”
History has also usually
been written from the point of view of men.
Women often are heard only as a chorus wailing in grief. One of the slave women in the novel says, “’I’m
supposed to just put up with it and say nothing, and if I do try to talk about
it, it’s: “Silence becomes a woman.”’” For women like Briseis, “Nothing mattered now
except youth, beauty and fertility.”
When Achilles insists that Agamemnon return the daughter of one of
Apollo’s priests in order to appease the god, Agamemnon demands Briseis be
given to him. Though it is her fate
being discussed, she has no voice: “Men
carve meaning into women’s faces; messages addressed to other men.” Later, Briseis is seen as the cause of the
disagreement between the two men: “I was
the girl who’d caused the quarrel. Oh,
yes, I’d caused it – in much the same
way, I suppose, as a bone is responsible for a dogfight.” Just as Briseis once removes a woman’s gag,
the author is trying to give voice to women silenced by power and history.
The book suggests that
though the death of men in war is undoubtedly tragic, the fate of surviving women
is worse. All the women of Lyrnessus
become slaves and “A slave isn’t a person who’s being treated as a thing. A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation
as in anybody else’s.” Achilles has “no
sense of [Briseis] as a person distinct from himself.” Briseis wants to be seen as “A person, not
just an object to be looked at and fought over.” There is a scene that emphasizes the
situation in which Briseis and the other women find themselves. King Priam begs Achilles for the body of his
son Hector by saying, “I do what no man
before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.” But Briseis comments, “And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my
husband and my brothers.” The fate
of another woman is outlined in equally graphic terms: “Her only child dead, and tonight she was
expected to spread her legs for her new owner, a pimply adolescent boy, the son
of the man who’d killed her husband.”
The characterization
of Achilles is interesting. Though
Briseis calls him a butcher in her first words, he is shown to be a very
complex character. There is no doubt of
his brutality, but another side of him is seen in his treatment of King Priam
and his relationship with Patroclus. He
was abandoned by his mother and it is clear he suffers still from that
childhood trauma. At times, the reader
will despise Achilles and be horrified by his actions yet at other times will
admire him and weep with him.
In an interview (https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/pat-barker-on-giving-voice-to-the-enslaved-women-of-homer-s-iliad-1.4936874),
the author stated that she intentionally inserted anachronisms into the novel
in order to encourage the reader to see that what is described in the novel is
true to the present. At the end, Briseis
wonders, “What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant
times? One thing I do know: they won’t want the brutal reality of
conquest and slavery. They won’t want to
be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and
girls. They won’t want to know we were
living in a rape camp.”
I could only think of Nadia
Murad who was one of about 3,000 Yazidi women kidnapped and sold into sex
slavery by ISIS. She and Dr. Denis
Mukwege, a Congolese surgeon who treats victims of rape, received the 2018
Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon
of war. The Norwegian Nobel Committee commented
on Murad’s bravery in refusing to remain silent.
The novel is sometimes
difficult to read because some of its descriptions are graphic, but I think it
is a must-read for everyone. It provides
a perspective other than that offered by male-dominated historical
narratives. And though it retells an
ancient story, it is as relevant as today’s news.
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