Silence of the girls, by Pat Barker, is a book about Briseis and her not so glorious life as a slave of Achilles. She is described as a “significant character in the Iliad”, and though there are many interpretations of her life, Silence of the Girls does a beautiful job of making her into a real person, a character with thoughts and talents and pains, much more than just the treasured war prize of Achilles.
Briseis was born and raised in Troy; the daughter of Briseus and a princess of Lyrnessus, coincidentally one of the towns that Achilles looted and massacred for Greece during the Trojan war. Briseis, like many others, witnessed her brothers, father, uncles, cousins, and friends being slaughtered by Achilles. She was captured by the Trojans, and as was the fate of women who were captured in war, she was given to Achilles as a war prize for his “bravery and courage” in the battle. The book gives a perspective of the silenced voice of women in the war; not glorifying the battles and the warriors, it gives a raw and touching story in the eyes of the quiet, forgotten sufferers.
Briseis is Achilles’s bed girl, she spends years being summoned and we see the pain that she endures being a slave and servant to the men that killed her family. She begins to help the other women in the camp and learn the stories they tell about the men that own them. She helps them through her pain, often sacrificing her comfort for that of others. Later in the war, she finds herself helping the injured and learns and experiments with herbs and droughts. For some time, she finds solace in the medicine. Her story voices thousands of lost stories and women who endured the same tragedies as her. It is a feminist retelling of the man-led wars and horrors that were seen in the Trojan War.
Unlike Circe, Briseis doesn’t have special powers or a spellbinding journey, nor does she have a gripping storyline of character development. However, Silence of the Girls is yet another commonly known tale that has been spun to interpret the female characters as more than just objects but people who led their own lives. We need more books like this; that acknowledge more than just the male told narratives in history and mythology, but the portrayals of the silenced and forgotten women. Click here to buy Silence of the Girls on Amazon.