Women in War: Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls Silence Becomes NOT a Woman

Abstract

This essay offers an analytical approach to the reading of Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls in terms of the author’s giving voice to women silenced in general in Homer’s Iliad. The effect is for creating Briseis as a first-person narrator and thus for her to lead the novel and voice her story in words. Briseis, from her point of view, delivers her life as a queen of Lyrnessus and soon as a war prize after her city falls. Dehumanisation about Briseis’s life as a war enslaved person, war prize, and a bed-girl of Achilles is told. The narrative form established in the novel allows Briseis to see what it is like for a defeated slave woman destined to serve the victor as a thing and conveys and interprets how the Trojan war goes on as a storyteller. This essay argues that it is significant to read the novel in such a view that she is entitled as an author of the story and the story is hers. That is how Briseis places herself in the manly world, even after Achilles is gone. She will outlast Achilles, and her son, who will survive Briseis, will remember her. One might wonder if Briseis is out of Achilles’s story in the end. This is contentious, but what is less controversial is that she wants that. The story is designed to suit the needs of her being out of Achilles’s story.