The Silence of the Girls and The Iliad

This essay will describe the relationship and conflict between Pat Barker's The Silence of The Girls and Homer's Iliad. In The Silence of the Girls (2018), the reader's attention is shifted from the male heroic narrative of the Iliad to a feminist elevation of the voices of the slave women. The choice of the emblematic title concerns the silent female characters of The Iliad, where, as Pat Barker explained, the silence of the women, as opposed to the whole epic story focused on glorious men, was unbearable to her. (Five Dials) In Homer's Iliad, the foreground is exclusively assigned to the heroes and their brave enterprises, whereas Pat Barker sheds light on the women behind the scenes. Therefore, in her retelling, women are depicted as the full-fledged heroines of the story. As the author explained: "The Silence of the Girls is a woman’s view of battle. Her labour, her courage, her bearing of pain is devalued on the battlefield because what that labour produced - and the hard work needed to bring that through to young manhood - can all be wiped out in a second on the battlefield. It is very much an assertion of women’s perspective and women’s values. (Barker, The Waterstones Interview, 29th April 2019) As a result, readers share the misery of the women, feel their humiliation and deeply empathize with their dire conditions. Indeed, since the opening lines of The Silence of the Girls, it is clear that the narration will follow a completely different thread from the original one. One of the features of the story that immediately draws our attention is the first-person narration through Briseis's eyes, as opposed to the omniscient narrator in The Iliad. Pat Barker's heroine is a Trojan queen, Mynes's wife, who helplessly witnesses both the sack of Lyrnessus and the butchery of her whole family. Her royalty renders her the perfect prize for the king of the Myrmidons: Achilles. Moreover, the narration already differs from The Iliad since the very opening scene, which concerns the sack of Lyrnessus, where women try hopelessly to hide from the Greeks. Homer's epic poem, instead, begins with the scene in which the young Chryseis, whose father was a priest of Apollo, has been captured by Agamemnon, who is adamant about not wanting to set her free. For this reason, Apollo listens to Chryses's desperate prayers and sends a plague to the Greek army. Furthermore, another distinctive feature of the original poem, omitted from Pat Barker's narration, is, as Mahvesh Murad claims in his article: (The War on Women: Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, September 13, 2018), that in her retelling, the reader immediately feels the lack of Gods, who, in the Iliad, constantly took decisions and sided with the heroes. On the one hand, Homer dedicated whole chapters to Gods and their controversies, which are an integral part of the story as well, while Pat Barker purposely confines her story to the mortal world. As Erin Hutton claimed in her book review, the blunt language itself mirrors her decision to destroy the romanticized version of war put forward by Homer. Homer remained faithful to his lyrical style even during the page-long lists of gruesome deaths of warriors on the battlefield. On the other hand, Pat Barker's language inevitably strikes for its crudity, disturbing and vulgar descriptions which disenchant the heroic atmosphere of The Iliad: [. . . ] "Barker’s language is often coarse and colloquial as if she’s trying to erase the notion that art can make war beautiful. " [. . . ] (Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic, September 24, 2018) Therefore, Pat Barker challenges Homer's poetic language, making space for too vivid descriptions of filth and coarseness, contaminating the narration. Moreover, also the perspective of heroes is seen from the other side of the coin. As the first literary hero of the Western culture, Achilles is a godlike figure, both admired and feared by his warriors and supported by Athena, Era and Poseidon. However, in Pat Barker's female retelling, his mercilessness gained him the reputation of "the butcher". (Mahvesh Murad, The War on Women: Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, September 13, 2018) Moreover, as Steve Donoghue argued in his review (The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, Open Letters Review, September 06, 2018), Pat Barker maintains Briseis at the centre of the plot. At the end of The Iliad, all the reader knows is that Briseis remains a slave, losing any chance to return to her kingdom, but nothing more. Conversely, in The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker tries to fill that void with an alternate and creative ending that gives Briseis back her former life. To conclude, Steve Donoghue described the author's final attempt by claiming that: "[. . . ] Barker’s attempt here to give voice to that silence can’t work with Homer but can’t work without him either. The result is dutiful but not moving, a marble frieze of something that’s meant to be pulsing with blood. " (Steve Donoghue, The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, Open Letters Review, September 06, 2018)