Reimagining ‘The Iliad’ From a Woman’s Point of View

Like Colm Toibin’s “House of Names,” or Margaret Atwood’s “The Penelopiad,” “The Silence of the Girls” by Pat Barker reframes an ancient Greek story from a perspective glossed over in an original telling.  Barker’s novel reimagines the story of the “Iliad” from behind camp lines — specifically, as seen through the eyes of the captured women of the Greeks during the final weeks of the Trojan War. 

Barker’s heroine and narrator is Briseis, a queen of a kingdom that borders Troy, who watches as Achilles slays her family, sacks her city, and takes her as his prize. Eventually, Achilles, the Greeks’ most lethal weapon, and Agamemnon, their leader, come to blows over her, though neither claims any kind of affection; Briseis is merely a symbol of their prowess and pride. Agamemnon takes her for his own, and Achilles, in retaliation, sits out of the next battles with his men. Without him, the Greeks begin to suffer. Accordingly, looks furtively cast Briseis’s way morph from uncaringly lecherous, to balefully resentful. Like Helen of Troy, about whom the men sing drunken rape songs, Briseis has become a walking symbol of the division between men that could cause, or cost, a war.

In ancient Greek myths women often serve simple functions, as mother or virgin, siren or slave; their conquest fuels fire, their sacrifice promises freedom, their forgiveness redeems sins. Barker has attempted to complicate these roles by shifting the lens of the story closer to the ground, letting us feel the precarious unpredictability of these women’s lives as they exist at the mercy of their captors. While the men fight during the day and talk strategy at night over wine, the women perform all of the labor of the camp. Some hold slightly privileged positions as the concubines of powerful men, especially when they are the mothers of their children, and especially when those children are boys; but that doesn’t stop it from being “a rape camp,” as Briseis calls it, toward the end of the novel. 

Yet while it undoubtedly was, Barker refrains from describing most instances of sexual violence in the narrative, darkly alluding to them instead, possibly intending to avoid offering a novel with gratuitous descriptions to a culture currently saturated with sexual violence. But this narrative strategy feels hollow; the story doesn’t benefit from it, nor from several statements of self-blame from Briseis, which feel antithetical to Barker’s undertaking. There are a few moments that deepen her narration: the last time Briseis is looked at like the queen she has always been, the moment she and Achilles both acknowledge that she could have escaped and chose not to, a specific moment of grotesquerie from Agamemnon on Briseis’s first night with him. Instances of cruelty to which the women are subjected flower like bruises throughout the novel, but overall, Briseis’s voice is curiously flat. 

Barker’s decision not to spend more than a few retrospective anecdotes on Helen (with whom Briseis spent time before the war) is not surprising, given how much screen time she has gotten in other tellings. These moments are some of the more haunting passages in the book. Briseis recalls accompanying her to watch battles from a tower, and being unable to fully read Helen’s face. There was pain from watching kinsmen suffer brutal deaths — but there was also a hunger, an undeniable look in her eyes saying, I caused this, that Briseis never truly feels herself.

“The Silence of the Girls” is full of clearly painstaking historical research, from the easy way the men talk to and about each other to the details about the inner lives of the women; Barker has a keen feel for imagining a certain kind of wartime, urgent intimacy. But ultimately, Barker’s echoes of these women’s voices don’t overpower the silence that has plagued them, and us, for centuries.