Literary Genre of The Silence of the Girls

What Genre Is This Novel?

The Silence of the Girls is historical fiction, but with a specific twist: it is feminist revisionist fiction. That means Barker takes a well-known story (the Trojan War, as told in Homer’s Iliad) and retells it from the perspective of the people who were left out of the original. In this case, those people are the captive women.

For the Comparative Study, genre matters because it shapes how the audience receives the story. The fact that Barker chooses to rewrite a famous male-centred epic from a female perspective is itself a statement. The genre is not just a container for the story. It is part of the argument the novel is making.

Historical Fiction

The novel is set during the Trojan War, roughly the 12th or 13th century BCE. Barker recreates the Greek camp outside Troy in physical detail: the huts, the cooking fires, the smell of the sea, the bodies piled after battle. She uses real (or mythological) figures, including Achilles, Agamemnon, Patroclus, and Briseis, and follows the broad outline of events from the Iliad.

But Barker is not interested in historical accuracy for its own sake. She uses the ancient setting to explore questions that are just as relevant today: who has power, whose suffering is visible, and whose stories are told. The historical distance gives her freedom to be direct about violence and oppression in a way that a contemporary setting might not allow.

Feminist Revisionist Fiction

This is the more important genre label for the exam. Feminist revisionist fiction takes a canonical story and retells it from the perspective of the women who were marginalised or silenced in the original. Barker is doing exactly this with the Iliad.

In Homer’s version, Briseis is a prize: an object fought over by Achilles and Agamemnon. She has almost no dialogue and no inner life. Barker gives her both. She makes Briseis the narrator, the thinker, the person who sees through the heroic pretensions of the men around her. This shift in perspective is the defining feature of the genre.

The revisionist approach does several things at once. It challenges the assumption that the “great” stories are the ones about powerful men. It exposes what the original epic left out: the rape, the slavery, the trauma inflicted on women. And it asks the reader to reconsider who deserves to be at the centre of a narrative. For the exam, this is a rich area to write about. You can discuss how the genre itself is a form of argument.

Narrative Techniques

First-person narration from Briseis. Most of the novel is told in Briseis’s voice. This is essential to the revisionist genre because it puts the reader inside her experience. You see Achilles not as a hero but as a man who owns her. You see the war not as a glorious campaign but as a process that destroys everything she cares about. The first-person perspective forces intimacy and prevents the reader from maintaining a comfortable distance.

Third-person sections from Achilles’s perspective. Barker occasionally shifts to Achilles’s point of view, narrated in the third person. These sections show his grief for Patroclus, his rage, and his moments of vulnerability. They prevent the novel from being a simple inversion (women good, men bad) and add psychological complexity. The contrast between Briseis’s first-person voice and Achilles’s third-person sections also reinforces the power imbalance: she speaks for herself, while he is observed from outside.

Direct, unadorned prose. Barker writes in short, clear sentences. There is no mythic grandeur in her style, no elevated language, no epic similes. This is a deliberate genre choice. By stripping the Trojan War of its poetic beauty, she forces the reader to see the events as they are: violent, ugly, and devastating. The prose style is itself a rejection of the epic tradition.

How Genre Shapes Meaning

The genre choices in this novel are inseparable from its meaning. Barker could have told a straight historical novel about the Trojan War, but she chose to make it a feminist revision because her argument requires it. The novel is saying: the story you know is incomplete. The version you were taught left out the people who suffered most. Here is what they would have said if anyone had listened.

For the exam, connect genre to general vision and viewpoint. The revisionist genre creates a pessimistic vision because it shows the reader what the heroic tradition concealed: slavery, rape, and the erasure of women’s voices. But it also contains a form of defiance, because the act of telling Briseis’s story is itself a challenge to the tradition that silenced her.

Using Genre in the Exam

Compare how each of your three texts uses or subverts genre conventions. In The Silence of the Girls, the genre itself is an act of resistance against the male-dominated literary tradition. Does genre play a similar role in your other texts? Do they follow their genre conventions faithfully, or do they bend or break them? A strong comparative point: “Barker’s choice of feminist revisionist fiction turns the genre itself into an argument, challenging the reader to question whose voices are included in the stories we consider canonical.”

Related Pages

• The Silence of the Girls Study Guide
• The Silence of the Girls Summary
• Themes in The Silence of the Girls
• Key Moments in The Silence of the Girls
• Key Quotes in The Silence of the Girls
• Ending of The Silence of the Girls Explained