Theme or Issue in The Silence of the Girls

Choosing a Theme or Issue

For the Comparative Study, the “Theme or Issue” mode asks you to pick one central idea that runs through all three of your texts and explore how each text treats it. With The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, the strongest themes to choose are: the silencing of women, the human cost of war, power and ownership, or identity and survival. Any of these will give you plenty of material.

This page focuses on what is arguably the novel’s most important theme: the silencing and erasure of women’s voices in stories told by men.

The Silencing of Women

The title itself tells you the theme. Barker’s novel retells the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of Briseis, a queen who is captured by Achilles and reduced to a slave. In Homer’s Iliad, Briseis barely speaks. She is a prize, an object fought over by men. Barker gives her a voice and uses that voice to expose what the original story left out: the experiences of the women who were captured, enslaved, and silenced.

Briseis is aware of her own silencing throughout the novel. She knows that the stories being told about the war will not include her perspective. The men around her, Achilles, Agamemnon, Patroclus, are the ones whose names will survive. The women will be forgotten, or remembered only as possessions. Barker makes this awareness central to the narrative. Briseis is not just telling her story. She is fighting against the erasure of it.

For the exam, this theme connects well to texts that deal with whose stories get told and whose get left out. If any of your other Comparative Study texts involve marginalised voices, suppressed perspectives, or characters who struggle to be heard, you have a strong basis for comparison.

How the Theme Develops

At the start of the novel, Briseis is a queen with status and a voice. After the fall of Lyrnessus, she is stripped of everything: her name (Achilles calls her by a different name), her autonomy, her identity. She becomes property. The silencing is not just metaphorical. The women in the Greek camp are literally not allowed to speak in the presence of the men who own them.

As the novel progresses, Briseis finds small ways to resist. She observes, remembers, and judges. She forms bonds with the other captive women. She refuses to internalise the story the Greeks tell about themselves: that they are heroes, that the war is glorious, that the women should be grateful. Her internal voice remains sharp and critical even when her external voice is suppressed.

By the end, Briseis has survived. She has outlasted Achilles, Patroclus, and most of the Greek heroes. Her survival is itself a form of resistance. The novel’s final sections make clear that Briseis is telling her story precisely because the official version of events will not include it. She speaks because no one else will.

The Novel’s Attitude Towards the Theme

Barker’s attitude is angry and clear-eyed. She does not romanticise the silencing. She shows it as a form of violence, as damaging as the physical brutality of war. The novel insists that the women’s experiences matter, that their suffering is real, and that a story which leaves them out is incomplete and dishonest.

At the same time, Barker avoids sentimentality. Briseis is not presented as a simple victim. She is complex, sometimes compromised, sometimes angry, sometimes numb. She survives by adapting, which means she sometimes cooperates with the system that oppresses her. This complexity makes her a more convincing and useful character for the exam.

Using This Theme in the Exam

When writing about theme or issue, always ground your analysis in specific moments from the text. For The Silence of the Girls, the strongest moments are: Briseis being handed to Achilles after the fall of Lyrnessus, the scene where Achilles calls her by a new name (erasing her identity), the women’s night-time gatherings (where they speak freely for the first time), and the final sections where Briseis claims her own narrative.

Compare how each of your three texts handles the theme. Do the silenced characters ever find a voice? Does the text itself challenge the silencing, or does it reproduce it? In Barker’s novel, the act of writing from Briseis’s perspective is itself a challenge to the tradition that silenced her. That meta-textual dimension is worth discussing.

A strong opening sentence for a comparative paragraph: “In The Silence of the Girls, Barker exposes the erasure of women’s voices from stories of war, forcing the reader to confront what the heroic tradition deliberately left out.”

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