Summoning the Voices of the Silenced: Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, a Feminist Retelling of Homer’s The Iliad
Summoning the Voices of the Silenced: Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, a Feminist Retelling of Homer’s The Iliad

Summary/Abstract: The Western literary tradition since its beginning has invariably foregrounded the experiences and perceptions of men suppressing the voices of women and, thus, relegated women’s voices to the margins of history. In the male-written and male-dominated accounts of the ancient world, we do not get access to women’s feelings and desires, their struggles and anguishes, and their dreams and accomplishments. Likewise, while Homer’s The Iliad recounts the incidents of the mythic Trojan War lionizing the valiant and valorous feats of larger than life heroes, women in this timeless epic are reduced to objects, primarily sex-objects, used by conquering men to appease their overriding sense of masculinity and heroism. In essence, women in The Iliad are denied the opportunity to articulate their voices on the harrowing pretext that “Silence becomes a woman” (Barker 2018, 294). The Booker Prize winning author Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls is a sincere attempt to break that tradition of silence by retelling the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of the female voice of Briseis, a war prize and a sex slave. Barker’s feminist revisionist mythological fiction allows the muted and undermined women of Homer’s The Iliad to speak out, to make choices, to act, and to assert their feelings and opinions about their own lives. Offering a textual analysis of The Silence of the Girls, this paper aims at explaining how Barker, focusing on the depiction of feminine perspective and female experience, attempts to challenge the age-old patriarchal bias which suppresses the female voice and to provide a new representation of female subjectivity that counteracts the misogynist depiction of women in literatures based on myths.

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