On the Margin of the Web: The Story of Briseis - Acta Universitatis Sapientiae

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 16, 1 (2024) 100–115

DOI: 10.47745/ausp-2024-0007

Abstract. Pat Barker’s novels Silence of the Girls and Women of Troy are part of some female authors’ successful approach, which emerged after the 1980s, to rewrite Homer’s fundamental texts from the perspective of the female character. Without changing the fate of the Homeric heroes, the author proposes a reassessment of the relationships between the characters by adopting an internal point of view of Briseis, the queen who became Achilles’s slave. Constantly contrasted to the glorious androcentrism in Homer’s epic, Pat Barker’s texts aim at shifting women’s place from the margins to the centre, from the insignificant status of a slave to that of a generator of powerful conflicts in the dominant world of men. Exposed and humiliated, Briseis understands that the major danger is not death but the loss of identity, the brutal reduction of a woman to a mere object. Thus, a different perspective on the events in Homer’s Iliad emerges, a different angle, able to question the central, seemingly indestructible status of the male collective.

The present study aims at discovering how, after the protagonist’s encounter with the strong, powerful characters of the epic, their hidden aspects are brought to surface and a fine weave of correspondences that the author creates between periphery and centre, the dominator and the dominated, the vanquished and the victor, meaning and nonsense is highlighted.

Keywords: female character, androcentrism, marginality, centre, correspondences.