SILENCING AND RECLAIMING FEMALE VOICES IN WAR NARRATIVES: FROM HOMERIC EPIC TO PAT BARKER’S THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS

Abstract

In this research, it is necessary to analysethe silencing and subsequent reclamation of female voice in the narration of a war. The conversation will range from Homeric epic to Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls (2018), the latter of which is the latest entry in the genre. The paper is based on the primary research of the supplied PhD thesis, and traces Briseis' evolution from a peripheral character in The Iliad to the consciousness of a female storyteller in Barker's feminist reworking. The analysis finds that Barker does not give the woman morespeech than the man, rather he redistributes the narrative power. Briseis seems to be a part of Homeric narrative of any of the quarrels, but part of the Homeric narrative of the Achilles' quarrel with Agamemnon in particular. Male is an economy of her body which is war. Her body is a male economic object of war's valuation, honor and possession. The narrator, witness, survivor, interpreter, and in the end, claimant of her own story is the same woman who is Barker. The five aspects explored in this transformation are: the classicisation of the narrative, the female witness, the female body as a battlefield, the minimisationof agency and survival, and feminist reception of the classical tradition. She comes from a sort of authoritative power that is rooted in observation, in memory, in judgment, in community and in storytelling. The paper concludes that feminist rewriting can be understood as a process of reclaiming the narrative which does not change, delete or replace the classical text, but rather reads it, reads its silences and thus makes the voices of those who are silenced the voice of the classical text. This discovery serves as confirmation of the recent feminist receptionist scholarship which has given voice and agency to Briseis, and with which she challenges Homeric divisions of gender.