Briseis’ Nomadic Subjectivity in Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls

Abstract

This article explores the process of nomadic subjectivity Briseis experiences in Pat Barker’s novel The Silence of the Girls through the theoretical constellation of Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts, lines of flight, striated space, and smooth space and Braidotti’s notion of nomadic subjectivity. By reconfiguring the Homeric figure historically reduced to a monolithic representation of femininity framed by silence and commodification, Barker deterritorializes the representational mechanisms of patriarchal myth, granting Briseis a narrative subjectivity that transforms her from a commodified emblem of masculine conquest into a nomadic subject engaged in continuous becoming. While existing scholarship has largely approached Briseis’ reclaimed voice through binary frameworks of agency versus silence, this study offers a Deleuzo-Guattarian and Braidottian account that reconceptualizes her subjectivity as a processual, nomadic becoming. In the novel, Briseis’ subjectivity is initially rendered inert within the hierarchical structures of patriarchal domination. Through male gaze, the war camp becomes a striated space, a closed system that erases female subjectivity, suppresses her transformative potential, and configures her as a static vessel for the performance of hegemonic masculinity. However, through relations and encounters with narration, the enslaved women, and non-human entities, she carves lines of flight that surpass the boundaries of the patriarchal codes of female subjectivity and enable her a passage from the striated spaces toward smooth spaces wherein the fixed coordinates of subjectivity are dissolved, and her subjectivity unfolds within the fluid continuum of becoming as a nomad.