The Song Of Achilles Character Analysis

Carlie Flanagan The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is a historical fiction novel taking place c. 1200 B.C. It is set in classical Greece and Troy at the time of the Trojan War. The time period and location of the novel have a heavy influence on how male characters are portrayed versus how female characters are portrayed. The gender of the characters in the story affects their social status along with the availability of choices during the characters’ lifetimes. The female characters of the novel are portrayed as lesser than the male characters. At the beginning of the story, Miller introduces Patroclus’s mother. Patroclus’s father, a king, agreed to marry her only because “her father’s fortune would go to her husband” (Miller 1).
Besides this, she is shown as disposable. Her husband didn’t care how she looked because “if she was ugly, there were always slave girls,” for the king to sleep with instead (Miller 1). Helen, a princess, is also depicted as inferior to men. Her main feature that she is “the fairest woman in [the Greek] countries.(Miller 5). This is opposed to the men of the story, who are all praised for their strength, speed, or intelligence . To find Helen a husband, her father summons all “princes and heroes and kings [to compete] for a single prize,” the prize being Helen herself (Miller 7). Helen is seen here as an object that each men wish to win, and not truly as a human being. During the raids before the war, the women of Troy were captured and brought back to the Greek camps, “for spear wives and bed slaves” (Miller 226). These women, including a girl named Briseis, were war-prizes and nothing
Helen, who had been given to King Menelaus as a prize, was “abducted from the palace in Sparta” (Miller 112). She was taken by the prince Paris of Troy, who wished to claim Helen as his own. Helen was nothing more than a prize for Paris to win, and claim bragging rights over. The war is started when the men of Greece set out to “sail to the kingdom of Priam for her rescue” and win her back (Miller 113). Even when the Greeks discover that Helen does not wish to leave Troy, the war continues, since Menelaus’s wishes for Helen to return are more important to the Greek men than her happiness is . The gender of the characters in The Song of Achilles greatly affect the storyline of the novel. The men of the novel are strong and have strong influence in society and politics. The women have no say in society, and are often seen as disposable objects. The men often take control of the women for their own selfish reasons, and this is what causes the main problem of the story. In conclusion, the male characters and the female characters are very different, and this is what causes the plot of the novel to occur the way it