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Chapter 2: 1665
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Girl with a Pearl Earring, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Power of Art
Obligation, Mutual Support, and Personal Agency
Wildness and Restraint
Women’s Roles
Sight and Insight
Summary
Analysis
As the winter progresses, Griet’s mother and father notice the way Griet smells noticeably of paint, although they don’t ask her why she evidently spends so much time in the studio now. Part of her yearns to tell them that Vermeer wants to paint her. But she doesn’t, describing the concert painting instead. Vermeer must position van Ruijven with his back facing out to disguise the fact that he barely knows how to hold his lute.
Griet continues to move out of her parents’ realm of influence the longer she stays in the Vermeer household, and her growing dishonesty with them about her activities traces this shift. But she’s not on her own, either; she’s still subject to the authority and control of Vermeer—and at the mercy of men like van Ruijven. Unlike Griet, his face is hidden to protect his reputation (in this case from mockery over his lack of musical ability), unlike Griet.
Themes
Pieter doesn’t ask Griet uncomfortable questions, but he does grow impatient with her reluctance to commit. One afternoon as they kiss in the alley, he runs his hands up under her cap and into her hair. She tries to stop him, but he loosens a strand of hair to frame her face. He tells her how much he looks forward to the day when he can see all of her. Soon she will turn 18; on that day, he plans to ask for her father’s blessing for their marriage. He knows her starving parents can hardly turn down the stability he offers. But mostly, he truly loves her and wants to make her happy.
The way Griet’s cap covers her wild, untamable hair allows her to feel like she has control over her wild, untamable desires and feelings. But her tenuous ability to control the world around her depends on the cooperation of others—usually men. Pieter’s attempt to look at her hair is fairly innocent, but it reminds Griet of how easily the men around her (specifically Vermeer and van Ruijven) could turn their power against her.
Themes
Vermeer brings Griet to the studio in the afternoons. He struggles to decide how to pose her until he positions her in front of the window, looking over her shoulder at him with the light on her face. Griet tries to think of anything other than his gaze burning through her. She struggles to meet his eyes—which burn her like a fire—at first. But soon, she loses herself in thought as she sits. When he has finished, her eyes snap into focus and she notices the deeply appreciative way he looks at her. She feels a little ripple of heat pass between them.
Vermeer struggles with posing and portraying Griet because his artistic sensibility best captures unseen truths. Posing her as a lady would be a lie; posing her as a maid would be true but without capturing the true depths of Griet herself—she’s so much more than someone who simply works for Vermeer’s family. Art can change the world but only within limits; it cannot change who Griet is or how she fits into the world around her.
Themes
One day, Vermeer asks Griet to pull her cap back to expose more of her face and her ears. Tucking her hair firmly out of sight, she reluctantly complies. But she refuses when he orders her to remove the cap entirely—lowly maids aren’t supposed to show their hair to men. Eventually, Vermeer retrieves an armload of fabric from the storeroom and tells her to figure out a way to wrap her hair, since he doesn’t like the cap and she refuses to go bareheaded. Griet initially gravitates towards a plain, brown cloth. Vermeer laughs and sends her back with a piece of yellow and blue cloth, which she fashions into a passable turban.
Despite her feelings for Vermeer, Griet refuses to let him see her hair, just as she refused to let Pieter. It’s one small way that she can claim autonomy in her male-dominated world. And it’s an important way that she can retain control over herself and her wild desires. Vermeer, somewhat surprisingly, respects Griet’s principled stand and compromises with her. But the way he continues to intervene and challenge Griet’s preferences foreshadows the time when he will no longer allow her to have a choice in the way she looks in the painting.
Themes
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Vermeer forbids Griet to look at her portrait, and although she has access to the studio at night, she respects his wishes. She’s certain that he would know if she cheated. Maria Thins knows about it, and after catching Cornelia on the stairs one day, Griet suspects the child knows something too. Van Leeuwenhoek knows, and when he again stops by the studio to lend Vermeer his camera obscura, he tries to warn Griet about the precarity of her situation. Van Ruijven’s interests aren’t honorable, but neither are Vermeer’s, in whom van Ruijven’s interest has provoked a possessive interest in Griet. Van Leeuwenhoek warns Griet that the talented painter cares more about himself and his work than others’ needs.
Van Leeuwenhoek’s camera obscura allows Vermeer to see the scene from a new angle, and van Leeuwenhoek himself offers Griet a novel perspective on Vermeer, warning her directly about the painter’s possessiveness and desire for control, as well as his self-centeredness. Griet’s experience—both in the past and as recently as Vermeer’s forbidding her to look at the painting—should confirm these warnings. But van Leeuwenhoek cannot finish making them, and although she listens, Griet shows no signs of taking them to heart.
Themes
Because Catharina is six months pregnant and unwilling to struggle up the stairs when Vermeer begins the painting of Griet, no one worries that she will discover the pair in the studio or see the painting itself. But van Ruijven drops continual hints about his secret commission. When Griet overhears them, she tells Maria Thins, who stops leaving the loose-lipped patron alone with Catharina.
Van Ruijven’s hints endanger Griet and remind her of her ongoing vulnerability to the men around her—van Ruijven doesn’t care at all about her reputation or her position in the house, yet his casual hints could both ruin her reputation and cause her to lose her employment. He abuses his power because he feels no mutual responsibility for lowly maids like Griet, no matter how alluring he finds them.
Themes
Vermeer only works on Griet’s portrait a few hours each week. Griet loves these sessions, even when the unusual position of her head and eyes becomes uncomfortable. Vermeer, on the other hand, grows increasingly unhappy and unsatisfied as the portrait nears completion. Finally, one day he declares it good enough for van Ruijven, but not himself. He allows Griet to look for the first time at the canvas, from which her own face, wrapped in yellow and blue cloth, emerges. Immediately, she knows what the painting needs—a point of brightness to catch the eye. But the obvious thing, she knows, will ruin her.
Art has the power to both represent and change the world, and the portrait of Griet both represents something essential about her—her captivating beauty, her innocence, her intelligent eyes—and allows van Ruijven to indulge in the fiction of possessing and enjoying her as he sees fit. And it allows Vermeer to possess Griet in his own way by creating the version of her that he himself finds most interesting. But art can also change the world around it, as Griet will learn. When Vermeer finds himself dissatisfied with the work, she knows that he will change something in the real world to make it conform to his artistic vision, in a way that will permanently mark her.
Themes
Griet refuses to give Vermeer the answer, and it takes him longer than she expected to discover it for himself. One afternoon, as Catharina prepares to go to a birth feast, Vermeer attends her in the great hall. He asks Griet to fetch some wine for his wife, and as Griet serves it, she looks up to see him regarding her and Catharina—who is wearing the shining, light-catching pearl earrings—with his “painter’s look.”
Vermeer fixates on the pearl earring because of the way it shines the light and draws the eyes, thereby changing the viewer’s perspective and rendering them captive to his artistic vision. But the idea of using the earring also touches on gendered power. He assumes the right to take his wife’s earring and force Griet to wear it even though neither woman would willingly agree to this arrangement. And this, in turn, offers further proof of his unwillingness or inability to consider the needs or desires of others.
Themes
Griet uncharacteristically dreads going to the studio the following afternoon. But unable to avoid it, she trudges up at the appointed time. She knows what Vermeer will ask her to do and knows that she can’t refuse. Before he can ask, she begs him not to—maids don’t wear pearls. Vermeer, surprised again by her insight, ignores her plea. He insists that she knows just as well as he that the painting remains incomplete without them. Griet agrees, but she also knows that Catharina won’t allow her to stay once she discovers the painting. Vermeer refuses to be dissuaded. He will not stop working on the painting until he thinks it’s complete—regardless of what van Ruijven will think.
Griet cannot refuse Vermeer’s request for many reasons—most importantly, the power he has over her (both as a man in a patriarchal society and as the master of the house where she is employed) and the fact that she’s obliged to him for protecting her from Cornelia’s scheme with the combs. The constraints of her society limit her power and autonomy, and the fact that Vermeer cares for his art more than for the people around himself exacerbates his sense that he must have Griet wear the earrings.
Themes
Vermeer sends Griet to the storeroom to change her headwear. She removes her cap, but before she can wrap the turban, she hears a sound. Vermeer has followed her, something he’s never done before. She turns, lowering her hands and allowing her glorious hair to drop over her shoulders. Vermeer stands staring for a moment, then slips away. Having her hair revealed to a man makes Griet feels freer—like she has nothing precious left to hide, nothing left to lose. She slips from the house that evening to find Pieter at a tavern near Meat Hall. Ignoring onlookers’ whistles and jeers, she takes his hand, and leads him to a nearby alley, where she lets him have sex with her.
This moment can be read in two ways. In one, Vermeer’s vision of Griet’s hair represents an act of patriarchal dominance and leaves her fully exposed. She no longer feels that she has ownership of any part of herself, so she gives in to Pieter’s sexual desires as well. In the other, Griet realizes that Vermeer seeing her hair doesn’t change her essential being; freed from her sense that she will lose herself if she even for a moment loses her tight grip on propriety and control, she takes a more mature perspective on life that balances restraint with desire, expressed by her own desire to have sex with Pieter. In either case, this moment marks an important transition for Griet into greater ownership of her choices and her fate.
Themes
The next time Griet sits for Vermeer, he neither mentions the earrings nor tries to see her hair again. He just deliberately mixes colors with his palette knife. She suggests that he paint the pearl from his imagination, but he finds this unthinkable. She asks him to think about what will happen when Catharina sees the painting, and he replies that she won’t. And he promises to borrow Catharina’s earrings at a moment when she won’t miss them. When Griet tries her final protest—her ears aren’t pierced—he simply tells her she must take care of that herself. Finally, when he’s ready to work, he asks Griet to lick her lips and leave them parted. Horrified and surprised, she complies. But she knows that only ruined—not virtuous—women open their mouths in paintings.
The innocuous palette knife—a tool used to mix paint colors together—takes on a feeling of danger in this scene, as Vermeer refuses to relinquish his plan to make Griet wear the earrings. Early in the book, Griet realized that Vermeer doesn’t always paint things as they appear, but as he wants them to be seen. This implies that he could paint the pearl from his imagination easily. But he wants to see her in them—suggesting his desire to dominate and control Griet, to prove that he has more claim on her than van Ruijven does, to force the world around him to conform to his artistic vision.
Themes
Griet doesn’t want to pierce her own ears, but she can’t ask anyone in the house. She decides to get Frans’s help, but she arrives at the tile factory to discover that he’s run off towards Rotterdam. Left on her own, she buys numbing clove oil from the apothecary. A little vial costs her two days’ wages. When her mother notices the shortage on Sunday, Griet claims that she broke a mirror and must pay for it out of her meagre wages. Then, one night after everyone has fallen asleep, Griet numbs her left earlobe and sterilizes a needle. As she faints from the pain of piercing her earlobe, she thinks, “I have always wanted to wear pearls.”
Frans and Griet live lives on parallel tracks: both left their parents’ house to fulfill their familial obligations (he to succeed in the apprenticeship they painfully bought for him, she to support them in their poverty); they both feel wild and ungovernable sexual desires for unattainable figures (Frans for his master’s wife, Griet for Vermeer). Frans’ inability to control his own desires and his refusal to follow through on his obligations both illustrates the danger of the situation in which Griet finds herself and sharply contrasts her choice to follow through on her obligations and to make responsible choices for herself, even when it’s hard to do so. And still, a hint of her own wild, ungovernable desires remains when she thinks about how badly she wants to wear the earrings, even though she predicts the dire consequences of doing it.
Themes
Each night, Griet applies fresh clove oil to her earlobe and pushes a slightly larger needle through to enlarge the hole. It doesn’t hurt until it becomes infected. Luckily, she can hide it in her cap during the day. It’s throbbing on the day when van Ruijven catches her alone in the courtyard, pushes her up against a wall, and tries to assault her, stopping only when Cornelia appears at the door.
Griet’s infected piercing drives home the gravity of Vermeer’s expectations. He’s gone from having Griet sit for a secret portrait to asking her to mutilate her own body in painful ways just to satisfy his desire to see her wearing jewelry that belongs to his wife. The book directly connects Vermeer’s quietly violent coercion with van Ruijven’s overtly violent assault, suggesting that while their approaches may be different, the same possessive desire for Griet animates both.
Themes
On the morning of her 18th birthday, Griet cleans the studio as usual. Vermeer has completed the concert painting, and van Ruijven will soon come to collect it. She knows that the multi-subject painting costs more, but she prefers his pictures of solitary women. Afterwards, Griet allows Maertge to come with her to Meat Hall—since her sexual encounter with Pieter she’s reluctant to see him alone. But he’s not there; Pieter the Butcher winks at Griet as he tells her that his son has gone off on an important errand relating to the birthday girl. Griet attempts to brush his comments off.
Pieter promised to ask Griet’s father for permission to marry her on her birthday, and so Griet faces the milestone with grim fear. She has little control over her life, between parental expectations that she will marry and Vermeer’s coercion about the earrings; Pieter represents a form of escape, but only if she willingly submits herself to the mutual obligations of marriage. She takes Maertge with her to the market as a sort of human shield to protect her from having to answer Pieter’s proposal, although she cannot hide forever.
Themes
Later, as Griet washes laundry in the kitchen, Maria Thins appears in the doorway and summons her to the studio. Catharina has gone out—an increasingly rare event as her pregnancy progresses—and the time has come for Griet to wear the earrings. Maria presses them into Griet’s hand, and she admires their beauty for a moment, before stumbling down the hallway and up the stairs in full view of Tanneke, Aleydis, and Cornelia. She tells them that she’s going to the attic, although both Tanneke and Cornelia seem to know that she’s lying.
As if to drive home Griet’s powerlessness, the day she fears Pieter will propose happens to coincide with the day that Vermeer forces her to wear the earrings. Foreshadowing her impending exposure, everyone in the house watches her go upstairs at an unusual time and without her usual excuses. Secrecy doesn’t matter any longer; as soon as the painting is finished, she will have fulfilled Vermeer’s wishes and he won’t have a need for her anymore.
Themes
Griet changes in the storeroom and enters the studio, where she notices the painting on the wall in which a leering man sizes up a beautiful young woman whose sexual attentions he plans to buy. Vermeer hands Griet the pearls, but at that moment, Maertge calls up the stairs that she has a visitor. Griet and Vermeer step to the window and look down to see Pieter standing in the street. He glances up and sees them, then asks Griet to come down. Muttering apologies to Vermeer, Griet quickly changes back into her cap and descends to the street, where Maertge and her sisters sit on the bench to watch the drama unfold.
As she prepares to sit for her final session, Griet once again looks at the painting of the procuress, who sells sexual access to the body of a young woman to lascivious men. Like the young woman, Griet is an object to be used for others’ pleasure—Vermeer satisfies his own desire in painting her (and forcing her to wear the earrings); Maria Thins used her to make more money for the family by convincing van Ruijven to pay for two paintings; van Ruijven wants to feel like he can do what he likes with her in one way or another.
Themes
Pieter asks about the blue and yellow cloth he saw on her head at the window, and Griet tries to deflect his questions and draw him away from the front of the house with its wide-eyed audience. But he refuses to be silenced, and right there he tells her that he’s received her father’s blessing. They can get married that same day. Griet rebukes him for speaking so boldly in public and for accosting her while she’s working, then she turns on her heel and marches back into the house and back up to the studio. Pieter remains in the street for a few minutes, but by the time she’s finished changing back into the turban, he’s gone. She sits by the window facing Vermeer and realizes that she cannot discern what he’s thinking behind his suddenly steely eyes. She refuses to answer when he asks if she will leave to marry Pieter.
When Pieter speaks to Griet in the street, he represents another life, one founded in affection and bound by mutual obligation, rather than exploitation. He loves Griet openly, professing his feelings in the street in front of everyone. This contrasts sharply with the wall of secrets and lies that confines her in the house. But Griet still longs to please Vermeer, so she remains stuck in the exploitative world of the studio. Vermeer realizes that Pieter represents a rival for Griet’s affection, and he reacts in a way that strikes Griet as worry, even though she can’t truly see what he thinks.
Themes
With unexpected boldness, Griet tells Vermeer that she wants him to put the earring in for her. As he pushes the wire through, a fiery pain jolts Griet’s body and brings tears to her eyes. He gently brushes them away. Then he steps back to the easel. Griet can only think about the sensation of his hand on her face. After a moment’s pause, Vermeer insists that she put the second earring in as well, even though it won’t be visible, requiring Griet to pierce her other ear on the spot. Mercifully, this time she doesn’t faint. Then, while the laundry water grows cold and the rest of the house goes on about their business, Vermeer and Griet silently regard each other as he paints.
The novel resolves the sexual tension it’s built between Griet and Vermeer with him putting the earring through the hole in her ear, which Griet describes in an intensely erotic way. Importantly, pain tinges her pleasure, suggesting the impossibility of her wild feelings for Vermeer ever ending. And Vermeer continues to assert dominance over Griet; although he acquiesces to her request to place the earring, he then asks her to further mutilate herself at his command by piercing the other—unseen—ear as well.
Themes
Finally, Vermeer wipes his palette knife on a rag and whispers that he’s finished the painting. He dismisses Griet, who begins to weep as she removes the pearl earrings and unwinds the cloth. She waits for a moment with her head bared, hoping he will come into the storeroom again, but he doesn’t. With the painting complete, he no longer wants or needs Griet. While she changes, he silently leaves the studio. Griet crosses it quickly, without looking at the finished painting (a decision she later regrets), and goes downstairs.
Griet sent Pieter away and returned to the studio, despite her knowledge of being exploited, hoping for more affection from Vermeer. But when he fails to come to her in the moments after finishing the painting, she realizes that she’s little more than a beautiful object to him, one he wishes to possess and control, but which he does not—and will not—love.
Themes
Just moments after Maria Thins replaces the earrings in the jewelry box, Catharina arrives home. Vermeer has disappeared on Guild business. In the afternoon, Griet resumes her work on the laundry while all of the family members complete various chores. All except Cornelia, who leads her mother up the stairs to the studio. Griet realizes that she has a brief opportunity to avoid the impending unpleasantness by running away before Catharina realizes what has been happening, but she’s frozen to the spot. Maria Thins runs up to the studio after her daughter and granddaughter. Griet hears enraged shouts, and then Cornelia comes down and instructs Tanneke to send Maertge for their father. Cornelia flashes a triumphant look at Griet, who stiffly returns to the courtyard to wait for the situation to play out.
As if to drive home the point that he only cares for Griet insofar as she contributes to his artistic vision, Vermeer physically abandons her and everyone else as soon as he has finished the painting. And as before, leaving the house represents his abdication of responsibility and respect for his family, especially for Catharina. Cornelia seizes on this moment to show her mother not just the painting but to really drive home Vermeer’s character flaws—proving once again, albeit it in a cruel and twisted way, how art can show people the true nature of the world around them.
Themes
Eventually, Cornelia summons Griet and leads her up to the studio. Catharina, her eyes red from crying, rises imperiously from a chair near the cupboard with the paint brushes and palette knife. Maria Thins stands impatiently next to the portrait. Vermeer’s face is blank as he waits for one of the women to speak. Griet keeps her silence in the face of Maria’s half-hearted interrogation, but when Catharina accuses her of stealing the earrings, she defends herself, since she has done no such thing. Only then does Vermeer speak, promising that the painting will soon be gone.
Vermeer and Maria Thins bear primary responsibility for the current situation, yet neither wants to accept it. Only Griet has the presence of mind and the self-respect to stand up for herself, and as soon as she does, the others try to silence her to mitigate their own responsibility and downplay their own roles in causing the drama. Although she has the least power and the most to lose, in this moment, Griet shows her innate strength of character and self-control even in the face of chaos.
Themes
Griet could say many things, but she doesn’t. She knows the earrings aren’t the real issue, and so does Catharina, who turns towards Vermeer and demands to know why he has never painted her. He calmly answers that neither she nor their children belong in his world. Catharina, catching the implication that Griet does, grows increasingly frantic. She looks around wildly and her eyes fall on the palette knife. She snatches it up and crosses the room. But Vermeer stops her before she can plunge the knife into the portrait. Griet catches a brief, fractured glimpse of the completed painting as Catharina sinks to the ground in the throes of premature labor.
Finally, Vermeer honestly admits his real feelings to Catharina: he only cares about his art, and he values it more than his wife and children. They—and their chaos and neediness—belong to an inferior world, far below the quiet sanctuary of his studio. As if to confirm his fears, Catharina goes wild and attempts to attack the painting, but his calm and collected attitude allows him to prevent her from doing so. They reprise their roles from the very first scene, in which she represents chaos and wildness and he represents calm. But now, instead of appreciating his reserve, Griet sees how it harms others.
Themes
Catharina drops the knife, which spins across the floor, coming to rest with its blade pointing towards Griet. Griet looks up and catches Vermeer’s eyes, where she thinks she sees regret. Then she turns slowly and deliberately, descends the stairs, pushes past Tanneke in the hallway, and out into the street. There, she breaks into a desperate run, not slowing until she reaches the compass laid into the stones of Market Square. She knows she can choose to go in any of the many directions it points: to her parents’ house, to Pieter, to van Ruijven, to beg pity from van Leeuwenhoek, to Rotterdam in search of Frans, to the church, back to Papists’ Corner, or even off entirely on her own. She deliberates for a moment, then makes her choice, setting her feet along the right point of the star and walking steadily in that direction.
The knife stops spinning with its blade pointed towards Griet as if to pin the blame for this situation on her. But the conflict existed before Griet came into the house—Catharina and Vermeer are caught in just one expression of an ongoing dynamic. All Griet has done is simply illuminate this dynamic, like Vermeer’s light-filled artwork helps viewers see the city of Delft (or common private moments) anew. Her role in the house fulfilled, she can now calmly leave. And, having achieved the most intimacy she can expect with Vermeer and still found him unable to treat her as a human being, she finds the courage to choose her own path in life.
Themes
