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Chapter 3: 1666
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
When Griet catches sight of Tanneke, scarred from a cooking accident and older (though still recognizable), she nearly drops her knife. The housekeeper and former maid have managed to entirely avoid each other in their small town during the 10 years since Griet left the house at Papists’ Corner. Tanneke approaches with a message from “[her] mistress,” who wants to see Griet at the house that afternoon. Griet doesn’t have to take orders like that anymore, and she bristles at Tanneke’s tone, but she tries to remain polite. Tanneke ponders the cuts of meat laid out in the stall until Griet asks if she will buy anything. Of course, she won’t—as soon as Griet married Pieter, the Vermeer family switched to a new butcher. And they never paid their bill. Pieter sometimes jokes that he paid 15 guilders for the privilege of marrying Griet. Griet doesn’t laugh when he does.
In this flash forward, readers quickly realize that Griet married Pieter, and he does seem to have given her a life of greater independence and safety—within the confines of mutual responsibility—than she had as a maid. Griet has changed; Tanneke has not. There are also still reminders of women’s reduced roles and autonomy in a patriarchal society: Pieter jokingly treats the unpaid balance on the Vermeer account as if it were a dowery, the price he paid to retrieve her from her former masters. Still, Griet seems to harbor feelings for her past life in the Vermeer house; it’s clear that she’s kept abreast of developments there over the years.
Themes
When Tanneke notices Griet’s two sons—Little Frans and Jan (who arrives with Griet’s mother)—she gives the family a baleful look before leaving. Market gossip and an ongoing friendship with Maertge have kept Griet abreast of the Vermeer family since she left, so she knows that it includes 11 living children. Some, like the one born early on the day Catharina discovered the secret painting, died in infancy. When Pieter and Pieter the Butcher return to the stall, Griet explains that she has an errand to run and leaves the boys in her mother’s care. Her mother tries to ask questions, but Pieter doesn’t; he never has, not even about the holes Griet still had in her earlobes on their wedding night. By now, they’ve completely scarred over.
Part of Griet’s journey towards maturity involved her recognition that not all obligations are bad; mutual obligations like those between members of a family can bind people together in functional units. In this light, it’s notable that part of moving on from the exploitative abuses of power she suffered in the Vermeer household involved the birth of her own children, which connected her to new (and healthier) webs of relationship and interdependence. It’s also notable that Pieter trusts Griet without reservations and doesn’t treat her with the same possessiveness Vermeer felt.
Themes
In all the years since she left the house, Griet never went near Vermeer, although she sometimes saw him in the streets. She doesn’t know if he ever noticed her; he moved in a completely different world. At first, while she thought she might still have mattered to the painter, each glimpse physically pained her, and she had to hide her reaction from Pieter and Pieter the Butcher. Running into Catharina or Maria Thins has been easier; Catharina avoids Griet, while Maria will offer a brief acknowledgement of her existence. Maertge has remained friends with Griet, bringing her the things she left at the house and bearing family gossip, although since her marriage they see each other less frequently. Now Griet has been summoned into the house on some business that likely relates to Vermeer’s death, which she learned about two months before through market gossip.
It doesn’t seem that Vermeer changed much—if at all—after knowing Griet. He remained as aloof and self-focused as ever. And while Griet’s attentiveness to the painter’s whereabouts and subsequent life suggest that some of her wilder desires and feelings were ultimately untamable, her experiences in the house also taught her to see the painter’s flaws. Now that Vermeer is dead, Griet looks on her relationship with his family through the lens of business. Any mutual obligations that bound her to Vermeer, Maria Thins, or even Maertge, have long since dissolved.
Themes
Griet scrupulously cleans the dried blood from her fingernails before walking across town. She finds four children sitting on the bench, just like she found Maertge, Lisbeth, Cornelia, and Aleydis 12 years earlier. With a shock, she realizes that the oldest one, a boy, must be Franciscus. He sends a sister in to announce Griet’s arrival, then confides that he recognizes her from her portrait, which van Ruijven loaned to Vermeer shortly before his death. Maria Thins crosses the threshold as Franciscus makes this revelation, and she wryly adds that Vermeer’s wish to see the painting again didn’t contribute to a peaceful family environment. But no one wanted to contradict the dying artist. Maria ushers Griet inside to see Catharina in the Crucifixion Room.
Vermeer’s request for the portrait can be interpreted in several ways. It could, of course, show that he did have secret feelings for Griet that he chose to indulge shortly before his death. Given what readers have seen about his character throughout the book, however, it is far more likely that his request represented a dying wish to return to what he considers his artistic triumph one final time—that it wasn’t about seeing Griet again as much as it was about revisiting his vision of her, with all the artistic mastery and control over her person that it entailed. The fact that this upset Catharina adds a final reminder of his inability to consider the needs or desires of those around him as important.
Themes
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Griet finds Catharina, Cornelia—whom Griet now pities more than fears—and van Leeuwenhoek in the Crucifixion Room. She assumes that Catharina intends to settle the family’s account with the butcher, and for a moment hopes the payment might be made in the form of a painting. Then, she takes a good look at Catharina, who wears the threadbare and motheaten yellow mantle, her pearl necklace (but not the earrings), and a wrathful look on her face. Griet stands in awkward silence while Catharina complains about the turn in the family’s fortune.
Once, Griet feared Catharina’s wildness and envied her for being Vermeer’s wife and living a fine life full of valuable possessions. But now Griet finds herself in the enviable position. She has a respectful husband and a stable life. Chaos and chance have taken a toll on Catharina, wearing out and fading her once-fine things. A change in perspective, wrought by the passage of time, has made it possible for Griet to view Catharina and her world in a new light.
Themes
Finally, van Leeuwenhoek breaks in to explain that he’s there to see one of Vermeer’s final wishes—written in a letter to van Leeuwenhoek 10 days before his death—carried out. The painter wanted Catharina to give Griet the pearl earrings. Griet tries to refuse them, but Vermeer’s wish binds her. As Griet slips into the hallway, Catharina burns the letter in the fire. Cornelia appears in a dirty and threadbare dress. In a greedy voice, she offers to take the earrings for Griet, who reaches over and slaps her. Still, she knows she cannot keep them, so on her way home she sells them to a pawnbroker for 20 guilders. She decides to hide the extra five someplace safe, never to be spent. She will give 15 to Pieter, settling the Vermeers’ account and making herself free in the process.
Even beyond the grave, Vermeer wants to impose his artistic vision on the world, regardless of how it affects others. He deprives his wife of one of her most valuable (if hated) possessions and forces her to acknowledge that she has a lower place in his estimation than Griet. And while Griet cannot refuse the bequest any more than Catharina can refuse to honor it, she chooses to no longer subject herself to his wishes. Once, he forced her to wear them, to her detriment. Now, she does with them as she pleases. She rejects the gift and denies Vermeer any further control.
Themes
