Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

“turned to privacy and inwardness as signs of leisure that distinguished it from
other social groups.” 201 Vermeer’s paintings, then, represent a vision of that social
class “whose rich inner life was expressed through metaphors of silence” (ibid).
However, for Wolf, Vermeer’s portraits of women alone in a room lead
away from the issue of class and “point us instead to the notion of art itself”
(168). Vermeer’s women are “a world apart, inviolate, self-contained, […] self-
possessed,” 202 thus representing a parallel to Vermeer’s view of art. Moreover,
many of his women depicted by themselves in a room are occupied in aesthetic or
artistic tasks: writing or reading a letter (e.g. Young Woman Reading a Letter at
an Open Window, ca. 1657; A Lady Writing, ca. 1665), making music (e.g.
Woman Tuning a Lute, ca. 1664; Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, ca. 1672-
73; Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, ca. 1675), or embroidering (The
Lacemaker, ca. 1669-70). Perhaps this connection of feminine privacy and
autonomy with the aesthetic may be one reason why so many female writers are
drawn to Vermeer’s works. Woman writers such as Tracy Chevalier and Susan
Vreeland have used Vermeer’s paintings in their novels to depict processes of
female self-realization and self-sufficiency.
Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring invents the story of the girl in
that famous painting of ca. 1665-66. 203 That is, her novel gives voice to this silent,
mysterious girl and lets her tell the story of her life as a maid in the Vermeer
201 Brian J. Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing (Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 2001) 158.
202 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1983) 224.
203 Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring (London and New York: Penguin, 1999).
193