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

transmedializing one selective aspect of Vermeer’s oeuvre. The novels reproduce
the privacy and inwardness of Vermeer’s canvases through the intimate rapport
between the paintings and the protagonists in order to show these women’s
expression of personal identity through that relationship. The films, on the other
hand, underscore the subtle hints of social power and socio-cultural identity
construction in Vermeer’s paintings.
VERMEER’S WOMEN: CONSTRUCTING PRIVATE, AESTHETIC, AND SOCIO-
CULTURAL IDENTITIES
Twenty-seven out of a total of no more than thirty-five or thirty-six works
in Vermeer’s oeuvre are paintings representing women alone or in company, and
of these, seventeen (almost half of the total oeuvre) show women by themselves,
engaged in a private, often aesthetic task. Many of them are either reading or
writing a letter, activities which Wolf has linked to “bourgeois notions of privacy,
property, and inner life” (18). These paintings, then, underscore the women’s self-
enclosure and inwardness in moments of quiet, private self-reflection. Martin
Pops has aptly described these personal spaces of self-consciousness in enclosed
rooms with the metaphor of the “chamber of being.” 208
On the other hand, however, letter writing and reading are also instances
of communication with the outer world, minimal intrusions of the public into the
private sphere. 209 Moreover, as Wolf has shown, it is precisely the silences and
208 Martin Pops, Vermeer: Consciousness and the Chamber of Being (Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1984).
209 In his essay on “The Public and the Private in the Age of Vermeer” in an eponymous catalog,
Arthur K. Wheelock discusses letters in Dutch seventeenth-century art as link between the private
and the public world, which often points to the tensions between individual concerns and
196