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

interrupted her labor of cleaning. The foreground shows a broom and two sturdy
servant shoes, and next to the maid stands a full laundry basket. Divided by their
occupation (playing music vs. cleaning), they are nevertheless joint by the
complicity and mutual understanding that the sending and receiving of love letters
requires. However, in contrast to the earlier painting, this one does not so much
foreground the complicity of gender, but more the separation of the classes. In
spite of the seeming harmony, then, the tension between the two social spheres is
strongly present.
It is in three pictures from the mid-1660s of women alone in their rooms
that class issues are superseded by what Wolf has called “meditations on the
‘aesthetic’” (168). Wolf reads Woman with a Pearl Necklace (ca. 1664), Woman
in Blue reading a Letter (ca. 1663-4) and Woman Holding a Balance (ca. 1664) as
self-reflexive, self-referential images not only of but about self-containment, self-
repose, and self-sufficiency, drawing together the notion of privacy and the
aesthetic (167-68). In these images, the subjects’ self-absorption and self-
possession functions as a parallel to painting itself.
In Woman with a Pearl Necklace, for example, the presence of the mirror
underscores the thematic of reflection and self reflection. Moreover, the mirror
transforms the Renaissance profile portrait, in the tradition of which this work
participates, into an instance of intense self-reflection, endowing the woman with
“a sense of presence and self-sufficiency that contradicts the passivity of
Renaissance profile conventions” (Wolf 180). Vermeer thus empowers his female
subject, converting the passive, observed object of the (traditionally mostly male)
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