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

social propriety. Thus, Griet in the film does not demonstrate the same growth of
self-assurance and self-possession as in the novel; an absence which parallels her
lack of aesthetic growth.
Such connections between Griet’s response to art and reflections about
social status and propriety are reinforced by the film's emphasis on class structure.
The clash of classes is also the main focus of the central scene in the film, the
banquet celebration that condenses the birth of Vermeer’s eleventh child and the
presentation of the painting Woman with a Pearl Necklace to Vermeer’s patron
Van Ruijven. Significantly, these merged events are two separate and less
prominent events in the novel. Moreover, the novel has no ekphrases of the
painting by Van Ruijven when he first views his new possession, an episode in
which Griet is only fleetingly present when she brings in the wine (72). That is,
the novel underscores the absence of ekphrasis in an episode in which the female
thoughts are silenced and the female gaze thwarted (“I had not had a chance to
look at it one last time,” 73), thereby indicating the vulnerable status of female
ekphrasis.
The film, by contrast, uses the discussion around Woman with a Pearl
Necklace to foreground the social and economic dominance of Van Ruijven both
in terms of gender and class. He marks his chauvinistic superiority by his jovial
ridicule of the painting (“you have glazed my wife in dried piss”), as well as its
female subject (“it is almost as if she were thinking”). When he finally does praise
the painting (“Color and perspective is true, the illusion – is perfect”), the relief of
the others further stresses the power of his words. Likewise, he underscores
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