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

thereafter at an auction of that painting at which Vermeer’s second eldest
daughter Magdalena, the model for that painting but now a married woman, is
present. Most of these chapters are told by an omniscient narrator. “Hyacinth
Blues” and “From the Personal Papers of Adriaan Kuypers,” are the only stories
told in the first person (by a female and a male protagonist respectively). In five
out of seven of the novel’s stories, the protagonist whose relationship to the
painting is the focus of the chapter, is female: the little Jewish girl Hannah in “A
Night Different From All Other Nights”, the first-person narrator in the chapter
“Hyacinth Blues,” Saskia, the farmer’s wife in “Morningshine,” the servant girl
and social outcast Aletta Pieters in “From the Personal Papers of Adriaan
Kuypers,” and Vermeer’s daughter Magdalena in the chapter “Magdalena
Looking.” Moreover, most of the protagonists are poor and from the lower social
classes. Art functions here as a means of imbuing their poor, often oppressed lives
with meaning, or illuminating their inner life. At the same time it also acts as
anchor for their identity in moments of personal or social predicaments or
interpersonal strife. In short, these stories underscore the intense personal function
of art for each of their protagonists.
Brent Shield’s film Brush with Fate not only changes the gender of the
painting’s owner from male to female, turning Cornelius into a Cornelia, but it
also makes her the narrator of all subsequent stories (deleting one of the novel’s
two stories told in the first person, “Hyacinth Blues”). Furthermore, the first
chapter is split and becomes a frame that closes at the end of the film, lending the
frame story weight at the expense of the female voices in the stories. In addition,
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