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

credible to the reader the resulting development of an internal transcendence of
her public, social status as a servant. Because the film decreases the focus on
Griet’s aesthetic understanding by deleting her interpretive ekphrases, it de-
emphasizes this evolving, very private consciousness and hence the ambiguous
status of Vermeer’s painted girl.
Likewise, in the novel it is Griet’s perspective, her perception, through
which readers experience not only the story, but almost all art works. In fact, in
Vermeer’s house, she is the only one apart from Maria Thins who contemplates
the artist’s works. Particularly her ekphrases portray Griet as an actively seeing
(and speaking) subject. Her personal as well as abstract-aesthetic responses to
Vermeer’s works reveal not only Griet’s identification with the inwardness and
autonomy of the women represented, but moreover, in the process she herself is
transformed into a more self-confident and independent, emancipated young
woman. Like Vermeer’s canvas, then, in granting her the power of ekphrasis, that
is, the power of both the gaze and the word, the novel represents the Girl with a
Pearl Earring as embodying perception.
The film, however, by reducing the girl’s ekphrastic agency, transforms
Griet back into seen object and more passive observer. Diminishing the double
ekphrasis of the novel (that is, the girl of the painting Girl with a Pearl Earring
reflecting on other paintings by Vermeer), the film all but erases the verbal and
visual power Griet conveys in the novel, as well as the defiance and self-
affirmation of the girl Vermeer painted. In so doing, the film exchanges the
interpretation of the painting as embodying perception in favor of one
218