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

epresenting class tensions. This divergent focus is also mirrored in the different
types of ekphrases of Woman with a Pearl Necklace appearing in the novel and
the film. In the novel Griet’s reflections and observations about Vermeer's art
underscore her inwardness as well as her aesthetic concerns. In the film, Van
Ruijven’s commentary on the picture places it back in the tradition of the profile
portrait, demonstrating male power and capital, and transforming the picture as
well as the woman into “objects of exchange” and “figures of spiritual value and
intangible worth” (Wolf 178). 215
However, by thus underscoring the tensions of class and gender, Webber’s
film takes up and intensifies, perhaps one could say contemporizes, crucial issues
in Vermeer’s works. For example, the film reinterprets the ambiguity of
Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring as representing, among other things,
unresolved class tensions that are also present in other works (such as Mistress
and Maid, the Love Letter, etc.). In contrast to the novel, Webber is interested in
highlighting not the complicity but the clash between classes and genders. The
film thus attempts to build up on and perhaps correct Vermeer by revealing a
possible before and after of the moments depicted in his works, thereby showing
that transcending class boundaries in a class-oriented society can only be
momentary and transient. While Webber is skeptical of the power of art as a
215 Wolf has interpreted Woman with a Pearl Necklace as an image about seeing which repudiates
the tradition of the profile portrait. It is through the bare wall behind her and the mirror into which
she gazes that the painting differs from that tradition, while foregrounding the theme of reflection
and self-reflection. Likewise, in positioning the chair at a 90-degree angle to the table, thus
affording a vantage point that the initial viewer lacks, the painting “sets the viewer at odds with
himself” and requires us to “rethink the terms of our own perception” (181). The painting thus
becomes self-reflexive and self-referential as “the woman’s self-absorption parallels that of the
work of art and our position as viewers affirms her autonomy by underscoring our separation from
her” (ibid.).
219