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

films revert to the traditional male gaze and voice and a more socio-political role
of art. In comparing the changes of the film adaptations of Tracy Chevalier’s Girl
with a Pearl Earring and Susan Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue with regard to
degree and kind as well as point of view of the ekphrastic scenes, I show how the
films underscore the socio-political implications of art and use ekphrasis to
demonstrate male power, while the novels use it as space of female self-
realization.
In the concluding chapter seven I attempt to draw some inferences from
the preceding chapters and discuss whether film does in fact appropriate the
image by giving it a voice as well as a living body in representing it as a tableau,
for example, or whether it allows the image to signify on its own by representing
it visually. What are the different implications of purely verbal as opposed to
mostly visual ekphrasis? And how do the four different ekphrastic categories
(attributive, depictive, interpretive, and dramatic) affect the interpretation of the
work of art? In so far as ekphrasis can be said to be a self-reflective genre, to what
degree are the four categories self-referential, and what role does the paragone
play in visual, filmic ekphrasis?
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