Scripta 9_2_link_final.pdf - Uniandrade

task attracts the painter’s attention. The painter and his wife, Catharina, need
a maid to clean the master’s studio. Griet needs a job because her father, a
tile artisan, has just lost his sight in a work accident and cannot support his
family anymore. The Vermeers are there to settle the final details of her
hiring. After Griet starts working in their house, Vermeer slowly draws her
into the world of his paintings: the still, luminous images of solitary women
in domestic settings. A bond between maid and master is formed as she
becomes responsible for cleaning his studio – a place so private that not
even his wife is allowed to enter. On the verge of womanhood, Griet also
contends with the attentions both from the butcher’s son, Pieter, and from
Vermeer’s patron, van Ruijven. She has to find her way through this new
and strange life outside the loving Protestant family she grew up in, now
fragmented by accident and death, as her father becomes blind as mentioned
above, her sister dies of the plague and her brother moves to another town
to find work.
The growing intimacy between master and maid creates disruption
and jealousy. At first, Griet describes the artworks to her father, who has
always been a great admirer of the master’s work, when visiting her family
over the weekends. Griet leaves her maid status behind when elevated to
master’s assistant by helping him with the preparation of the colors by
mixing pigments and they start discussing his art pieces as he finishes a
painting and starts a new one. Van Ruijven gets interested in Griet since the
very first time he sees her. He is determined to have the wide-eyed maid, as
he likes to call her. Besides van Ruijven, no one else agrees with Griet’s
modeling, because of rumors involving the maid who last did so for the
painting The Girl with a Wine Glass and became pregnant even before the
painting was finished. Van Ruijven’s obsession leads to the climax of the
story when Griet becomes Vermeer’s muse, culminating in her sitting for
the portrait Girl with a Pearl Earring. The novel can be considered a
Künstlerroman because the core of its narrative is built on Vermeer’s real life
and the story of the mysterious girl he painted. The literary work is enriched
by borrowing elements from painting shown by ekphrastic descriptions
through Griet’s reading of Vermeer’s work.
Chevalier makes vast use of descriptions of Vermeer’s paintings in
the narrative of the novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, which is named after the
portrait. Griet, the female protagonist, lays out the core of the story through
a series of descriptions. This ancient descriptive device, which became
rather popular during the Romantic Movement in the nineteenth century, is
Scripta Uniandrade, v. 9, n. 2, jul.-dez. 2011 13