Chapter 6 Vermeer's Women in Film and Fiction: Ekphrasis And

Chapter 6 Vermeer’s Women in Film and Fiction: Ekphrasis and Gendered Structures of Vision Introduction Both the United States and Europe have witnessed a literal Vermeer craze in recent film and fiction. To mention some of the most notable, Jon Jost’s film All the Vermeers in New York (1991), the novels by John Bayley, Girl in the Red Hat (1998), Susan Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999), Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999), Catherine Weber’s The Music Lesson (2002), and Luigi Guarnieri’s La doppia vita di Vermeer (2004), as well as the poetry collections by Marylin Chandler McEntrye, In Quiet Life (2000) and Carlos Pujol’s La pared amarilla (2002), all deal with Vermeer paintings. Perhaps one of the reasons why this seventeenth-century Dutch artist fascinates so many people is because so little is known about his life and so few of his works exist, leaving ample room for fictional speculation.1 Moreover, Vermeer often depicts his subjects – mostly women – in a moment of quietness or intimacy, so that the viewer is at once drawn in and kept out of their privacy. Critics have often remarked upon the silence and mystery surrounding Vermeer’s canvases. Yet, these silences, as Brian J. Wolf has proposed, can be seen as an expression of the socio-cultural identity of the Dutch upper bourgeoisie, who “turned to privacy and inwardness as signs of leisure that distinguished it from other social groups.”2 Vermeer’s paintings, 1 According to John Nash, “of the twenty-nine works documented in Vermeer’s lifetime, twenty-two appear to survive today, seven seem to be lost. Eight further, undocumented works are today universally accepted as genuine. […] Currently there is consensus among Vermeer scholars on not more than thirty-one works. Of these, seven have chequered histories.” See John Nash, Vermeer (London: Scala Books; Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1991), p. 26. Other scholars set the number at thirty-five or thirty-six works. The two paintings whose authenticity is the most disputed are Girl with a Flute and Girl with a Red Hat. 2 Brian J. Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 158. then, represent a vision of that social class “whose rich inner life was expressed through metaphors of silence.”3 However, for Wolf, Vermeer’s portraits of women alone in a room lead away from the issue of class and “point us instead to the notion of art itself.”4 Vermeer’s women are “a world apart, inviolate, self-contained, […] self- possessed,”5 thus representing a parallel to Vermeer’s view of art. Moreover, many of his women depicted by themselves in a room are occupied in aesthetic or artistic tasks: writing or reading a letter (e.g. Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window, ca. 1657; A Lady Writing, ca. 1665), making music (e.g. Woman Tuning a Lute, ca. 1664; Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, ca. 1672-73; Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, ca. 1675), or embroidering (The Lacemaker, ca. 1669-70). Perhaps this connection of feminine privacy and autonomy with the aesthetic may be one reason why so many female writers are drawn to Vermeer’s works. Woman writers such as Tracy Chevalier and Susan Vreeland have used Vermeer’s paintings in their novels to depict processes of female self-realization and self-sufficiency. Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring invents the story of the girl in that famous painting of ca. 1665-66.6 That is, her novel gives voice to this silent, mysterious girl and lets her tell the story of her life as a maid in the Vermeer household, where eventually she becomes the model for that painting. The novel, told in the first person, centers on the servant girl Griet’s private thoughts and domestic troubles, and moments of descriptive and interpretive ekphrasis in the novel generally occur in intimate, private moments. Susan Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue deals with an imagined Vermeer.7 A math teacher claims to own an unknown Vermeer, and in order to substantiate his claim for its authenticity, the novel traces the painting from the present day to its conception in the 1670s in seven separate stories connected only by the painting. As a whole, the novel focuses on the history and pedigree of the painting (and the girl in the painting) vis-à-vis its role in the life of its predominantly female owners. Both these novels have been filmed recently (2003), and both films have made significant changes to the story, which shift the emphasis to a socio- political dimension that is subtler in the novels. Moreover, in both films ekphrasis becomes a tool to demonstrate male power rather than female self- 3 Wolf, p. 158. 4 Ibid. p. 168. 5 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 224. 6 Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring (London and New York: Penguin, 1999). 7 Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue (Denver: MacMurray & Beck, 1999). 184 .

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