67 pages • 2 hours read
Susan VreelandGirl In Hyacinth Blue
Fiction | Novel | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
The Different Facets of Love
In every one of the eight stories that link this narrative into a novel, the theme of love serves as the foundational refrain, repeating throughout. Even in the story of Cornelius, the battle to find love in friendship or to navigate the torturous love he feels for his father, the author brings love to the fore. Through each character, the author intentionally provides an array of love experiences. When taken altogether, the overarching point is that love, in whatever form it takes, is unpredictable. In this way, love is both a theme and a character.
The author uses the painting as the springboard for each of the characters to explore their relationship with love. There are many forms of love, including familial love, romantic love, and love for self. The preponderance of tragic and unrequited love demonstrates that this theme does not always produce a happy ending. In all these various plot configurations, the novel demonstrates how ubiquitous love is, but also how clever and frightening it can be.
Readers are shown, via the range of stories throughout the novel, that love is many things: It is mysterious, obvious, and tortured. It is permanent or transitory. Love is often ineffable. In this novel, the characters struggle with their love for other humans, their love for place, and their love for art. Laurens, for example, realizes as he remembers his first love, that “…love builds itself unconsciously […] out of the momentous ordinary” (80). This is an echo of how Vermeer sees his art as capturing the moments of ordinary life.
In each story, the painting itself provokes a dramatic change or acceptance that each character experiences by the end of their individual narrative. It is ironic that the springboard for love—the painting—is itself indefinable and personal to each character. No one knows, really, if it’s a Vermeer masterpiece, but each character knows that whatever power the painting has to imbue their own life with an understanding of love, it is indestructible. Above all, the love for art is the one that endures and lasts eternally.
The Power of Art
If love is the overriding theme for each story, then the power of art to transform love is the foundation of the novel, and the link that brings each story together. Art is so powerful that it is capable of causing a person to covet and nearly to destroy it. More often, art is a source of transformation or something that inspires a course of action.
Related to the power of art is the idea that art never dies. It is personal insofar as every beholder has their own idea about its meaning, influence, or authority. It is a source of pride, often before the fall, and an inspiration to seek one’s own personal power as demonstrated by the story of Hannah, who understands her strength as she destroys the pigeons. Art as a theme reveals the unfair social dynamics of a male-dominated culture, as Magdalena experiences. Adriaan falls in love with the socially “wrong” person, Claudine eschews arranged marriage, and it is usually the painting that brings the character to their own understanding. In this way, art also reflects the dynamics of culture.
Finally, thematically, art is the basis for emotion and for putting voice to life. As Vermeer himself says, painting is the way to know what is not understood. “Painting,” he thinks, “was the only way even to attempt to know” (221). Here, he is speaking of the act of painting, but as seen in other stories, the painting itself is a way to teach one about oneself and to understand the world in an intimate way. The painting in this novel is the one thing that becomes the lasting teacher.
Discovering the Meaning of Life in Its Moments
The painting itself is the pillar upon which each chapter/story builds. Each character who possesses the painting brings something to the canvas that asks the big questions about their lives, the meaning of their lives, and their relationships with one another or the spiritual landscape of their hearts.
To that end, Girl in Hyacinth Blue is a book about how one finds meaning. But throughout the book, the meaning is discussed in terms of accessing the moments. Clearly the author’s intention is to advocate for the importance of art to make sense and give value to one’s life, but in each story, the main character is also living a life in conflict. The painting either helps explain the conflict or helps to end the conflict. Most of the characters begin their transformation when they realize the moments in ordinary life are the things that matter. For examples, Laurens has an epiphany when he remembers his first love, “In the end, it’s only the moments that we have […] only the moments” (71).
We find lasting value, the author implies, in the small things, the richness of love and the surrounding landscape, in the moment of light caught on the water, or the expression on a child’s face. When Magdalena says she wants to paint the history of the world through a raindrop, she is saying that the world is found in everything, large and small. Through each characters’ view of the painting, the author implies that when we aren’t aware, like Cornelius failed to be aware, we miss the richness of art and the powerful moments that engender life’s experience.
While each of the characters reference the ordinary moments that help them understand themselves, it is through Vermeer that we see the power of simple details; the blue smock, the golden light, the upturned hand. Each of these details captures the essence of every moment in life and, in turn, reveals the heart of each character’s struggles and desires. Vermeer sees his craft as one that brings into stillness the life around him. He is driven by what he doesn’t know about himself and his place in the world. While he paints his daughter, he knows the power of a moment and its eternal life.
