Girl With a Pearl Earring

This section opens with Griet at home with her parents, her father complaining that she smells of linseed oil. Pieter is there as well, as he has become a weekly visitor in her parents’ home. One Sunday in February, Griet and Pieter leave her parents’ house and convene in the alley for their weekly tryst. Pieter becomes more aggressive squeezing and pulling at Griet’s breasts and then trying to run his hands through her hair under her cap. She stops him, but not before he has pulled loose a strand. He promises that he “will see all of” her hair, that she “will not always be a secret to” him (175), and that he will speak to her father about marriage as soon as she turns eighteen the next month.

The narrative shifts back to the month previous, the first day of the year, when Vermeer calls Griet into the studio so that he can decide what pose to paint her in. He offers her many props—has her pretend to read a letter and then a book, and then pretend to pour wine, and then look out the window—having her “do things a lady would do” (178). She suggests, instead, that she do things a maid would do, because she cannot wear Catharina’s clothes, even as a model in his painting, and thus cannot pretend to be “a lady”. Vermeer responds by declaring, “I will paint you as I first saw you, Griet. Just you” (179), though we don’t yet know what that will entail. He has her sit and look out the window, then turn her head slowly toward him and hold his gaze. After some time, his eyes shift from seeing the painting he envisions in his mind’s eye to looking at Griet in front of him, and his jolt of recognition ends the session.

During their next session, Vermeer asks first that Griet pull back her cap so that he can see the line of her cheek, then her ear, and then her hair. She refuses his last request so he asks her to find something in a pile of cloth with which to wrap her hair. She chooses a piece of brown cloth and winds it around her head. Vermeer asks why she chooses brown, and although she has thought about the class differences represented by the different colors that women wear, she merely says, “Brown is the color I usually wear” (183). He then chooses blue and yellow strips of cloth for her to wear instead of the brown, and she returns to the storeroom to redo her makeshift turban. When she returns, she resumes her place in the scene without comment and the end of the yellow cloth comes loose as she turns her face toward Vermeer. Though she is concerned that her hair will be exposed, the turban stays together and Vermeer approves the pose and costume.

At this point, Vermeer is working on two paintings at once, and has forbidden Griet from looking at the painting of herself. One day, while Griet is sitting for the painting, van Leeuwenhoek arrives with the camera obscura. When Vermeer leaves the room briefly, van Leeuwenhoek warns Griet to “watch out for” herself (185), worried that she will become caught in a battle between Vermeer and van Ruijven. Griet does not believe that Vermeer would hurt her and says as much. But his friend insists that Vermeer, though a genius, is selfish and that Griet will have to take care to “remain herself” (186) and not get lost in Vermeer’s world.

It is not long before Griet understands what van Leeuwenhoek’s warning meant. After a couple of months of painting, Vermeer invites Griet to view the painting, observing that while his patron, van Ruijven, will be satisfied that it is finished, Vermeer himself is not. Griet views the painting and quickly realizes what it needs. She knows that he will see it eventually as well, but since she understands that she will have to wear Catharina’s pearl earrings, and that doing so will be her ruin, she waits for Vermeer to come the realization on his own. When one day she sees him observe his wife wearing her pearl earrings, she knows that he has reached the same conclusion that she has.

The next time she is to sit for him, she refuses to wear the earrings, arguing that van Ruijven will be satisfied with the painting as it is, instead of appealing to Vermeer for her own sake. He is angered by the suggestion and orders her to change her cap out for the makeshift turban. While she is in the storeroom changing, Vermeer walks in on her and sees her with her hair uncovered.

After that, Griet feels that she “no longer […] had something precious to hide” (196) and goes to find Pieter that night. She leads him into an alley and they have sex for the first time, and when Griet “remembered [her] hair loose around [her] shoulders in the studio, [she] felt something like pleasure” (196).

When she sees the painting again, she notices that Vermeer has added a wisp of hair escaping from her turban. Nevertheless, she asks him if he can paint the earring into the painting without her wearing it—“imagine [her] wearing the pearl, and paint what [he] imagine[s]” (197). He refuses, and again, Griet does not ask him to consider the consequences she will face for wearing the earring. Instead, she asks what his wife will say when she sees the painting. He insists that it will go directly to van Ruijven and that Catharina will not see it. Then Griet argues that her ear is not pierced for the earring, and he tells her to “take care of that” (197–198).

During this conversation, Vermeer has been mixing gray paint with his palette knife, which he finally taps and wipes with a rag, beginning their session. He tells Griet to lick her lips and leave her mouth open. Shocked, she thinks to herself that “[v]irtuous women did not open their mouths in paintings” (198) and that he has ruined her already. She licks her lips again, to which he replies, “Good” (198).

Griet wants help with piercing her ear, and the only person she can think of to ask is her brother Frans, but when she goes to see him at the tile factory the following day, she learns that he has left, gone to Rotterdam, perhaps. She feels “more alone than ever” (199) and must pierce her own ear without help. She waits until late at night after everyone has gone to bed, looks once more at the painting to gain resolve, and begins. She puts her thinnest needle in the candle flame, rubs clove oil from the apothecary on her earlobe to numb it, and plunges the needle through the lobe. The shock makes her pass out. Over the following several days, while waiting for the opportunity to use Catharina’s earrings secretly while she is out, Griet keeps the hole open by pushing a needle through it every night, and it becomes painfully infected.

On the morning of Griet’s eighteenth birthday, Maria Thins hands her the pearl earrings and chides her up the stairs for her final sitting while Catharina is out of the house. After she has changed her headdress but before she has put on the earring, she is called back down to meet Pieter the son, who has come to ask her officially to marry him, having just come from her parents’ house with permission from her father. She refuses to discuss it with him and goes back into the house and up to the attic. By the time she has changed back into her headdress, Pieter has left.

When Vermeer hands her the earring, she demands that he put it in for her. When he does, they share an erotically charged moment, as he strokes her face and neck, catching her tears with his thumb, which she licks. He returns to his easel, but instead of painting, he sits thinking and then demands that Griet wear both earrings, even though only one will be visible in the painting. To do so, she has to pierce her other ear. She does, and sits through this final session with both ears throbbing. When Vermeer finishes, he tells her to take off the earrings and give them back to Maria Thins when she goes downstairs. She goes into the storeroom to change out of her headdress, waiting for him to come, but he doesn't. On her way out of the studio, she does not stop to look at the painting, not knowing at that moment that she won’t have the opportunity to see it again.

Catharina returns home after the earrings are safely back in her jewelry box and lies down for a nap. Vermeer has gone out for dinner. All is quiet and Griet returns to her laundry. Suddenly, she hears Maria Thinks asking her daughter where she is going and Griet sees the very pregnant Catharina heading up the stairs, presumably lured to the studio by Cornelia. Realizing that Catharina will see the painting and Griet wearing her earrings, Griet is rooted to the spot, while Maria Thins follows her daughter upstairs. Griet hears Catharina shout with rage and then Cornelia comes down the stairs to tell Tanneke that Vermeer is to be brought home. Maertge is sent to find her father. Shortly afterwards he arrives home and goes upstairs, Cornelia comes down to summon Griet to explain to Catharina how she came to be wearing her earrings. Neither Maria Thins nor Vermeer will admit to their roles in the affair, while Catharina accuses Griet of stealing, because“[m]aids steal all the time” (213).

Griet refuses to admit to stealing. In her hurt and rage, Catharina grabs the palette knife and tries to stab the painting, but, Griet observes: Vermeer “knew his own wife” and “moved with Catharina as she stepped up to the painting. She was quick but he was quicker—he caught her by the wrist as she plunged the diamond blade of the knife towards the painting. He stopped it just before the blade touched my eye” (215). Catharina finally drops the knife when she feels labor pains and it slides across the floor, spinning to a stop at Griet’s feet. She stares at Vermeer, then turns and walks out of the studio and out of the house.

Griet runs to the market square and “stop[s] in the circle of tiles with the eight-pointed star in the middle. Each point indicate[s] a direction [she] could take” (216).

She stands in the circle, turning round and round until she makes her choice, “the choice [she] knew she had to make” and walks “steadily” in its direction (216).