Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier is unusual in having taken a specific painting and

created a construction round it.

How does she build a convincing impression of the characters and their

circumstances in this unusual household on Papists Corner in Delft

between 1664-1676?

Tracy Chevalier is unusual at having taken a painting, a Girl with a

Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer and assembled her story around it.

Tracy Chevalier's construction is about a young girl, Griet. Who has

to become a maid, due to her family's circumstances, to the painter

Johannes Vermeer. Part of her job is to clean the painter's studio

without moving anything, as she has been doing for her blind father.

But she finds herself falling in love with Vermeer while being courted

by the butcher's son, Pieter. Her hard life as a maid then comes to an

end when she is painted, by her master for an art tradesman, van

Ruijven.

In an interview in 2001 Chevalier said, 'I have always loved this

painting, I was attracted to the ambiguity of expression.' She uses

this ambiguity to create a convincing but unusual novel based on an

unusual painting. The attraction of this ambiguity to the novelist is

that she has a lot of freedom within which to write her story and to

make it attractive to the 21st century reader. Tracy Chevalier uses

the other Vermeer paintings and the limited biographical information

about his life to create a picture of 17th century life which is

appealing to her 21st century audience. She has a problem because the

details of a 17th century life may not be so appealing to a 21st

century audience; we do not have the same situations as described in

the book. So she may have adapted them to make th...

... middle of paper ...

...not caring about that, only about what will make the

painting look good. The main reason for all the tension is the eyes of

everyone in the house, always watching, always judging, coming out of

the shadows and just around the corner. The claustrophobia draws us

into the novel and involves the reader. Griet has to be on guard all

the time, adding to the uneasy feeling of the house.

Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring is a very convincing

novel, based on the believable setting of Delft and the book's strong

characters. She has obviously studied Vermeer's paintings in depth and

the historical information on the period and produced an entertaining

and believable piece of literature. The tension of the Catholic

household and the claustrophobia within Delft society draw us into

this 17th/21st century novel and keep us persuaded of the novel's

realism.