44 pages • 1 hour read
Tracy ChevalierGirl With a Pearl Earring
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Knife
Knives are present in many crucial moments in the novel, from the opening scene when Griet first meets the Vermeers, to the climactic scene of confrontation with Catharina, to the first image we have of Griet as a butcher’s wife. Because they are always potentially threatening, knives take on meaning in the story depending on who wields them and with what intent, level of control, and degree of skill. Though they are never shown to cause physical harm, except when Griet cuts her palm after learning that Vermeer is dead, they are threatening when Catharina is present, as she is the only person who seems to have no skills, even wielding a knife.
The Pearl Earrings
The pearl earrings are symbols of class, jealously guarded by Catharina, coveted by Griet, and used by Vermeer for their ability to catch light in his paintings. In Part Three of the novel, they also come to symbolize the relationship between Griet and Vermeer, and Griet’s initial refusal to wear them is about her fear of being “ruined” by the scandal that will ensue. Her attempt to refuse them in Part Four, however, is a rejection of the bourgeois, artistic world they represent, for which she no longer has any use—“a butcher’s wife did not wear such things, no more than a maid did” (233).
The Eight-Pointed Star in the Center of Market Square
This star, to which Griet returns multiple times, including at the end of the novel when she is deciding what to do with the pearl earrings, is symbolic of the different paths one’s life can take and, as such, is highly appropriate to the bildungsroman. It is also a bittersweet image: although each time Griet returns to it, she makes the “right” decision, she also sees all the other possibilities she can’t pursue. Whether good or bad, the closing off of other possibilities is also the limiting of her vision. Each time she chooses a path, the “wide eyes” of her youth are blinded a little more.
Griet’s Hair
There is only one scene in the novel where Griet’s hair is seen, and it is when Vermeer walks in while she is dressing for her sitting. The effect of this intrusion is so powerful that Griet is inspired to have sex for the first time with Pieter. Her hair is a clear symbol of her sexuality and her agency, as is evident in her reaction to Vermeer having seen her uncovered head: “Now that he had seen my hair, now that he had seen me revealed, I no longer felt I had something precious to hide and keep to myself. I could be freer, if not with him, then with someone else. It no longer mattered what I did and did not do” (196). The language she uses here is the familiar language of “virtue” and “virginity,” which, for women, is often figured as “something precious to hide and keep to [one]self,” and the kind of “freedom” Griet refers to here is not “free will” so much as promiscuity. The last line—“It no longer mattered what I did and did not do”—is what suggests her hair is symbolic of more than just her sexuality, since what she does or does not do is about her sense of agency.
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By Tracy Chevalier
