In the Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, we are taken through 17th-century Holland through the eyes of the main character, Griet, a sixteen-year-old girl in the lower class. Through her eyes, we, as readers, see a remarkable story that summarizes inequalities of classism in the 1600s.
Our opening scene is of Griet cutting up vegetables for stew when she is interrupted by the sound of company coming into the home. In a moment that felt like both an hour and a measly second, Griet is hired to be a maid in a Catholic home to be the maid of a peculiar artist, Johannes Vermeer. Griet’s father had lost his sight when working, and with her father unable to work anymore, her mother is the only one who can bring in money. Unfortunately, because there were not many high-paying jobs for women, her mother needed to recruit Griet to bring in more income. Therefore, her father requested an old painter friend to hire his daughter as a maid. With Griet, after her family explains what happened after the experience, she is disheartened that she will have to leave her family and only see them on Sundays; yet, she feels a sense of duty to her family that she cannot refuse this job. At sixteen, she has to leave her family and become a maid for a wealthier family than hers. It is understandable why Griet goes, yet all the audience can do is shake their heads and watch in concern as a child becomes a maid.
The audience learns that life as a maid in the 1600s is not a welcoming experience. We learn from Griet that maids are known for stealing, which means she cannot pick up an item with any hint of interest in her eyes, even if she is cleaning it. The wife of Vermeer immediately forms a distaste for Griet, as maids are also portrayed as sneaky and mischievous. In the story, maids are known for anything other than doing their job. Yet we find out that rather than Griet being the lazy stealer that everyone chalks her up to be, she is the only maid to do her job for the first time in the home. Even the maid that lived there over a decade has barely done her job, leaving the work to Griet. We finally understand the “whys” to the questions we had been asking with two quotes from the book:
- “Theirs is not our world.”
- “He is powerful… and you [Griet] are but a maid.”