Girl with a Pearl Earring
Reading Group Guide Girl With a Pearl Earring Tracy Chevalier
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. In Girl With a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier treats us to a richly appointed portrait of intersecting faiths, fracturing family dynamics, erotic awakenings, community scandals, religious tensions, and aesthetic compromises—all filtered brilliantly through the eyes of the young narrator, Griet, whose concise, wide-eyed perspective functions much like Vermeer’s camera obscura, rendering with particularly sharp precision and subtle insight the character of seventeenth-century Delft itself. “The camera obscura helps me to see in a different way, to see more of what is there,” Vermeer muses. Discuss the way in which Chevalier’s writing style achieves a similar effect. What techniques does she use to establish the novel’s particular tone and tension, to enrich the imagery, to develop her characters’ motives, and to encourage us “to see more of what is there”? 2. In the particular emotional realm of this novel, the issue of “seeing” is central. Griet endeavors for much of the novel to manipulate all that she sees into a sort of harmony, beginning with the soup vegetables she so carefully arranges so that they will not “fight when they are side by side.” Likewise, Vermeer’s art relies upon his ability to see the universal in even the most prosaic settings. Griet’s father cannot see at all, and not coincidentally, he is perhaps the novel’s most tragic and impotent figure. What does “seeing” mean to the novel’s other characters? Is it fair to say that, of all the characters, it is Maria Thins who sees the most clearly in the end? 3. Compare Girl With a Pearl Earring to other historical novels you’ve read in recent years (e.g.: Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders, A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, and so on). How does Chevalier's novel—focused, detailed, and tightly framed as it is—complement, complicate, and/or depart altogether from the standard themes and trappings of
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. In Girl With a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier treats us to a richly appointed portrait of intersecting faiths, fracturing family dynamics, erotic awakenings, community scandals, religious tensions, and aesthetic compromises—all filtered brilliantly through the eyes of the young narrator, Griet, whose concise, wide-eyed perspective functions much like Vermeer’s camera obscura, rendering with particularly sharp precision and subtle insight the character of seventeenth-century Delft itself. “The camera obscura helps me to see in a different way, to see more of what is there,” Vermeer muses. Discuss the way in which Chevalier’s writing style achieves a similar effect. What techniques does she use to establish the novel’s particular tone and tension, to enrich the imagery, to develop her characters’ motives, and to encourage us “to see more of what is there”? 2. In the particular emotional realm of this novel, the issue of “seeing” is central. Griet endeavors for much of the novel to manipulate all that she sees into a sort of harmony, beginning with the soup vegetables she so carefully arranges so that they will not “fight when they are side by side.” Likewise, Vermeer’s art relies upon his ability to see the universal in even the most prosaic settings. Griet’s father cannot see at all, and not coincidentally, he is perhaps the novel’s most tragic and impotent figure. What does “seeing” mean to the novel’s other characters? Is it fair to say that, of all the characters, it is Maria Thins who sees the most clearly in the end? 3. Compare Girl With a Pearl Earring to other historical novels you’ve read in recent years (e.g.: Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders, A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, and so on). How does Chevalier's novel—focused, detailed, and tightly framed as it is—complement, complicate, and/or depart altogether from the standard themes and trappings of