Catharina Character Analysis

The woman looked as if she had been blown about by the wind, although it was a calm day. Her cap was askew so that tiny blond curls escaped and hung about her forehead like bees which she swatted at impatiently several times. Her collar needed straightening and was not as crisp as it could be. She pushed her gray mantle back from her shoulders, and I saw then that under her dark blue dress a baby was growing. It would arrive by the year’s end, or before.

The woman’s face was like an oval serving plate, flashing at times, dull at others. Her eyes were two light brown buttons, a color I had rarely seen coupled with blond hair. She made a show of watching me hard, but could not fix her attention on me, her eyes darting about the room.

The woman standing in the doorway had a broad face, pockmarked form an earlier illness. Her nose was bulbous and irregular, and her thick lips were pushed together to form a small mouth. Her eyes were light blue, as if she had caught the sky in them. She wore a grey-brown dress with a white chemise, a cap tied tight around her head, and an apron that was not as clean as mine. She stood blocking the doorway, so that Maertge and Cornelia had to push their way out round her, and she looked at me with crossed arms as if waiting for a challenge.

Already she feels threatened by me, I thought. She will bully me if I let her.

“My name is Griet,” I said, gazing at her levelly. “I am the new maid.”

Maria Thins seemed content to stand with me and contemplate the painting. It was odd to look at it with the setting just behind it. Already from my dusting I knew all of the objects on the table, and their relation to one another—the letter by the corner, the powder-brush lying casually next to the pewter bowl, the blue cloth bunched around the dark pot. Everything seemed to be exactly the same, except cleaner and purer. It made a mockery of my own cleaning.

Then I saw a difference. I drew in my breath.

“What is it, girl?”

“In the painting there are no lion heads on the chair next to the woman.”

“No. There was once a lute sitting on that chair as well. He makes plenty of changes. He doesn’t paint just what he sees, but what will suit.”

[H]e was standing in the doorway. […] The girls ran up to him and tried to snatch off the paternity cape he wore […] He looked both proud and embarrassed. I was surprised—he had become a father five times before, and I thought he would be used to it. There was no reason for him to feel embarrassed.

It is Catharina who wants many children, I thought then. He would rather be alone in his studio.

But […] I knew how babies were made. […] And as difficult as Catharina could be, I had often seen him look at her, touch her shoulder, speak to her in a low voice laced with honey.

I did not like to think of him that way, with his wife and children. I preferred to think of him alone in his studio. Or not alone, but with only me.

“Oh yes, that story went all around the Meat Hall,” he answered, chuckling. […] “It was several years ago now. It seems van Ruijven wanted one of his kitchen maids to sit for a painting with him. They dressed her in one of his wife’s gowns, a red one, and van Ruijven made sure there was wine in the painting so he could get her to drink every time they sat together. Sure enough, before the painting was finished she was carrying van Ruijven’s child.”

“What happened to her?”

Pieter shrugged, “What happens to girls like that?”

His words froze my blood. Of course I had heard such stories before, but never one so close to me. I thought about my dreams of wearing Catharina’s clothes, of van Ruijven grasping my chin in the hallway, of him saying “You should paint her” to my master.

“Please, madam, what did he say? About me?”

Maria Thins gave me a knowing look. “Don’t flatter yourself, girl. He said very little about you. But it was clear enough. That he came downstairs at all and concerned himself—my daughter knew then that he was taking your side. No, he charged her with failing to raise her children properly. Much cleverer, you see, to criticize her than to praise you.”

“Did he explain that I was—assisting him?”

“No.”

I tried not to let my face show what I felt, but the very question must have made my feelings clear.

“But I told her, once he had gone,” Maria Thins added. “It’s nonsense, you sneaking around, keeping secrets from her in her own house. […] I would have thought better of him.” She stopped, looking as if she wished she hadn’t revealed so much of her own mind.

He did not treat me differently after the affair of the comb. When I thanked him for speaking up for me, he shook his head as if shooing away a fly that buzzed about him.

It was I who felt differently about him. I felt indebted. I felt that if he asked me to do something I could not say no. I did not know what he would ask that I would want to say no to, but nonetheless I did not like the position I had come to be in.

I was disappointed in him as well, though I did not like to think about it. I had wanted him to tell Catharina himself about my assisting him, to show that he was not afraid to tell her, that he supported me.

That is what I wanted.

I did not pick up the knife. I turned and walked from the room, down the stairs and through the doorway, pushing past Tanneke. When I reached the street I did not look back at the children I knew must be sitting on the bench, nor at Tanneke, who would be frowning because I had pushed her, nor up at the windows where he might be standing. I got to the street and I began to run. I ran down the Oude Langendijck and across the bridge into Market Square […] I reached the center of the square and stopped in the circle of tiles with the eight-pointed star in the middle. Each point indicated a direction I could take. […] When I made my choice, the choice I knew I had to make, I set my feet carefully along the edge of the point and wen the way it told me, walking steadily.

At first it was very hard for me. When I saw him I froze wherever I was, my chest tightened, and I could not get my breath. I had to hide my response from Pieter the father and son, from my mother, from the curious market gossips.

For a long time I thought I might still matter to him.

After a while, though, I admitted to myself that he had always cared more for the painting of me than for me.

It grew easier to accept when Jan was born. My son made me turn inward to my family, as I had done when I was a child, before I became a maid. I was so busy with him that I did not have time to look out and around me. […] When I saw my old master across the square my heart no longer squeezed itself like a fist.