Religious and Social Structures of Girl With a Pearl Earring

Tracy Chevalier manages to capture the social and religious aspects of 17th century Netherlands with an almost eerie accuracy in her book "Girl With A Pearl Earring". As you turn the pages, a totally different world flies out and there you are in the middle of it, feeling compassion for the poor low class maid or hating her spoiled wealthy mistress. It is a world entirely different to our own present day life, yet a world filled with more class separation, etiquette rules and customs, and more horror and difficulty of circumstance that we could ever encounter.

From the very onset of the novel, you get the feeling of a severe separation between the wealthy people and the poor people, and the heavy emphasis on the class system is established. From the main character's, Griet's statement: "They were the kind of voices we heard rarely in our house" (p3) we can understand that the rich rarely mingled with the poor. There even seems to be a class differentiation by accent, as Griet determ...