Girl In Hyacinth Blue

Hannah is on the cusp of becoming a woman. She is often lost in thought. Though her grandmother has nothing but criticism for her, Hannah realizes she is a girl with deep feelings. She is beginning to understand the world is changing and that big things are happening. She puts the yellow star on her sweater without thinking much about it, but when she sees the German family being deported, she sees and understands that things are not as they should be. From the unique perspective of a young woman watching the unfolding horror of the Nazis, Hannah becomes the vision of innocence in the face of grave danger.

Hannah often looks at the painting of the girl at the window and thinks that she is much like her. A person who is silenced by the world around her, but who maintains the wistful quality of hope. When her mother realizes that her daughter believes that it doesn’t matter what the girl in the picture is looking at, only that she’s thinking, Hannah feels understood for the first time. In that moment, when Hannah finds the courage and the deep, profound love to kill her father’s pigeons.

Through Hannah, the highly symbolic nature of the Passover is clear: It is about being free. Hannah has set her father free from the terrible task of having to destroy his flock of pigeons. She has freed herself, as well, because she comes to know herself. Since Passover cannot be what it is without the existence of the Jewish slaves, nor can Hannah be free to know herself, without also understanding the fate of herself and her Jewish people under the Nazis.

We see Hannah’s courage in facing the coming Holocaust in her ability to kill the pigeons. She proves herself wise and ready to participate in the Passover rituals. Hannah inherits the responsibility of leading the family in prayer and in life when her mother hands her the candles for Shabbat  

It is interesting to note that the reverse chronology of the novel allows us to see even more into Hannah’s character after the fact. Cornelius’s father steals the painting after her family is deported, leaving Tobias behind. This turn creates a devastating irony. The reverse chronology of the novel is what allows the reader to understand the power and impact of the life and possible death that Hannah, and certainly her brother, must face. The innocence of the lives of young children is stolen in the act of the painting’s seizure. 

Initially, Laurens seems displeased with his daughter and her betrothed. The storyline reaches its denouement by the end, when Laurens understands that love is complicated and that even as he ages, it changes and matures. Laurens, too, matures throughout the story, first seeing love selfishly as a memory of the past, and later understanding that true love is the consistent love he and his wife share.

We learn that Laurens lost his first love because of his arrogance in not meeting with her, thinking it would make her want him more. In this regard, Laurens is a character who seems selfish and self-involved. He is a man who has not learned the lessons of ego. When he realizes, at last, that he has hurt his wife, he experiences that same foolish feeling he did as a young man; that he will lose the one he loves. He thinks that his wife will come around and then he realizes that in reducing a love affair down to its essentials, all he is left with are “only the moments” (71.) Only then does he realize how much his wife matters to him. 

Claudine is characterized by her superficiality and her willingness to violate social constructs like those of marriage and fidelity. She admits she was never in love with her husband, but she longs for real love.

In her story, Claudine is memorable for her flowery language and her big personality. She likes drama and seeks it out, as we see in her romantic tryst with the violinist. As a matron of high society, she possesses all the financial and social trappings, but she is also scandalous and doesn’t seem to care.

Claudine can be acerbic toward others in the society she keeps, and she crushes the myth that after years of partnership, an arranged marriage can come to be loving. She gets what she wants by going after it.

It’s only after studying the painting that Claudine realizes she has settled for something less than she is worth. There is something she recognizes in the girl that looks like fierceness and a sense of esteem. Where once Claudine saw only “vacancy” (105) in the girl’s face, she now sees an expression of power and what she believes is the willingness to sacrifice all for love. In this moment, Claudine makes her transformation. Rather than settling for her marriage because it’s tolerable, she decides to leave it altogether in pursuit of finding a love that matters. As a woman of means, she is able to be spontaneous whereas many of the other characters are not. 

The author sets up a true love between Saskia and her husband, Stijn. When the waters rise—a symbol of both saturation with a situation, and change as is often noted in Christianity, Saskia lets her fidelity go. She is not supposed to use the seed potatoes, but she has fallen in love with the painting that seemed to have been handed over by God. The baby, too, seems a divine gift. It is clear that Saskia views the events in her life as blessings, via the route of divine intervention, but in the giddiness of receiving these blessings, Saskia loses sight of what matters.

She becomes intoxicated by the blue smock the girl in the painting wears, and she likens it to heaven. In the development of Saskia’s character, there are repeated references to God, divine blessings, heaven, and God’s wrath.

When she is caught using the seed potatoes, she realizes that she has made a mistake. She isn’t sure if Stijn is angry or doesn’t love her. She realizes that after eight years of marriage, “she still had trouble telling the difference between his love and his worry” (146). She takes the children and heads to Amsterdam to sell the painting. She floats through the high waters like a spiritual figure in search of meaning. She doesn’t want to get rid of the painting. Surely there must be some way. She is not accustomed to sacrifice. Only when she takes a side trip to her home of origin, does she snap out of her strange delirium. Her mother brings her back to earth shaming her for forgetting her fidelity to her husband. In the end, after she sells the painting, she settles on some blue wool from which she will make scarves for her children. It is the not the painting, but with humility, she realizes it’s as close as she can get.

Adriaan is a scientist and a scholar. He is a practical thinker, but he grows tired of “squeezing some personal meaning out of Descartes, Spinoza and Erasmus” (160). He returns home to his Aunt Rika so that he can study windmills and the engineering design of building and crafting them. He is characterized as a man who is intelligent and can see through his Aunt’s desperate need for social acceptance.

He is not prepared to fall in love, and he has never imagined that he would fall in love with someone whose superstitious nature is at odds with his rational self. Adriaan’s predicament is made worse by the fact that he can do nothing about Aletta’s eventual fate. She did kill his daughter, but he seethes over the town’s gossip and its opinions of people that don’t meet their standards. Perhaps if they had been genuinely compassionate in greeting someone who didn’t fit in, Aletta would not have had to die. In the end, Adriaan is portrayed as a man with scruples who puts on no airs when it comes to love. He is the tragic embodiment of hypocrisy and moralism gone too far.

Vermeer is a poor but gifted man who ends up sacrificing his true love—painting—for his family. He feels a deep resentment about this sacrifice and holds out as long as he can. Eventually, he folds his canvas and gives up, dying in poverty and leaving behind 11 children and a beleaguered wife.

He often wonders whether it is worth it to suffer such poverty for the sake of his art. He wonders if the world needs another painting of another pitcher. For his art, he faces personal humiliation by asking his mother-in-law for money. He faces the indignity of dodging his creditors. And yet, Vermeer is an artist, and making art is the only thing he truly loves.

When Vermeer finds himself intrigued by his daughter, Magdalena, he also doesn’t understand why. He is a character who has the humility to see that in his undeviating pursuit of painting, he has missed the finer subtleties of what makes his daughter tick. Vermeer is a collector of moments. That is what he paints. He reconciles the fact that he has lived “badly” (209) because he is always weighted down by regret and frustration. He doesn’t stop to play with his daughter. He can’t if he lives only for art. In this regard, he might be perceived as selfish.

The author takes pains to create his character as one of an ordinary man without pretensions or strange proclivities. He is a simple, not unkind person, who merely wants to transcribe the way he sees the world through his paintings. The selfishness that he possesses tragically stands in the way of his ability to see his own daughter and her temperament as one that is similar to his. He never asks her to paint, and she never asks him to show her how. He dies without ever having knowledge of Magdalena’s aspirations, and she regrets that she never told him.