Vermeer's Love Letter to Society

 While examining Johannes Vermeer’s painting, The Love Letter (c 1669) it became clear that the artist was striving for what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s work, Remediation, describes as “transparent immediacy” as we, the audience, are meant to forget that we are looking at a painting/canvas and are instead propelled into its storyline (21-2). Forced to view the work from the artist’s voyeuristic prospective—deep within the closet looking into the room, which is reinforced by the shelving at the forefront and immediate right of the scene—the audience is left with the impression that they are illicitly spying in on a very personal moment. Indeed, the canvas disappears and we are there, crouched within that closet, either with or as the artist, encroaching on this young maiden’s privacy as she plays her lute and inadvertently (or not) we witness, as the title of piece suggests, the obviously wealthy young woman’s request to her servant that she deliver a love letter. Additionally, the subject matter of this piece highlights the 17^th century’s view of women as chattel. The fact that women are first the property of their fathers then their husbands, during this time period, and used as commodity to advance the family’s social, political and monetary aspirations within the public sphere, they are, by definition, not free to choose who to love or marry. History, then, reinforces the work’s “immediacy”—as it supports the storyline advanced by the painting: a young woman with no agency is forced into an act of subterfuge with the assistance of her servant—a popular storyline utilized previously by both Ovid and Shakespeare. Therefore, even as this paper would represent a remediation of Vermeer’s work, as the “literary description” itself is a remediation of “visual art,” it is the artist’s prospective and the point in history when it was created that adds credence to the piece as a subject representative of immediacy  (45). 

Additionally, The Love Letter, would seem to bring to light issues of the public and private spheres as described by Jurgen Habermas’s work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Now, one would assume that as the scene depicts a private moment between a young woman and her servant, presumably within her own home (if not her own room) that the space itself would be defined as a private sphere. Yet, the painting could also be representative of Habermas’s assertion that the “intervention of public powers in the affairs of private people” was a byproduct of society’s inability to resolve their issues from within the private “salons” (35, 142). Essentially, the “public sphere” began as an amalgamation of private citizens, who gathered together in the hopes of affecting public change. Thus, if, as the painting’s title suggests, and the protagonist’s expression of concern as she covertly passes said letter to her servant reinforces, the “public” reaction to this young woman’s affections for the recipient of this letter is a point of contention that she is attempting to avoid, and the we, the public in the closet, are meant to be outraged by and perhaps even meant to intercede in—no doubt, for the greater good of society.

Although perhaps an innocuous subject matter when viewed from a modern day perspective, it is easy to imagine that when viewed from within the prospective of 17^th century society the information conveyed by Vermeer’s piece may well have been considered scandalous if not subversive. While it is unclear how many people would have had access to the painting when it was originally created, it could be assumed that it would have, at the very least, been prominently displayed within someone’s home and accessible to all visitors. Nevertheless, the sheer quantity of information conveyed: locking away young women may not be enough, maidens are clever, devious, disobedient, impure in thought or action, one must be the ever vigilant, like the audience in the closet etc…, would seem to add credibility to the suggestion of many scholars that far from a byproduct of post-industrial/modern societies, the information society is more than likely a “continuation of pre-established relations” (Webster 7). Thus, even as there is no doubting that with the advent of technology, the “information society” of today is afforded many more avenues for accessing information, “quantity” does not necessarily equate to “quality” information—and as Vermeer’s work demonstrates, it is not necessarily a byproduct of modernity (21-31).  Thus, as Frank Webster suggests in his work, Theories on the Information Society, “we must not confuse the indispensability of a phenomenon [(technology)] with a capacity for it to define a social order” (23) as much of the information derived from the advent of technology can easily be described as “devoid of content” (31).

Works Cited

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media.

Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000. Print.

Habermas, JÜrgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into

a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991. Print.

Vermeer, Johannes. The Love Letter. 1669. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Webster, Frank. Theories of the Information Society. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.