Sociology After the Crisis by Charles C. Lemert

Author:Charles C. Lemert [Lemert, Charles C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317251750
Google: XT5ACwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-22T05:06:02+00:00

Even in those affluent and good times for the new classes of bourgeois people, such crises as there were had some sensible bearing on their positions in the world. Even in the simple confines of Mistress and Maid, if the crucial note brings the word of a disappointment in love, the delicate balance of life between the sexes is off. If she is the mistress of the household, what is wrong between her and the master? Who, after all, is the author of the note? And what of her relation to the maid with whom she seems to share some slight degree of intimacy, woman to woman? Who is the woman upon whom the mistress relies for the petty services that provide comfort in her daily life?

Just as in our informed glances about the daily lives in which we today live, we seldom notice the complicated relations that shift just off the canvas. In Vermeer’s painting, the play of sexual differences, like the hard reality of class differences, shapes the drama of the event without really being present. The lover is at most a possibility created by a secret note, folded so we cannot ever know its message. The maid, who may well know the secret, is closer to its truth than we can ever be. Yet her proximity is gently proscribed by the plain clothes and her unadorned arms and neck—signs of exclusion from the middle class she serves. Mistress and Maid would literally make no sense without these barely visible signs of the structured realities of life between the classes and the sexes in seventeenth-century Holland.

There is still another difference—one so understated that the observer denies its very existence. If one looks closely at the original of Mistress and Maid in the Frick Collection in New York City, the notion dawns that the maid might not be European. At the very top of her brow, the hair is tightly curled. Her face, though it is directly illuminated, is evidently darker by several shades than the skin of the mistress. What is Vermeer suggesting in these detectable marks of difference? Is it possible that the maid is African, possibly a Creole offspring from the West Indies? Surely, the middle classes in Holland recruited servants from among the mixed-race classes of the Dutch colonies. This third vector of difference in the painting is just as slightly suggested as is the identity of the note’s author. We who are white and middle class are more inclined to insert the lost lover into the painting, while overlooking the signs of racial and class difference. Yet, again, the painting would be of less interest without them. It pulls us in as much for the eerie relation between the women as for the mysterious note. With hard work, we see the class differences because they are sharply accented. But are we meant to see the race differences so slightly hinted?

In those days in Holland race differences were, it must be remembered, the differences imposed by the great capitalist hegemony over the colonized world.

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