The Miniaturist

The Miniaturist is a historical novel disguised as a mystery one: its real aim is not to explore the enigma that the title character represents, but to present and criticize the Dutch society of the early 17th century.

The protagonist is Petronella Oortman, or Nella, a young woman who marries a successful merchant she doesn’t know, named Johannes Brandt, and goes on to live with him in Amsterdam. Her new life, however, is not as she had imagined. Being constantly ignored by her husband and finding in her sister-in-law a hostile figure, Nella only feels comfortable around her wedding gift: a detailed dollhouse that faithfully represents the rooms where she now lives in. However, she soon begins to receive strange gifts from the miniaturist hired to furnish the house, and realizes that she may be being watched.

The beginning of the book is loaded with suspense. The author, Jessie Burton, is skilled at building a suffocating atmosphere and suggesting danger, especially in Nella’s first scene in her new home. The protagonist walks through the darkness as she enters the house, where she meets her husband’s sister, Marin, immersed in shadows, dressed in black and with a rigid posture, manifesting her opposition to the girl’s presence with few words. As she takes Nella to her new bedroom, Marin points to the various paintings on the walls that portray hunting animals, revealing her predatory nature.

Strange sounds in the house disturb the protagonist during the night; characters whisper when she is not around and shut up when in her presence. Nella immediately feels threatened, believing that she is far from welcome in that house and that her sister-in-law may pose a constant threat.

The relationship between the two characters is the highlight of the book. If, at first, Marin assumes the role of antagonist – reminding the villain of Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak – she gradually shows traces of compassion and loyalty, gradually becoming the moral center of the story. If Nella, at the beginning, sees her sister-in-law as an enemy, at the end, the feeling she has for Marin has completely changed.

Marin’s development actually far outstrips that of the protagonist herself, being the culmination of the themes developed by the book. The Miniaturist deals with prejudice – racism, homophobia, and misogyny – and presents characters that fit into each minority. Marin and Nella are women, for example, and so are unable to take care of business, argue with their husbands and be free. As Marin explains: “some of us can work, […] back-breaking work, for which they won’t even pay us half of what a man could earn. But we can’t own property, we can’t take a case to court. The only thing they think we can do is produce children who then become the property of our husbands.”

Marin, therefore, sees marriage as prison, as the moment a wife submits herself to her husband’s authority until the end of her life. Remaining single, however, doesn’t mean total freedom, for the character is still supervised by the society in which she lives – her room is even described as a cell during a certain scene.

The character, then, keeps fighting the misogyny of her society, whether it’s sending suitors away, running her brother’s business, taking care of finances or taking on typically male household chores, such as reading sermons. The reader gradually realizes that Marin’s hostility is actually a defense mechanism of someone who is constantly being watched and frowned upon.

Nella, on the other hand, is submissive to the values she learned as a child. At one point, for example, her mother teaches her about the nature of a horrible Brazilian saying, “bad with him, worse without him”, arguing that married life means financial security even though it is not “comfortable” in a lot of ways: “Her mother has told her what wives can hope for – a rising rod of pain, the chance it won’t go on too long, the wet clam dribble between your legs.”

However, what the protagonist sees in her new home surprises her. Nella sees a woman taking care of her brother’s business with skill, an employee who is treated with respect and still works hard, a man with dark skin who is considered trustworthy by Johannes, and a homosexual who is honest and kind. Her character arc involves the deconstruction of prejudices acquired in her childhood: she is part of those recurring cases where a family education does not reflect the reality of the world, but only the frustrations, vices, and prejudices of the parents.

The protagonist, however, takes a long time to understand this. She passes almost the entirety of the book repeating the same ideas of female submission, severity in the treatment of the employees, of distrust towards people of color and of hatred against homosexuals – the last one, not by chance, is even reinforced during a visit to the church. If Marin is a tragic figure for keeping fighting these prejudices without success, Nella is an especially annoying one for keeping spreading them for a long time.

Moreover, her relationship with Johannes is not very well developed. At first, Nella resents her husband’s disregard for her, by the middle of the book she just gets angry at him, and during the climax, she is suddenly loving him with all her heart. This evolution makes no sense, as there are very few scenes of the two together that could suggest the development of this love. Johannes remains cold with her for much of the story: his displays of affection are regularly followed by a certain detachment, as if he feared that she would begin to nurture something for him. Therefore, the melodramatic climax ends up feeling artificial: the protagonist does have reason to despair in face of the events, but for logical, not emotional reasons.

Another point where the protagonist is also problematic is in her delay in taking any action concerning anything. Her relationship with the miniaturist is the most revealing in this regard: Nella starts to receive gifts that she did not order; gifts that expose characteristics of her family life that only someone present in that house could know, but acts as if this is not very dangerous. She delays her visits to the miniaturist more than once, being constantly distracted by various random events. She even believes it is sufficient to send letters asking the miniaturist to stop harassing her. She is being watched and provoked by a mysterious individual and, to solve the situation, she just sends letters to them. Her reaction to the events is of complete lack of urgency, which sabotages the tension surrounding the figure of the miniaturist.

Furthermore, from a certain point on, Nella even starts to see the gifts not as a threat, but as a helping hand. She looks at the dolls she receives and tries to interpret them, imagining what the miniaturist meant with those images. There is no reason for her not to call the police, but Nella still assures people that the miniaturist just wants her well-being.

This plotline also ends up being completely irrelevant to the main story. The book is structured on the basis of the discoveries made about the Brandts: Johannes and Marin keep countless secrets that are gradually revealed, connecting them with the prejudices of their society. The main antagonists are a Dutch couple who, although they envy Johannes’ success, give him kilos of sugar to sell. Johannes, however, does not seem to commit himself to the enterprise, generating the conflict in the climax.

Meanwhile, Nella receives miniatures and has epiphanies that don’t even serve to make her act. In one scene, for example, she reflects that the miniaturist is suggesting that she should press her husband to sell the sugar, and yet she doesn’t. Just the fact that she needs an encrypted message made with dolls to reach an obvious conclusion is already problematic, but even knowing what should be done, Nella remains inert because of her ideas about what a woman in a marriage should not do. As a result, the whole part of the story about the miniaturist becomes irrelevant to the main plot. If this strange and mysterious figure didn’t exist, none of the main events would have occurred differently – which is a pity, since the author is competent in building suspense and putting some good foreshadowing early on.

The scene in which the dollhouse is presented serves as a good example. Burton may use the cliché of “the house seemed to observe the protagonist”, but makes up for it with the macabre touch regarding the material used in the construction of the object: “‘Made of oak and elm. Elm is strong,’ Johannes says, as if this is the explanation his new wife has been waiting for. He looks at Marin. ‘It’s used for coffins.’”

In the same way, by positioning the following passage at the beginning of the narrative, the author already builds the tension for a birthing scene at the end, suggesting the possibility of a tragedy:

“The first time Nella bled, aged twelve, her mother told her that the purpose of that blood was ‘the security of children’. Nella never thought there was much to feel secure about, hearing the cries through the village of women in their labour pains, the coffins sometimes marched to church soon after.”

The Miniaturist may be well-written in some regards, but it suffers from serious structural problems and an infuriating protagonist. The miniaturist is an underdeveloped figure, completely dispensable, and the protagonist pales before her supporting characters. If Burton had eliminated from the novel the mystery regarding the miniaturist, and focused more on the historical drama, the book, at least, would have been more consistent.

January 31, 2020.

Review originally published in Portuguese on March 07, 2016.