Maes uses the space as domestic life, and especially the features of Dutch vernacular architecture, to focus on the two different women. Throughout the series, Maes explores the relationship between servants and employers by describing the household as a cluster of territories. The theme of clandestine goings-on in the household has particular resonance for Dutch culture because it suggests the potential breakdown of the domestic order, an issue that dominated the didactic literature so prevalent in seventeenth-century Holland. (p. 104 An entrance for the eyes).
Maes represents the problem in terms of the relationship between mistress/housewife and maid. He investigates the doubled or split person of a woman in a series of distinctive paintings featuring divided domestic interiors with the housewife situated between the flirtatious maid down in the kitchen and the refined guests above. The narrow tall Dutch house is often a setting parcelled out - as indeed was then happening to Dutch houses - for different roles. .
In a painting by Maes, the maid, with a cat, is in the kitchen making love, and a couple sit decorously upstairs. The markedly young housewife on her way, in place of the maid, to refill the wine pitcher is between two scenes, part of neither. Beside her are a map, a globe and the discarded outer jacket and sword of an unseen man. But which man and where? Upstairs or down? Indeed, her attitude (finger raised, and amused face turned out of the picture toward he viewer) seems less than a warning than a kind of amused invitation to collude with the kitchen goings-on. The pictorial handling does not warn or recommend, does not blame or praise, but instead registers the tensions in the social order of things. (p.63).
Maes was also experimenting with vistas and adjoining paintings of women at household tasks. In the intriguing Interior: Woman plucking a Duck, Maes uses the simple colour scheme of black, white and red, set off with deep shadows, that dominates the Eavesdropper series.
