A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism 9780199950980, 0199950989

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A TA S T E F O R C H I N A

GLOBAL ASIAS Eric Hayot, Series Editor

Foreign Accents Steven G. Yao

Lin Shu, Inc. Michael Hill

A Taste for China Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins

A TASTE FOR CHINA English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism

EUGENIA ZUROSKI JENKINS

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3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jenkins, Eugenia Zuroski. A taste for China : English subjectivity and the prehistory of Orientalism / Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins. p. cm. – (Global asias) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–995098–0 (acid-free paper) – ISBN 978–0–19–995099–7 1. English literature–18th century–History and criticism. 2. Orientalism in literature. 3. Chinese diaspora in literature. I. Title. PR448.O75J46 2013 820.9’3585–dc23 2012035654 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For my parents, who taught me to read.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Writing China into the English Self 1 1. The Cosmopolitan Nation, “Where Order in Variety We See” 16 2. The Chinese Touchstone of the Imagination 66 3. Defoe’s Trinkets: Fiction’s Spectral Traffic 105 4. “Nature to Advantage Drest”: The Poetry of Subjectivity 122 5. How Chinese Things Became Oriental 147 6. Disenchanting China: Orientalism and the English Novel 188 Afterword: Rethinking Modern Taste 214 Notes 219 Bibliography 257 Index 273

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It has taken many years to bring this project from inception to its current form, and I am indebted to a number of people for their mentorship, collegiality, and friendship during that time. Foremost among them is Nancy Armstrong, who guided me through the early stages of the project’s development and has remained a vital source of encouragement through its completion. Both she and Len Tennenhouse have served me as models of intellectual integrity and sociability, and I am immensely grateful to them for their tireless generosity on all fronts. I wrote this book while serving on three different faculties in two different countries. My colleagues at Haverford College and the University of Arkansas showed great hospitality and gave me necessary space to work. Research funding from the University of Arkansas allowed me to read primary texts at the Newberry Library as well as to travel to conferences. Of particular importance were annual ASECS and regional meetings, where I presented parts of the book in various stages of development and benefited from excellent feedback and conversation. I am grateful not only for the opportunity to participate in the communities of scholars assembled at these conferences, but also for the friendships the meetings have fostered. Bob Markley was especially helpful in helping me think through crucial parts of the present argument. Brycchan Carey helped see me through the transition from dissertating to book-writing. Kathleen Lubey has been a companion throughout the process of writing and publication, and I thank her for consistently reminding me how much I enjoy this work. Jason Solinger is perhaps my closest intellectual peer in the field since we jointly delved into eighteenth-century literature at Brown University. I finished the book since joining the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, where I have been met with kindness by ix

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a wonderful group of colleagues. Melinda Gough read parts of the manuscript and was essential in helping me see the book’s final shape. I owe special debts of gratitude to Peter Walmsley, who read an early version of the manuscript in its entirety, and Jacqueline Langille, who has assisted me in just about every aspect of my transition to a new home and job with relentless enthusiasm and good humor. While I cannot name individually all the students with whom I have worked while developing this project, it was with them that I most regularly exercised specific readings, arguments, and lines of thought, and I heartily thank the students from my undergraduate and graduate seminars over the years for helping me to generate and hone my ideas. A grant from the McMaster Arts Research Board enabled me to conduct research at several key institutions in London: the British Library, the British Museum, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. I could not have completed the research for this book without the assistance of the librarians at the John Hay Library at Brown University, the Newberry Library, the British Library, and the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum, as well as at my home institutions. I am also grateful to the V&A, the British Museum, and the Bodleian Library for their generous policies regarding the reproduction of images for academic books. The images in chapter 4 were produced by ProQuest as part of Early English Books Online. Early versions of chapters 3, 4, and 6 were previously published elsewhere: “Defoe’s Trinkets: Figuring Global Commerce in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in Global Economies, Cultural Currents of the Eighteenth Century, AMS Studies in the Eighteenth Century 64, edited by Michael RotenbergSchwartz; “‘Nature to Advantage Drest’: Chinoiserie, Aesthetic Form, and the Poetry of Subjectivity in Pope and Swift” in Eighteenth-Century Studies; and “Disenchanting China: Orientalism and the Aesthetics of Reason in the English Novel” in Novel: A Forum on Fiction. I wish to thank AMS Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, and Duke University Press for permission to reuse these materials, as well as their editors and readers for their attention to my work. The anonymous readers of my manuscript for Oxford University Press offered extremely thoughtful feedback and this book has benefited greatly from their responses. OUP editors Shannon McLachlan and Brendan O’Neill coordinated the reading and processing of the manuscript, and I thank them in particular for suggesting the book might be published as part of the Global Asias series. As the series editor, Eric Hayot has been extraordinarily receptive and helpful in the final stages of the book’s completion. I am delighted to be able to contribute to the series, and to see how it frames the work I have done in ways I have not yet imagined. I have been sustained throughout the writing process by the love and encouragement of family and friends. Douglas Brooks knew I would write

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

this book before I even knew I would major in English, and I am very sorry he is not here to read it. I never had a big sister until I met Shelia Collins; I don’t know how I ever survived without her. My father-in-law and late mother-in-law, Penny and Lynn Jenkins, understood from the start that their son was marrying a book-in-progress and regularly checked in on its development. My grandparents, George and Ruby Yuan, have been sources of books, stories, and inspiration for as long as I can remember. My younger sisters, Kathryn and Emma Zuroski, have endured more conversations about British literature than anyone should be required to, and yet have stayed close. My parents, Gregory and Patricia Zuroski, taught me how to read and think and have been an attentive and thoughtful audience for my ideas since I first started having them. I could not do this kind of work without their constant support. And at the center of my inner circle is Derek Jenkins, my best reader and favorite thinker—he and Ruby and Daisy Mae are all integral parts of my self.

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A TA S T E F O R C H I N A

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Introduction Writing China into the English Self This book offers an account of how literature of the long eighteenth century generated a model of English selfhood dependent on figures of China. Contrary to existing narratives of the relationship between China and Europe founded on the orientalist paradigm of “self ” and “other,”1 it shows how modern English selfhood first takes shape through strategies of identifying with rather than against certain forms of “China.” By the early nineteenth century, it was impossible to conceive of English identity without attendant notions of Chineseness. The form most privileged as an indication of Englishness is the chinoiserie object—the “thing Chinese.” Orientalism does not inform the literary incorporation of China into English self-definition, I argue, but is instead one of its most lasting effects. There are multiple well-established traditions of scholarship on the relationship between England and China, particularly in the fields of area studies, comparative literature, art history, and material culture studies. By suspending the assumption that China serves first and foremost as a figure of “otherness” in the English imagination, however, this literary study uses its key terms differently than they are used in these other fields. It reframes the meaning of “China” and “Chinese” from the way these terms are used in traditional area studies to refer to a unique national body and culture that can be studied comparatively to other cultures.2 Consequently, it shifts the meaning of terms like “chinoiserie,” “china,” and “chinaware” from their conventional use in material cultural and art histories, in order to attend to the fluidity and instability of their meaning in eighteenth-century literary texts. In traditional art historical and anthropological discourses, these terms are used to isolate particular objects that either originate in that place called China, and which embody the ethnic quality of Chineseness in the manner of an artifact, or are created outside of China in deliberate imitation of more authentic Chinese things. Identified through consistencies in aesthetic style, materials, and technique of manufacture, as well as documented histories 1

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INTRODUCTION

of sale and acquisition, they refer in art history specifically to decorative art objects that can be identified as either authentically or inauthentically “Chinese” depending on where they were made, and are interpreted primarily in terms of how and why they traveled from that point of origin to a final site of possession and display.3 By treating Chineseness as an English literary effect that is ascribed to objects rather than an ethnic quality that inheres in objects, my own use of the terms “chinoiserie” and (as it appears more often in eighteenth-century writing) “china” does not refer to any measure of cultural authenticity, but rather to the broad category of objects—including Chinese export commodities and comestibles, European manufactures in the same style, and their graphic and textual representations—recruited by English writing to represent a global world of goods whose circulation and consumption defined modern life. Reframing the category of “things Chinese” as a literary problem makes particular sense in the context of eighteenth-century culture, which predates the nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses of anthropology, commodity capitalism, and professional art expertise that inform our contemporary understanding of what objects are and how they work in cross-cultural circulation.4 In the eighteenth century, a broad range of literary texts—periodical essays, plays, poetry, personal diaries, prose fiction— assumed responsibility for defining the role of objects in English life, and collectively they present a diverse, contradictory, and shifting account of that role. Part of this complexity derives from the fact that different literary genres are themselves in competition for cultural authority in this period: plays and verse, periodical essays and prose romance variously vie and collaborate to speak for a culture in which print literature is itself an object of circulation and consumption. My readings of texts from the first half of the century reflect a dynamic understanding of chinoiserie generated by an equally dynamic field of literature in which different literary forms stake out varying, coexistent domains of authority in which to consider the cultural life of objects. Eventually, I demonstrate, the novel’s particular mode of representing daily life in England lays claim to “the real” by restricting how objects—Chinese objects in particular—are perceived in relation to subjects and as part of English culture in general. Taking a literary critical view of the eighteenth-century object, in other words, attends to the dynamics of “things” not yet fixed as art, artifacts, or commodities in the modern senses of these terms. Rather than privileging the materiality of the object as it is constituted through a history of manufacture, trade, and acquisition, I argue that material objects function as extensions of the literary text that addresses and incorporates them. As such, they are animated by literature to perform kinds of imaginative work in excess of their material histories.

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In contrast to the artifact, the performance of “Chineseness” I examine in these objects is not limited to “being Chinese.” In the early eighteenth century, China marked a range of things associated with new modes of consumption that test the stability of existent and emergent forms of English selfhood. These things Chinese channeled signs of cosmopolitan prestige traditionally possessed by the aristocracy into a growing market of goods available for purchase by a much wider range of people. Chinoiserie is identified in writing of the period with a kind of consumption that mimics diplomatic tribute and replaces inheritance as the foundation of identity. As I demonstrate in chapters 1 and 2, while there is a logic to this cultural reassignment (one that I trace specifically to the intervention of Locke in theories of selfhood), it proceeds unevenly across a variety of consumer practices, generating multiple versions of English consumers as well as Chinese objects of consumption. This variety is instrumental in literature’s project to identify, in the midst of this new field of cross-cultural acquisition, what part of modern consumption generates a discernable, reproducible form of Englishness on the modern world stage. The concept of “taste” arises from these literary experiments to distinguish a form of cosmopolitan identity based on consumption and acquisition. As I show in chapters 3 and 4, however, the category of taste remains as unstable as the literary and material objects that stimulate it, and cosmopolitan Englishness ultimately serves as a transitional category for literary considerations of English selfhood. Chapters 5 and 6 show how this category loses favor to more nationalist configurations as Chinese objects are rewritten as “oriental” things that pose an active threat to the English self who desires and consumes them. As literature claims responsibility for putting the English self in a mutually defining relationship with things Chinese in the eighteenth century, it consistently frames problems of national identity, global economy, and political power as privatized problems of taste, virtue, and individual desire. This book aims to show how this multifaceted strategy of literary experimentation ultimately yields a model of the modern subject: an individual in whom the desire for foreign things is organized as part of the privatized economy of sexuality and self-regulation.

SINOGRAPHY AND COSMOPOLITANISM

In its account of how English literature produced a version of the self that was filled with chinoiserie, this project is indebted both to studies of literature’s role in the invention of subjective interiority and to what Felicity Nussbaum has called “critical global studies,” which resituates Western culture “within

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INTRODUCTION

a spatially and conceptually expanded paradigm.”5 English letters’ increasingly concentrated effort to house identity within the imagined space of subjectivity, I suggest, was part of a cultural strategy to organize things Chinese as a fundamental element of English culture. The production of modern identity, in other words, looked inward and outward simultaneously in the eighteenth century. Writing China into English selfhood was one way of asserting England’s global relevance as a cosmopolitan nation. The prevalence of figures of China in English literature of this period is consistent with recent histories that emphasize the importance of the East to the development of modern European economies. Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. van Kley, Andre Gunder-Frank, and Kenneth Pomeranz have all offered compelling evidence that prior to the nineteenth century Europe participated in global economies both financial and cultural at a distinct disadvantage to Eastern empires, China in particular.6 In Pomeranz’s words, despite the reigning historiographical myths about Europe’s “rise” to modern industry and trade, there is “little reason to think that western Europeans were more productive than their contemporaries in various other densely populated regions of the Old World prior to 1750 or even 1800,”7 and Frank goes so far as to say that “if any economy had a ‘central’ position and role in the world economy and its possible hierarchy of ‘centers’ [before 1800] it was China.”8 How, then, are we to understand European expressions of superiority over China on political, economic, and cultural fronts—expressions that, as David Porter has demonstrated, subsumed more laudatory discourses over the course of the eighteenth century?9 By what logic did China’s preeminence on the world stage appear to recede so quickly that Hegel could claim that China lies “outside the World’s History,” that “everything that belongs to Spirit—unconstrained morality, in practice and theory, heart, inward Religion, Science and Art properly so-called—is alien to it,” in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History in the 1820s?10 Porter argues that, far from reflecting ignorance, such attempts to “write China out of history” in European discourse constitute “an act of instrumental amnesia: a deliberate occlusion of rival claimants to exemplarity, and of the memory of a more truly cosmopolitan early modern past.”11 Recovering that cosmopolitan past depends not only on revisionist histories but also on new modes of historiography attuned to the ways knowledge of the world is translated into knowledge of the self.12 The orientalist antagonism toward China that pervades nineteenth-century European thought and continues to the present13 is preceded by two centuries of what Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao call “sinographies”: writing that uses the figure of China or Chineseness to organize thought itself. The act of writing “China” in English does more than introduce a representation that may be adjudicated true or false; it weaves a concept of China into the very possibility of thinking in English

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about anything, including—significantly—Englishness itself.14 Thus when Mill invokes China as a “warning example” of the kind of national stagnation that attends cultural homogeneity in 1859’s On Liberty, deliberately writing China out of his theory of modern individual freedom, he participates in the ongoing project of writing China into the fundamental rhythms and cadences of English thought.15 In order to attend fully to the ways in which China is written out of Western modernity, we must simultaneously cultivate an understanding of how China is written into it. In this vein, recent work by Porter, Robert Markley, Chi-ming Yang, and others has shown that early eighteenth-century British literature does not yet insist on the “unwriting” of China as part of the production of modernity—that, on the contrary, in many cases British culture of this period takes pains to write China into its self-representation.16 Eighteenth-century English literature’s efforts to negotiate cosmopolitan self-awareness with emergent forms of nationalism find expression in repeated but inconsistent invocations of China. In various forms including travelogues, fantasy fiction, landscape design, decorative objects, and emergent domestic rituals such as tea-drinking, things Chinese are systematically incorporated into the everyday material and mental lives of English subjects. The meanings generated by English chinoiserie, however, remain unstable, and the archive of representations of China is convoluted and self-contradictory. As Markley has demonstrated in his readings of the siniphobic strains of Defoe’s fiction, the eighteenth century saw English writers disavowing China’s domination of both the English imagination and trade economy in the very moment the culture appears to register that dominance.17 Yang identifies China as a central figure in what she calls “early modern orientalism,” which is “a structure of ambivalence [in British literature] resulting from the desire for East Indies markets and the encounter with their superior moral and economic example.”18 China’s remarkable “plasticity of representation,” she argues, was precisely what made it such a fruitful figure for mediating transitional models of value for early modern Britons, allowing it to “exemplif[y] fundamental contradictions of British consumer society by testing the changing boundaries between virtue and vice.”19 The period traditionally known to students of English literature and philosophy as the Enlightenment—the moment when English culture begins the project of self-conscious modernization—is thus also the period in which a recognizable notion of China (or, more accurately, a variety of them, overlapping and competing) becomes part of the very experience of being English.20 Far from consolidating any singular model of Englishness, these multiple versions of China sustain a version of English identity that is itself variable and ambivalent. When we recognize the conspicuous place of chinoiserie objects in eighteenth-century modes of European self-presentation,21 literary and

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INTRODUCTION

philosophical “sinographies” overlap provocatively with the questions posed by recent scholarship in literary and cultural “thing studies.”22 In Bill Brown’s words: “What are the poetics and the politics of the object? How do objects mediate relationships between subjects, and how do subjects mediate the relation between objects? How are things and thingness used to think about the self?”23 Eighteenth-century English culture was particularly fascinated with the relationship between objects and subjective life, and the ability of writing to negotiate this relationship, as evidenced in the proliferation of “it-narratives” or stories told by things and non-human animals. Barbara M. Benedict has suggested that eighteenth-century writing about material things reveals a rather haunted version of selfhood and objecthood alike, one that perceives the boundaries of the self as fluid, contingent, and attached to forms of life that exceed personal boundaries.24 With regard to things Chinese in particular, what Benedict calls the “spirit of things” offers one way of understanding how an emergent cosmopolitan sensibility is negotiated in and through material objects. The “Chinese object” is animated by its imagined relationship, on the one hand, to an invisible but palpable realm called “China,” which itself stands synecdochically for a concept of “the world” as an arena of unseen powers that bear on English life, and, on the other, to the English person who cultivates a real relationship to the object through processes of perception, collection, sensory interaction, and display. As part of our analysis of literature’s ability to mediate and generate such relationships, might the integration of meaningful objects into English life through everyday practice be considered itself a kind of “writing”? And if so, who is the author—subject, object, or the “spirit” of cross-cultural encounter that brings them into meaningful relation to one another? These are the specific questions that compelled the present study: how does English literature negotiate a relationship between Chinese things and English subjects in eighteenth-century culture, a relationship that replicates itself in material spaces beyond the written page, and how does this relationship generate modern forms of identity? If, as Julie Park has argued, “in an age of Enlightenment, things indeed have the power to . . . enable a genre of selfhood,”25 then how is this power organized, mobilized, and deployed? Do things Chinese, as they and the people who consume them are incorporated into literature, generate only one genre of English selfhood, or multiple ones? Do we recognize these forms of selfhood today? My argument is less concerned with counteracting the effects of Britain’s apparent anti-Chinese turn in the late eighteenth century26 than with accounting for this turn as part of the organization of modern English subjectivity—a subjectivity that does not only “include” some aspect of Chineseness in its constitution, but that is itself an effect of the sinographies examined in the chapters that follow.

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I argue that figures of China are not merely one of many strains of globally oriented thought in the cosmopolitan culture of early modern England, but that they are fundamental to English literature’s ability to represent and reflect on itself as a cosmopolitan culture at all. “China” in this context refers to much more than another nation, empire, or culture; it refers metonymically to an emergent notion of the global, something in relation to which England is situated, and by which Englishness must be measured and tested. Thus while it foregrounds the way eighteenth-century English thought privileges multiple forms of China, this study does not reproduce China as an isolated, essentialized object that exercises a mysteriously unique hold on the Western imagination. Rather than suggesting that there is something inherent to China or goods from China that made them especially rich for thought experiments in English culture, I propose that various figures of China were generated and organized by English writing to refer to globalization and cosmopolitanism more broadly; as literary effects, the categories of Chinese and English emerge together and operate in harmony to orient English considerations of the world at large, especially England’s place and the English subject’s role in it.27 The “Chineseness” of “things Chinese” is, in other words, something that English literature ascribes to them, not something the things themselves introduce into the culture. If, as I argue, what it means to be English in these texts is unthinkable without a concept of China, then it is important to recognize that these texts generate their own versions of China and Chineseness for this purpose.

OTHER ORIENTALISMS

These questions reframe some of the primary concerns of cultural and political history as distinctly literary critical problems, premised on the claim that the subjects and objects that populate English culture are literary innovations. Tracing the variable terms of this relationship from the Restoration to the early nineteenth century, I argue that English literature’s gradual shift from privileging aristocratic cosmopolitanism to favoring an orientalist nationalism as the foundation of English identity was pursued as a matter of defining subject via objects. These claims reconsider some of the assumptions we make about the categories of West and East, as well as of subject and object, in the wake of postcolonial theory and in particular Edward Said’s critique of orientalism as the hegemonic discourse of modern Western imperialism. Turning to literature’s role in generating these categories allows us to see more clearly the discursive processes by which

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they have come to structure Western self-definition, or what I am calling their “prehistory.” To some extent, then, this book joins a conversation about the role of postcolonial critique in readings of nascent imperial cultures of eighteenth-century Europe. As Suvir Kaul notes, postcolonial criticism does not limit itself to the historical “afterlife” of colonialism; in its analysis of the cultural logic as well as the material institutions of empire, it must include the history of empire-formation in its purview. From a postcolonial critical perspective, we have been able to observe how imperial aspirations and processes of colonization both material and imaginative contribute to “the domestic political and economic consolidation of the nation” in early modern Europe long before those nations are able to claim imperial global dominance.28 At the same time, these early modern European cultures productively call into question many of the historical assumptions that attend a postcolonial perspective. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa observe “the perils of anachronism” in relying on postcolonial theory to read the Enlightenment: “Many of the concepts (ambiguity, hybridity, mimicry) and forms (nation, race, gender) that today anchor postcolonial theory rely on categories of difference that not only do not remain stable across time and space, but also do not exist in a recognizably ‘modern’ form during the Enlightenment. The myriad shapes assumed by early imperial enterprises challenge any attempt to make generalizations about the history of colonialism.”29 By allowing the terms “postcolonial” and “Enlightenment” to reflect critically on one another, we might, on the one hand, reveal the extent to which the “Enlightened” states and subjects of eighteenth-century Europe belong to the political order of empire, and, on the other, historicize the formation of that political order. In Carey and Festa’s words, “The need for sustained engagement between histories of eighteenth-century colonial activity, Enlightenment, and postcolonial theory arises from an imperative to think through how the relative value of these forms of difference is produced, not just what these forms of difference might be . . . The point is not to reify what constitutes identities in order to compare them, but to address how they are made, examining processes of differentiation rather than celebrating difference” (25). This imperative has exerted considerable pressure on the term “orientalism” as it entered our critical vocabulary following Said’s seminal critique. Saidian orientalism is strictly binary: “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’”30 In order to demonstrate both the breadth and depth of orientalist discourse as a mode of Western self-awareness and political practice (“the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically,

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sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively”), Said focused specifically on the “post-Enlightenment period” beginning in the late eighteenth century (3). Postcolonial readings of eighteenth-century European culture have identified an equally broad and profound preoccupation with notions of the East or Orient, but one that lacks the infrastructure of imperial expansion and governance as well as the singular purpose of generating stable forms of Oriental difference as part of a unilateral deployment of colonial power. Recently, Srinivas Aravamudan has coined the term “Enlightenment Orientalism” to contrast eighteenth-century uses of the imagined East with those emphasized by Said. “Enlightenment Orientalism,” Aravamudan writes, “was not ‘a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient’ but a fictional mode for dreaming with the Orient—dreaming with it by constructing and translating fictions about it, pluralizing views over it, inventing it, by reimagining it, unsettling its meaning, brooding over it. In short, Enlightenment Orientalism was a Western style for translating, anatomizing, and desiring the Orient.”31 Specifically eschewing terms like “pre-Orientalism” and “pseudo-Orientalism” in order to resist a teleological model of the rise of orientalism, Aravamudan introduces instead a pluralization of orientalism’s functions. To historicize Saidian orientalism is, in this case, to consider the existence of other orientalisms at work in European culture. The forms of “China” through which England reflected on itself as a cosmopolitan nation in the eighteenth century constitute one of these other orientalisms: a fictional mode of experimenting with English selfhood by imagining it in relation to versions of the East that exceed a strict or stable “otherness.”32 While the argument of this book thus complements Aravamudan’s, I reserve the use of the term “orientalism” to describe the phenomenon identified by Said. One of the aims of this book is to offer an account of the relationship between the Enlightenment-era “taste for China” and nineteenth-century orientalism. This account takes the shape of a genealogical prehistory rather than a teleological history: literature’s cosmopolitan integration of China into English selfhood, I argue, creates the conditions that enabled the binary model of orientalist thought to emerge into dominance by the early nineteenth century, but it does not singularly “lead to” or cause its institution. As I elaborate below, a genealogical model recognizes not only how earlier modes of affiliation between Chinese things and English selves anticipate nineteenth-century orientalism, but also how they do not—the ways in which eighteenth-century theories of taste generate alternative concepts of English and Chinese, West and East, subject and object, that must be variously disavowed by or rewritten into compliance with modern orientalism as part of its emergence into hegemony.

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INTRODUCTION

A particular kind of literary history, this study thus departs from the presumptions of traditional historiography in the story it tells about the co-emergence of modern orientalism and subjectivity. Instead of mining eighteenth-century culture for signs that these phenomena are on the “rise,” it approaches the question of English subjectivity through the Foucaultian model of genealogy, a critical narrative that traces the “descent” of a figure rather than seeking its “origins.”33 The narrative I offer of early modern English selfhood, while it does present both positive and negative representations of chinoiserie, contains neither champions nor villains in its account of how Chineseness comes to be written into English identity—only participants, either witting or unwitting. Rather than establish traditions of thought, it seeks to identify what Foucault calls “points of emergence”: fantasies and convictions, images and figures, that articulate local logics of self and other in the “endlessly repeated play of dominations” that constitutes human history.34 Thus many of the examples I offer as part of the multifaceted and heterogeneous emergence of modern subjectivity are wrested from an “original” context—the specific arguments and conversations they once serviced, for example, or the traditions to which they have been conventionally assigned by histories of literature and ideas—in order to resituate them as part of other streams of cultural thought. Indeed, Foucault insists that genealogy reveals how the struggle for dominance among ideas within the rule-bound system of culture generates once unimaginable victories. This book argues that British literature consistently imagines English selves and Chinese things in meaningful relationship to one another throughout the long eighteenth century in the service of some version of English “rule,” be it aristocratic prestige, individual taste, national coherence, or the institution of modernity. But the particulars of that relationship and the meanings it generates are unstable and shift from moment to moment as emergent logics are seized, perverted, inverted, and redirected by and in service of new regimes of power. In particular, I follow the uneven struggle for dominance between, on the one hand, an aristocracy reinventing itself and its mode of displaying status in the context of cosmopolitan commerce, and, on the other, new categories of English subjects defined by wealth but not necessarily by blood, for whom things Chinese represent both the possibility of new forms of self-fashioning, and the perils of playing too freely or tastelessly with material status symbols. The narrative thread of these competing eighteenth-century sinographies runs through the period’s debates on taste, status, national definition, and cultural identity, but it does not respect their warp and woof. The forms of subjectivity I illuminate here are thus very much eighteenth-century English innovations, but not necessarily the ideas their authors thought they were having.

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THE MATERIALS OF MODERN SUBJECTIVITY

This book suggests that, like subjectivity, orientalism is a narrative rather than a static category—a story about what it means to be English that literature begins telling well before the zenith of British Empire. The orientalism introduced to our critical vocabulary by Said acquires its salient features during the eighteenth century, I argue, as the English turned to the twin tasks of replacing the rituals of an international aristocracy with new consumer practices and authorizing a new ruling class that came from money but not from blood. These people, who bought their “china” and other appointments of person and property rather than inheriting them, prefigure the nineteenth-century middle class. Placing eighteenth-century commerce and consumption practices in the context of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and epistemological inquiry, this study traces the gradual shift in the English imagination from “Chinese” (which is an essential component of English identity) to “oriental” (which is antithetical to English identity). As this book demonstrates, the prehistory of orientalism is very much a part of the literary history of material things in English life. Prior to the eighteenth century, English identity was borne in material possessions only insofar as those objects were passed down as part of an aristocratic inheritance, following the model of Habsburg household property discussed in chapter 1. This relationship between people and property underwent a radical transformation as the reigning paradigm for understanding the world shifted in Europe from one based on resemblance and kinship to one based on order and distinction, a shift Foucault locates in the late seventeenth century.35 John Locke was thinking in terms of such a paradigm when he postulated the human mind as an initially empty space that comes to be “furnished” with ideas through the dual processes of taking in sensory information from the outside world and turning this variety of information into a hierarchical set of ideas that mirrored the order of the world. The subject of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is defined not by inherited qualities but by the ability to acquire knowledge based on sensations of an external object world and, in this sense, to make those objects part of the self. The Chinese things that furnished English households in the eighteenth century indicated a similar mode of accumulation. The well-furnished home and the well-furnished mind were mutually sustaining: the personal property one possessed—which included the body—objectified the orderly mind, which was in turn (according to Locke) furnished by sensations of the object world converted into ideas and appropriately hierarchized. Between the mind and the domestic interior, the “improved subject” of the Enlightenment took shape: a subject who is made rather than born, and whose virtues and wealth

12

INTRODUCTION

are visible on the surface and in the behavior of the body, as well as in the selection and arrangement of material possessions. Chinese objects, privileged early on as signs of England’s participation in a Chinese-dominated global marketplace and European cosmopolitanism, played an important role in the composition of an English subject defined by improvement and social intercourse rather than by innate qualities of the body and mind. The eighteenth-century literature on chinoiserie comes to naturalize this mode of material accumulation and the relationship it sustained between people and things—initially an elite, cosmopolitan exercise—as the foundation of normative domestic life. Chinese things, too, are housed by the discourse at the very heart of normative Englishness. Chapter 1 offers an account of how, following the logic of Lockean subjectivity, English literature extended cosmopolitan commercial practices into a model of individual and collective English identity—an identity whose reliance on internal variety made “Chineseness” an essential component of the English self. At the same time, however, the literature reveals that the concepts of China and chinoiserie were also capable of challenging the ideology of the highly individuated and self-governing subject as it achieved hegemonic status. In a social order in which individuals were identified by the extent to which they did or did not “improve” themselves in and through the sensations and objects accumulated, Chinese objects served as the measure of a person’s taste and judgment, precisely because they demanded to be imported and incorporated into English culture—that is, to be made English. Chapter 2 shows how forms of chinoiserie such as porcelain, furniture, and tea operate in Restoration comedy and early eighteenth-century journal and periodical literature as ambiguous and changeable objects made either beautiful by tasteful management or grotesque by the lack of judgment in acquiring and integrating them into the household. Though essential to English taste, Chinese things consistently presented the possibility that they might “take over” and change the nature of the person whose taste they were supposed to reflect. As soon as a market in Chinese things took hold in England, the specter of unregulated chinoiserie provoking unnatural desires, particularly in women, posed a threat to English individualism. During the first half of the eighteenth century, this threat was used to rhetorical advantage in popular literary genres for purposes of emphasizing the power of English taste to merge the Chinese object with and subordinate it to the English character. As I trace the genealogy of chinoiserie’s relationship to English subjectivity, I show how, over the course of the eighteenth century, the role things Chinese played in the composition of the subject underwent a decisive shift from positive to negative. Once the mark of individual improvement, Chinese objects came to represent the internal instability of English identity,

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as chinoiserie became an indication that English subjectivity might contain something foreign to itself. This shift in the figurative properties of china is, I emphasize, not a simple transition from positive to negative, but rather the chiasmatic movement of a figure that always had two valences. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the role of chinoiserie in defining English subjects in, first, the early novel represented by the fiction of Defoe, and, second, the dressing-room poems of Pope and Swift. In different ways, both adventure fiction and satirical poetry focus on chinoiserie objects to construct, question, and reimagine the dynamic relationship between people and things. They also explicitly consider the role of literature in negotiating that relationship, and of situating English subjects formed by commerce and domestic ritual within an imagined global framework. Shifting my focus from the first half of the century to the second, in chapter 5 I examine various literary efforts to pry apart the intimate relationship between Chinese things and English subjects established by earlier traditions of letters. Where the exemplary English subject of the early eighteenth century incorporated Chinese things, converting them—according to the positive paradigm of China—into cultural capital, literature of the later eighteenth century defined the English subject as variously vulnerable to and resistant to things and qualities Chinese. This shift, I argue, is part of a broader effort to redefine the relationship of “nature” to social order in the interest of purging residual forms of aristocratic power from modern forms of English subjectivity. That Chineseness should come to represent the external limits of this new form of English identity, however, only served to maintain the importance of the figure to the coherence of Englishness. Even when the category of the Chinese is abjected from the normative English self, it remains active in various forms. In particular, I argue, the disavowal of an aristocratic enthrallment with Chinese objects from modern English selfhood effectively introduces the possibility of modern sexuality. Chapter 6 shows how a particular literary genre assumes responsibility for naturalizing this reorganization of English culture, demonstrating how the late eighteenth-century novel produces a notion of modern English “reality” by generating formal, generic boundaries marked by orientalism. This final chapter argues that the domestic novel took shape around the project of splitting the category of Chinese things in two, disenchanting one and orientalizing the other. Disenchanted china becomes naturalized to the novel’s “realistic” or normative representations of English life, while orientalized china is consigned along with other “unnatural” fantasies to disavowed genres of English self-representation. Modern subjectivity, I conclude, is an effect of the mental labor an individual invests in policing the boundary between these categories, which are organized in the novels of Jane Austen as part of a developmental narrative: oriental romance is relegated to the

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INTRODUCTION

past in the form of childhood fantasy, while novelistic realism takes its place as the only true or mature representation of the modern present. Neither a survey nor a comprehensive “history of ideas,” this book seeks to illuminate the mutually constitutive relationship between English selves and Chinese things in its various manifestations throughout the long eighteenth century, not in service of excavating a neglected tradition, but in order to show that the seemingly stable categories of East and West that structure English self-definition from the nineteenth century onwards are in fact products of dynamic and counterintuitive lines of earlier thought. This study considers things Chinese not simply as objects of desire and consumption, but as a literary medium that organized new epistemologies, new forms of socialization, and, ultimately, new subjectivities in the early modern period. The intimacy forged between chinoiserie objects and English subjects in literature of the early part of the century provided a model of imaginative intercourse between people and things that continued to govern the relationship between readers and literary texts even when those texts started insisting that Chinese things no longer be part of the equation of English identity. Modern orientalism emerges in large part, I argue, as a strategy for disavowing older forms of English culture, specifically cosmopolitanism, as Great Britain’s material status in the world changes; “the Oriental” that is so vehemently resisted by the nineteenth-century English subject is, in fact, an eighteenth-century Englishness. In addition to the field of global studies, this project belongs to a body of eighteenth-century scholarship that investigates configurations of identity that predate what Dror Wahrman identifies as the “modern self ”: “a very particular understanding of personal identity, one that presupposes an essential core of selfhood characterized by psychological depth, or interiority, which is the bedrock of unique, expressive individual identity.”36 There is something attractive to us as subjects of the twenty-first century, wellschooled in critiques of the mythology of “modern selfhood,” in the very idea that three centuries back, there lives a culture of dis-integrated—or, rather, not-yet-integrated—subjects akin to ourselves. This enthusiasm has only increased, I think, with the added insight that the particular dynamics of early eighteenth-century selfhood have much to do with the period’s investment in “globalization,” with which we also identify. The extensive work that has been done in distinguishing English culture of the long eighteenth century from both the Renaissance and the Victorian era, and the peculiar combination of alterity and familiarity that our critical narratives of the period present to modern readers, may encourage us at times to think of the eighteenth century as a postmodern ideal (caveats about standards of hygiene notwithstanding)—an antediluvian version of ourselves that enjoyed shopping without transnational corporate dominance, popular entertainment

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without television, public spheres without the internet, globalization without the legacies of imperialism, the “pleasures of the imagination” without the guilty conscience of middle-class hegemony. Such fantasies are as much a self-centered projection of ourselves onto another culture as the “ahistorical reading” we perpetually resist. I present this “prehistory” not to escape the orientalism that is inextricably part of what China means to Western subjectivity now, but to tell a story that shows how hegemonic forms like the East/ West binary emerge in unexpected places, just as categories like “Chinese” and “English” live and operate in unexpected forms. I offer a narrative of a cultural moment in order to suggest that culture is best understood as narrative: there is no going back to “how things were,” but there are different ways of proceeding if we deliberately make our various histories—even the unexpected ones—part of our present selves.

1 The Cosmopolitan Nation, “Where Order in Variety We See” There is no Place in the Town which I so much love to frequent as the Royal-Exchange. It gives me a secret Satisfaction, and in some measure gratifies my Vanity, as I am an Englishman, to see so rich an assembly of Countrymen and Foreigners consulting together upon the private Business of Mankind, and making this Metropolis a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth. —Joseph Addison, Spectator 69 (May 19, 1711)1

Joseph Addison’s famous homage in the pages of The Spectator to the Royal Exchange as a hub of global commerce and social exchange directs us to the problem of a cosmopolitan nationalism: how does London’s capacity to contain “so rich an assembly of Countrymen and Foreigners” gratify a particularly English vanity? What is so English, in other words, about this spectacle of diversity? To some degree, Addison highlights the Exchange in the interest of a Whig party effort to transfer English political power from the ownership of land to commercial wealth and to relocate the seat of political authority from the court to the commercial metropolis. As London merchants tapped into increasingly profitable foreign trades, Whig political ideology held up this investment in imported wealth as good, even vital, to the English nation. The Spectator played its own role in this national redistribution of power to an ever-wider readership along its own channels of the trade in print, as it efficiently disseminated an image of London as an “emporium for the whole Earth” to a growing body of consumers outside of London. The periodical’s audience was connected by the very act of reading to the power of that “emporium”—the circulation of goods, information, and various forms of wealth that the London Exchange kept in motion. While it gratified Addison’s English vanity to observe the Exchange in action, it also gratified

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the sensibilities of an emergent body of English readers who partook of his pleasure by reading about it. But the notion that trade and commerce were fundamental components of a new national ideal was not limited to Whig political propaganda. In fact, on both sides of the Whig/Tory divide, the dominant idiom for the ascendance of a newly powerful England on the world scene paired commercial cosmopolitanism with national identity. Works such as Alexander Pope’s Windsor-Forest (1713), for example, suggested that cosmopolitanism might expand the domain of more traditional forms of English political power. Pope’s poem, which celebrates the reign of Queen Anne as the restoration of the Stuart line to the throne, envisions a Great Britain defined by a combination of the power of the English monarch and the forces of global trade. Through the figure of Augusta, who personifies London as the offspring of the peace-making Anne and the Neptune-like Father Thames, the poem imagines London as the meeting-point of court and commercial power. The lavish buildings that display London’s profits as a center of world trade appear here as a “new Whitehall,” replacing the traditional seat of monarchical power that had burned down in 1698: Hail Sacred Peace! hail long-expected Days, That Thames’s Glory to the Stars shall raise! ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... Behold! Augusta’s glitt’ring Spires increase, And Temples rise, the beauteous Works of Peace. I see, I see where two fair Cities bend Their ample Bow, a new White-Hall ascend! There mighty Nations shall inquire their Doom, The World’s great Oracle in Times to come; There Kings shall sue, and suppliant States be seen Once more to bend before a British Queen.2

In this case it is the British Queen rather than the Spectator’s Englishman whose vanity is gratified by the sight of representatives of foreign nations gathering in London. In both instances, however, London emerges as the site where tribute is paid by foreign trade embassies. From both sides of the Whig/Tory binary, Spectator 69 and Windsor-Forest define the metropolis of London as a cosmopolis and locate English national identity there. Through the mythological figure of Augusta, Pope’s poem places Addison’s notion of London as an “Emporium for all the Earth” within a new national allegory that situates England at the heart of an empire built on global trade. In this vision of the nation, England takes its place at the center of the world by taking in all manner of people and things from the

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outside. England stands out among all other nations because it contains all other nations; it comes into its own as a national power to the extent that it imports materials—the stuff of the nation—from beyond its national borders. This particular vision of England, in which cosmopolitanism and national identity are not in conflict but rather work in concert, enabled the emergence of a national culture based on the acquisition and display of imported objects—a culture, in other words, that identified the nation with the display of acquired, foreign things within English spaces. In historical context, the grandiosity of Pope’s and even Addison’s representations of London in the early decades of the eighteenth century must be seen as hopeful, or perhaps strategically speculative, since England arguably had not yet achieved the level of commercial superiority these pieces boast. During the Restoration period, England competed with Portugal and the Netherlands in the pursuit of Asian trade relations; by the close of the War of Spanish Succession in 1714, it had established itself as a rival but had by no means displaced the Dutch as the reigning European presence in the East Indies. According to historian Holden Furber, the English posed no lasting threat to Dutch power until they consolidated direct trade connections in China by establishing an English factory at Canton over the period from 1713 to 1744.3 This victory itself serves as a reminder that, even in the mid-eighteenth century, European global significance was still determined largely by Chinese favor. As economic historian Andre Gunder Frank has argued, to the extent that a “global economy” existed before 1800, it was based in Asia and controlled by China; European ventures in the Pacific Ocean were aimed at participating in this long-established network, not necessarily overtaking it.4 Only in the second half of the eighteenth century were “European empires of trade east of the Cape of Good Hope . . . transformed into empires of conquest” among which “the British became predominant.”5 This historical timeline begs the question of just how England changed so rapidly, in the years between 1660 and 1750, from a war-torn nation struggling to keep up with various continental European kingdoms in the cultivation of Eastern trade relations, to a rising power of the Western world establishing the foundations of a global empire. I suggest that this remarkable transformation—both material and representational—is due largely to the way England adopted European trends of aristocratic cosmopolitanism not merely as signs of traditional noble status, but as the foundation of a new kind of national identity. This is not the reactionary or outwardly defensive nationalism emphasized by Linda Colley6 and Gerald Newman,7 but rather a radical reconfiguration of the very concept of nation from a body maintained by native bloodlines to something more like the mind theorized by John Locke: a capacity to import external objects in the form of ideas, and an

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ability to identify with their orderly and meaningful arrangement. Like the modern subject organized around Locke’s model of “human understanding,” this type of nation thrives on the incorporation and internalization of “otherness,” in the form of things originally external to it; it is sustained not by assimilation but by difference, in the form of harmonious mixture. In this chapter, I trace this shift in the concept of an English nation, demonstrating how, at the height of this moment of cosmopolitan nationalism, the figure of China, as embodied in Chinese objects, came to signify modern English identity. I refer to a “moment” rather than a stage or era because, as I hope to show, British culture in the long eighteenth century is best understood as a series of competing trends, positions, and models of selfhood both collective and individual; rather than progressing from one ideology to another in a steady march toward modernity, various concepts of Englishness and Britishness emerge out of fluctuating lines of thought that generate new definitions by remixing inherited materials. My historical perspective is that described by Kathleen Wilson, from which “‘Englishness’ . . . appears to be less a stable and eternal entity . . . than a continually contested terrain, a ‘sign of difference’ the specific meanings of which [depend] upon the contexts of its articulations.”8 Building on Wilson’s formulation, I examine here a moment in this ongoing contest in which, paradoxically, the most stable version of “Englishness” is one founded on principles of multiplicity, change, and difference. Far from weakening collective notions of national coherence, various models of heterogeneity—emerging from political, scientific, and aesthetic discourses alike—serve momentarily to consolidate recognizable forms of Englishness in the context of cultural, political, and economic transformation. As an ideal, this cosmopolitan Englishness sits suspended between, on the one hand, Renaissance ideals of national coherence based on physiological qualities borne in the blood of nobility and royalty, and, on the other, the nationalist trends of the later eighteenth century focused on common rallying points that distinguished Britons from a vast and growing variety of “others.”9 The cosmopolitan nation momentarily displaced traditional modes of identifying the English self in favor of models of heterogeneity and self-transformation, and while this new, dynamic Englishness was only temporarily the preferred way of imagining the nation, waning by the mid-eighteenth century, it remained the predominant way of understanding the individual as an expression of a complex, internal subjectivity well into the nineteenth century and beyond. The suspension of sameness as the basis of English identity in the early eighteenth century, which Colley, Newman, and others have treated as a national identity crisis,10 I propose to be a moment of innovation, when, in the process of trying to redefine the nation, English culture introduced the basic structure of modern subjectivity.

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In this chapter, I argue that English literature figures China as a fundamental component of this emergent English identity. This is not as strange an assertion today as it may have seemed only ten years ago. It is an observation broadly enabled by the critical turn to the “global” as a mode of framing eighteenth-century cultures—“to resituate eighteenth-century studies,” Felicity A. Nussbaum writes, “within a spatial and conceptually expanded paradigm” that allows us to “analyze the European encounter with other populations throughout the world” and, at the same time, to “query the boundaries of national histories and literatures that have limited our understandings.”11 It is an argument particularly indebted to recent work by Robert Markley, David Porter, Chi-ming Yang, and others emphasizing the European preoccupation with China in the early modern period.12 These studies demonstrate not only how large China loomed in the early modern English imagination, but also how traditional European historiography, both colonialist and postcolonialist, relies on certain assumptions of European power and postures of superiority that have obscured the importance of China to Europe before 1800—not as a potential colony or a mere source of goods, but as a reigning world power, a political and cultural ideal. By figuring China into the equation of early modern English self-definition, I aim to show how England’s apparent ambivalence toward “Englishness” itself in the early eighteenth century—its surprising disavowals of native qualities alongside the more grandiose expressions of national and imperial power we have come to expect from Great Britain—represents a culture’s canny way of laying imaginary claim to a world that it does not yet materially possess. Before England could conceive of projecting itself into the world, and onto other nations, in the fashion of an empire, it had to imagine itself capable of taking the world into itself while remaining identifiably English.

MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU: AN ENGLISH COSMOPOLITANISM

Addison’s and Pope’s literary monuments to a cosmopolitan ideal—one economic, one political—are also homages to English power. Both texts suggest that in early eighteenth-century England, cosmopolitanism and more local forms of identification were not necessarily in conflict. Becoming a citizen of the world, in other words, did not counteract or override one’s English status—if Mr. Spectator’s “vanity” is any indication, it may even have enhanced it. Margaret C. Jacob notes that although “by the eighteenth century the [European trade] exchanges, in particular the famous one in London, were hailed as symbols and realities of the cosmopolitan,” these markets “displayed varying degrees of cosmopolitan

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expansiveness depending upon both internal and external factors.”13 London’s Royal Exchange was, by European standards, a relatively nonviolent and orderly commercial space by the late seventeenth century, but this order was, according to Jacob, the result of heavy regulation and policing, not the natural outcome of free commerce across cultural boundaries.14 Cosmopolitanism as a local practice, in other words, required the enabling discipline of English state power. Windsor-Forest acknowledges precisely this point by attributing cosmopolitan peace and plenty not to trade itself but to the monarch under whose effective reign trade flourishes. It thus seems quite possible that participants in the Exchange’s activity would have registered the forces of cosmopolitan interaction and English governance simultaneously, even as one. In order to understand how early modern subjects negotiated multiple frames of self-identification, we need to distinguish between what David Porter has called “historical cosmopolitanism,” which is a critical perspective that resists the nationalist trends of traditional European historiography by taking a broader view “of the contemporaneity of historical time across national and cultural boundaries,”15 and historically specific forms of cosmopolitanism as strategic self-fashioning. Certainly the former helps us perceive the latter. But I want to emphasize, through the following reading of the letters of Mary Wortley Montagu, that in the context of early eighteenth-century English culture cosmopolitanism was not necessarily embraced as an alternative to nationalism; rather, it was posited in various ways, and from various political positions, as a way of improving English nationalism, bringing it up to date with rival European cultures, and attuning it to a growing body of knowledge of the global world. Older versions of English nationalism might indeed be suspended or dismissed by the cosmopolitan, but they were replaced with modernized ways of imagining the nation in a position of global privilege. Montagu’s letters bring these uses of cosmopolitanism into focus. One of the most eloquent observers of foreign cultures from an English perspective, Montagu offers close descriptions of local fashions and habits that reveal as much about her own interpretive tools as a literate woman of the English aristocracy as they do about the cultures she describes. In a 1716 letter to her sister, Montagu remarks of the women in Dresden: The Saxon Ladys ressemble the Austrian no more than the Chinese those of London. They are very genteelly dress’d after the French and English modes, and have gennerally pritty faces, but [they are] the most determin’d Minaudieres in the whole world. They would think it a mortal sin against good breeding if they either spoke or mov’d in a natural manner. They all affect a little soft Lisp and a pritty pitty pat step, which female frailtys ought,

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however, to be forgiven ’em in favour of their civility and good nature to strangers, which I have a great deal of reason to praise.16

The tone is typical of Montagu’s letters from abroad: perceiving the finest details of dress and deportment, she is critical, even satirical, with regard to “frailties” exposed in foreign aristocratic habits but careful to praise proper adherence to universal codes of presentation and hospitality. She frames these observations and evaluations by a matrix of cultural touchstones that outlines the formal boundaries of the European cosmopolitan imagination: from London in the west to China in the east lies a world containing vast difference, yet belonging to a natural order that allows one to understand specific cultures with reference to the whole. London and China are presented here as polar opposites, but they belong to the same cosmic order, and together establish a universal standard of comprehensible cultural variety. An English reader who has never met a Saxon or Austrian lady can yet understand the relation between them with reference to the relationship between China and England; the juxtaposition serves as a shorthand for the degree of alterity sustainable in a well-ordered, empirically comprehensible world. Montagu’s use of the distinction between the ladies of London and China to communicate the distinction between various cultures of the Habsburg empire belongs to a cosmopolitan worldview that is part of what I call in this book the prehistory of orientalism. This discourse, prevalent in English culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, locates England within a larger world of which China forms the far boundary, and presents that world as both traversable and understandable by the English subject, even those parts of it that remain “undiscovered.” While it suggests that Europe and Asia are culturally distinct from one another, Montagu’s cosmopolitanism does not organize the world in terms of the orientalist binary defined by Edward Said as “an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and . . . ‘the Occident.’”17 China is not England’s “other” in the postcolonial sense, the absolute antithesis confirming what is English by opposition, but part of the architecture of the English imagination—a point of reference that confirms that the English mind is equipped to understand the level of variety found in the world at large. Eric Hayot has called this formal epistemological figure the “Chinese ecliptic,” where the ecliptic “names a particular kind of relationship between the local and the universal: the universal as it is imagined from a particular perspective, one whose locality is named and defined by the universal it declares.”18 Recognizing the Chinese ecliptic as part of a prehistory of orientalism provides insight not only into the role of China in the early modern English imagination, but also into how English culture positioned its subjects in relation to the world at large in the century before Great Britain consolidated its global empire.

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The place of Mary Wortley Montagu in current English literary studies reveals how the success of orientalism as a critical framework has both illuminated certain aspects of eighteenth-century literature and limited our access to others. Her letters now known collectively as the Turkish Embassy Letters19 were written in 1716–18 when Lady Mary accompanied her husband Edward Wortley Montagu on his journey to take up the position of English Ambassador to Turkey. She selected and edited the letters herself as a collection, and although they were not published until after her death in 1762, they consolidated her reputation in the eighteenth century as author and cultural commentator. As one of her biographers notes, “her journey to the East would be remembered long after [her husband’s] mission was forgotten.”20 Like many early modern authors, particularly women, Montagu’s fame in her own time did not prevent her from falling out of the English literary canon by the twentieth century. Interest in her work was reignited by the late twentieth-century feminist and postcolonial turns in literary and cultural studies, and the Turkish Embassy Letters have received significant scholarly attention in the past few decades for their unique representation of “the Orient” from the perspective of an eighteenth-century European woman. Her descriptions of life in Constantinople, where she famously traveled “incognito” in Turkish carriages and entered spaces such as the public bath unavailable to male travelers, have proven fertile ground for considering how race, gender, and social station inflect Western conceptions of the East. Critics such as Lisa Lowe have used them to demonstrate how “orientalist representations [overlap] with rhetorics of gender and class,” generating multiple “orientalisms,”21 and they form the foundation of Srinivas Aravamudan’s concept of strategic “levantinization” in the eighteenth century, a process by which “subjects . . . fashion their agency from unpromising materials.”22 While Said makes no mention of Montagu in Orientalism, in Culture and Imperialism he names her as one of the British writers responsible for establishing a “language of casual observation” in travel writing that represents one of the discursive forms of imperial power.23 Yet, as Laura Rosenthal points out, “while interest in Montagu’s work has exploded in the last two decades or so, it sometimes seems, searching through the MLA bibliography, that she really only wrote one letter and one poem. Her letter describing the Turkish baths and her poem responding to Jonathan Swift’s description of a lady’s dressing room have probably attracted as much attention as everything else she has written combined.”24 Indeed, the richness within the context of orientalism studies of Montagu’s representations of Turkey, and the “Turkish bath letter” in particular,25 has led us to overlook the collection as a whole, which, Rosenthal notes, “was carefully selected and perhaps even revised extensively,” suggesting “that

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Montagu herself considered the volume as an artistic object to be appreciated in its entirety.”26 The earliest letters in the collection, the ones Montagu wrote en route to Turkey, record her impressions of the courts and palaces of Central Europe as well as the manners and customs of the elite families who hosted her and her husband on their journey. Only by attending to these first twenty-three epistles can we fully appreciate the complexity of the subject position Montagu crafts for herself as an Englishwoman abroad, one that confounds simplified orientalist binaries of “West” and “East.” The letters on Central Europe establish Montagu’s authority as a member of a cosmopolitan aristocracy, an authority that underwrites her experience as a guest of foreign empires both European and Asian. The palpable tension between the categories of East and West which have made the letters from Turkey so attractive to scholars is absent, but Montagu’s accounts show how the rites and rituals of polite European society are imbricated in a global network of material signifiers of social quality and political power. These signifiers refer to a multitude of “orients” in the European imagination, and Montagu’s participation in cosmopolitan rituals of prestige depends as much upon certain modes of identification with the East as on distinguishing herself from it. I thus read Montagu’s travels through Europe with an eye toward the mental labor she invests in situating herself as both English traveler and cosmopolitan subject. Traversing the continent from Rotterdam to Vienna in 1716, Montagu had the opportunity to witness first-hand various European metropoles and courts that had achieved a level of global commercial integration to which England still aspired. Her praise of the Dutch reflects the Netherlands’ status as the established leader of European trade by sea with the Far East; its towns set the standard of convenience and comfort enabled by modern commerce. Of Rotterdam, Montagu observes, ’Tis certain no Town can be more advantagiously situated for Commerce. Here are 7 large Canals on which the merchant ships come up to the very doors of their Houses. The shops and warehouses are of a surprizing neatness and Magnificence, fill’d with an incredible Quantity of fine Merchandize, and so much cheaper than what we see in England, I have much ado to perswade my selfe I am still so near it. Here is neither Dirt nor Beggary to be seen. One is not shock’d with the loathsome Cripples so common in London, nor teiz’d with the Importunitys of idle Fellows and Wenches that chuse to be nasty and lazy. (1:249)

Montagu’s association of the town’s commercial prosperity with its lack of visible poverty is consistent with the Netherlands’ reputation in Europe as a modern center of trade whose social progress was directly

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related to its commercial enterprise in the East Indies. The Dutch had superseded the Portuguese as the predominant European presence in East Asia in the seventeenth century, and in the early eighteenth century the English were still struggling to catch up to them. As Furber points out, while the English had made enormous strides in Eastern trade between 1657 and 1713, “in comparison with the Dutch, English participation in the East India trade was still modest even at the close of the reign of Queen Anne.”27 While, as seen in the examples of Spectator 69 and Windsor-Forest, English literature of this period already fashioned London as the new center of world trade, Montagu’s observations confirm that, materially, the English still looked to their European rivals for models of modern cosmopolitanism. “If You want any Indian Goods, here are great Variety of Penn[yworths],” Montagu writes from the Hague to her friend Jane Smith, “and I shall follow your orders with great pleasure and exactness” (1:251). Overall, she concludes, “nothing can be more agreable than travelling in Holland” (1:250). As she travels into Central Europe, Montagu’s assessments of towns and their nobility become more ambivalent. The trappings and rituals of prestige of the ancien régime impress her as both magnificent in design and oldfashioned, even decayed, in their deployment. In Nuremburg, she draws a striking distinction between the “free” towns of Holland and the more traditional sovereignties of Germany: . . . tis impossible not to observe the difference between the free Towns and those under the Government of absolute Princes (as all the little Sovereigns of Germany are). In the first there appears an air of Commerce and Plenty. The streets are well built and full of people neatly and plainly dress’d, the shops loaded with Merchandize, and the commonalty clean and cheerfull. In the other, a sort of shabby finery, a Number of dirty people of Quality tawder’d out, Narrow nasty streets out of repair, wretchedly thin of Inhabitants, and above halfe the common sort asking alms. I can’t help fancying one under the figure of a handsome clean Dutch Citizen’s wife and the other like a poor Town Lady of Pleasure, painted and riban’d out in her Head dress, with tarnish’d silver lac’d shoes, and a ragged under petticoat, a miserable mixture of Vice and poverty. (1:254–55)

Her disgust at the “shabby finery” of Europe’s old aristocracy and its coexistence with the “miserable mixture of vice and poverty” that proliferates in poorly managed towns resurfaces, to her disappointment, in Vienna. “This Town, which has the Honnour of being the Emperor’s Residence, did not at all answer my Ideas of it, being much lesse than I expected to find it,” she writes.

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The streets are very close and so narrow one cannot observe the fine fronts of the Palaces, thô many of them very well deserve observation, being truly magnificent, all built of fine white stone and excessive high. The Town being so much too little for the number of the people that desire to live in it, the Builders seem to have projected to repair that misfortune by claping one Town on Top of another, most of the houses being of 5 and some of them 6 storys. You may easily imagine that the streets being so narrow, the upper rooms are extream Dark, and what is an inconveniency much more intolerable in my Opinion, there is no house that has so few as 5 or 6 familys in it. The Apartments of the greatest Ladys and even of the Ministers of state are divided but by a Partition from that of a Tailor or shoe-maker, and I know no body that has above 2 floors in any house, one for their own use, and one higher for their servants. Those that have houses of their own, let out the rest of them to whoever will take ’em; thus the great stairs (which are all of stone) are as common and as dirty as the street. (1:259–60)

The Spatstil quality of early eighteenth-century Vienna,28 its remarkable combination of old and new forms, strikes Montagu as a kind of social as well as aesthetic confusion. The aspirations of imperial architecture clash with the closeness of the old city, suggesting insufficient social organization, such that ladies and ministers of state live in disturbing proximity to tailors and shoemakers, and the commonly used “great stairs” bring the dirt of the streets into the interiors of houses. The architectural aesthetics of empire fail spectacularly in the eyes of this English visitor, especially in comparison to the forms of modern commerce she witnessed in Holland. While she finds the particular “mixed” effect of Vienna’s core repellent, however, Montagu finds relief in the kinds of heterogeneous decorative schemes that characterize the interiors of the city’s great houses. Many of these palaces were located outside the city center, in the developing “fauxbourg,” or suburb.29 “I must own that I never saw a place so perfectly delightfull as the Fauxbourgs of Vienna,” she writes. “It is very large and almost wholly compos’d of delicious Palaces; and if the Emperor found it proper to permit the Gates of the Town to be laid open that the Fauxbourgs might be joyn’d to it, he would have one of the largest and best built Citys of Europe” (1:261). One of the advantages of the “delicious palaces” of the suburbs is that they direct a visitor’s attention to the interior spaces of great houses, which Montagu tends to find more expressive of social quality than the architectural designs alone. Even within the city gates, Montagu finds respite from old Vienna in properly maintained interior spaces. Of the very same “intolerable” houses crammed indiscriminately with tenants, she concedes,

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’Tis true when you have once travell’d through them, nothing can be more surprizingly magnificent than the Apartments. They are commonly a suitte of 8 or 10 large rooms, all inlaid, the doors and windows richly carv’d and Gilt, and the furniture such as is seldom seen in the Palaces of sovereign Princes in other Countrys: the Hangings of the finest Tapestry of Brussells, prodigious large looking glasses in silver frames, fine Japan Tables, the Beds, Chairs, Canopys and window Curtains of the richest Genoa Damask or Velvet, allmost cover’d with gold Lace or Embroidery—the whole made Gay by Pictures and vast Jars of Japan china, and almost in every room large Lustres of rock chrystal. (1:260)

The aesthetics of these “magnificent” apartments offer an intriguing paradox: somehow, the extraordinary assemblage of objects in these rooms counteracts the effects of urban crowding. The “largeness” of these exceedingly furnished rooms seems to derive from the palatial quality not of their volume but of their surface area. The walls and ceilings become slates for carvings and gilt designs, in addition to which they are hung with tapestries, curtains, mirrors, and pictures, which are themselves overlaid with silver or textile embellishments. “Japan” tables, covered in gilt and lacquered designs, hold pictures and decorated porcelain. These rooms set a standard by which Montagu assesses even the palaces of the suburbs. Of the interior of Count Schönborn’s palace, designed by Hildebrandt, Montagu observes approvingly, “the Furniture is all rich broc[ades], so well fancy’d and fited up, nothing can look more Gay and Splendid, not to speak of a Gallery full of raritys of Coral, mother of Pearl, etc., and through out the whole House a profusion of Gilding, Carving, fine paintings, the most beautifull Porcelane, statues of Alablaster [sic] and Ivory, and vast Orange and Lemon Trees in Gilt Pots” (1:261). The measure of “magnificence” here is variety, of two sorts: first, the number of objects and surfaces that make up the decor, and second, the geographic range represented by different objects and styles. The presence of different forms of “Japan” and “China” mark the imaginary extent of these material microcosms. Fernand Braudel attributes these trends in elaborate internal decoration to the urban imperative to fit more luxury into less space. The modern European town house was divided into apartments distinguished by social function—“reception rooms for polite society, where one could entertain one’s friends agreeably; the public room for display and ostentation; and the private or family apartments”30—and these smaller spaces compelled innovations in luxury furnishing: To compensate [for smaller houses and rooms], the desire for luxury turned toward furniture: an infinity of finely wrought delicate pieces, less clumsy than

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the old furniture, adapted to the new dimensions of boudoir, drawing-room and bedchamber . . . This was when all those little tables began to appear—the gaming tables, card tables, night tables, bureaux, centre tables, dumb waiters, etc., as well as the chest-of-drawers in the early years of the century and the whole range of soft armchairs . . . The same taste was employed on ornamentation: sculpted and pointed paneling, sumptuous and sometimes top-heavy silver decorations, bronze and lacquer in the Louis XV style, exotic and precious woods, mirrors, mouldings and chandeliers, pier-glasses, silk hangings, Chinese vases and German crockery . . . In short, the new simplicity in architecture did not lead to sobriety of decoration, indeed the reverse. The grandiose had disappeared; but it was often replaced by the fussy. (309–10)

While the profusion of ornate objects in these interior spaces may appear “fussy” to the twentieth-century observer, it clearly impressed an eighteenthcentury traveler like Montagu as “magnificent.” From her perspective, the very definition of aristocratic grandiosity is being successfully translated into particular forms of interiorized, everyday life through new arrangements of material objects. This transition is evident, for example, at the dinner table. “I have already had the Honour of being invited to Dinner by several of the first people of Quality,” she writes, and I must do them the Justice to say the good taste and Magnificence of their Tables very well answers to that of their Furniture. I have been more than once entertain’d with 50 dishes of meat, all serv’d in silver and well dress’d; the desert proportionable, serv’d in the finest china; but the variety and richnesse of their wines is what appears the most surprizing. The constant way is to lay a list of their names upon the plates of the Guests along with the napkins, and I have counted several times to the number of 18 different sorts, all exquisite in their kinds. (1:260)

To a certain extent, such entertainment belongs to a tradition of aristocratic grandiosity. The quantities of food Montagu describes are on the scale of the feasts served by lords of great estates in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as demonstrations of their wealth and patronage, the kind of “liberal board” that “doth flow / with all that hospitality doth know” that Ben Jonson attributed to his patrons at Penshurst.31 Braudel notes of such feasts that “[o] stentatious quantity prevailed over quality. At best, this was an orgy of greed. Its striking feature was the riot of meat—a long-lasting feature of tables of the rich” (190). Meat consumption in general having declined throughout Europe after 1550, the prodigious quantities served at noble tables operated as a conspicuous sign of social distinction (Braudel 197). Certainly, a meal of “50 dishes of meat” would have been considered lavish in terms of quantity

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alone. But the meal Montagu describes is not simply an “orgy of greed.” Of the servings of meat, Montagu also notes that they are “all serv’d in silver and well dress’d.” She applauds the dessert for being both “proportionable” and “serv’d in the finest china.” The wine, too, which flowed in copious amounts, is represented not as a Bacchanalian flood but as a selection characterized by “variety and richnesse.” The guests are invited not only to count but also to savor and judge each of the eighteen types of wine served in precise order over the course of the meal. What distinguishes these extravagant meals from the traditional feasts dished up by country lords is, in Montagu’s own words, the attention paid to how well “the good taste and Magnificence of [the] Tables . . . answers to that of [the] Furniture.” The furnishings of these houses do not simply fill space—they organize it, generating particular experiences in and of that space. Consequently, the measure of upper-class hospitality shifts from mere quantities of food to the aesthetic mode of its presentation and consumption. The noble feast, once a gathering of the entire community under a nobleman’s purview, becomes a more private affair, reserved for the entertainment of an elite group of guests capable of appreciating distinctions of taste and quality. Communal dishes are now mediated by individuated place settings furnished with personal plates and silver utensils that frame the meal for a single refined palate.32 Like the entire well-furnished interior of which it is part, the modern dining table is a social and aesthetic composition that caters to a subject capable of appreciating both its variety and its strict order. In her analysis of “reiterative design” in eighteenth-century France—a way of unifying through themes and symmetry a variety of types of objects within a room, compiling them as a “set”—Mimi Hellman observes that “the set’s tension between formula and variation produced a gratifying sense of aesthetic and social mastery that was central to the construction of elite identity.”33 Carefully designed social experiences exercised new faculties associated with high status, namely taste and imagination. As Daniel Cottom has argued, aristocratic “mastery” is extended in these composed spaces from a material to a mental form of domination.34 A mind honed to see the “shared decorative vocabulary” of a furnished room, but also “the almost endless possibility of variation within this vocabulary,”35 possessed the skills to see the entire world in a new light—to perceive and take pleasure in divine design, or natural cosmic order. In the words of Joseph Addison, the polite imagination “gives [the man who has it] a kind of Property in everything he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated Parts of Nature administer to his pleasures.”36 The extensively decorated interiors of aristocratic houses are thus, in a very real sense, microcosms designed to cultivate a “worldly” perspective. We should not confuse the nature of this perspective with contemporary

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notions of “multiculturalism,” which adopts the posture of understanding multiple peoples and cultures in their “authentic” specificity from one another. The eighteenth-century cosmopolitan was no amateur anthropologist. Rather, he or she was someone attuned to universal principles of beauty and order, assumed to govern even in the farthest and most uncultivated corners of the world, and representable in miniature through collections of imported things—the world objectified. The cosmopolitan principle of European interior design helps explain the prevalence of explicitly “foreign” objects and styles in combination with one another, and the seeming preference for “china,” “japan,” and “india” ware. These terms were used loosely and interchangeably to name a variety of objects imported to Europe from the East via Silk Road land routes or, increasingly, sea trade. They were also commonly applied to any object fashioned in the style of imported Eastern goods, regardless of its actual place of origin.37 The imprecision of these categories speaks both to the convoluted histories of migration that explain how such objects ended up where they did in the world and to the fact that they belong to what Dror Wahrman calls the “ancien régime of identity,” which locates identity not in the imagined depths of individuated “selves,” but on the visible, expressive surfaces of things.38 Like cosmopolitan subjects, cosmopolitan things were what they appeared to be—their appearance a negotiation between object and subject, dependent as much on how they were perceived as on their visible qualities—and their display in culturally disparate contexts displayed their transcendence of specific local identities. The “china jars” and “japan tables” of this order of things were not material artifacts of the “Orient,” but European manifestations of worldly variety and universal design. Eastern objects had long been items of prestige for the European elite, in part because of their scarcity in Europe before the eighteenth century, and in part because of their symbolic status as foreign tributes from powerful Asian states.39 The Habsburgs in particular had a history of collecting chinoiserie, perhaps as an expression of their rivalry with the Ottomans, who controlled the majority of overland shipment of East Asian goods into Europe. The Archduchess Margaret of Austria, daughter of Emperor Maximilian I and ruler of the Habsburg Netherlands in the early sixteenth century, was one of the earliest European collectors of “Indian wares,” and Donald F. Lach notes that she “was evidently partial to Chinese porcelain. According to the inventory of her possessions she assembled for the period a sizeable collection of porcelain bowls, saltcellars, ewers, and plates.”40 Her collection was eventually divided between her nephews Charles V and Ferdinand I; Ferdinand developed his share into one of the most extensive pre-1600 European compilations of chinoiserie, and established Chinese porcelain and other “India wares” as material signifiers of the Habsburg empire’s

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magnitude and global importance. In 1710, the Habsburg ally Augustus the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, established the first European hard-paste porcelain manufactory, at Meissen—the first porcelain factory outside of China. Augustus’ enthusiasm for porcelain is nothing short of legendary. The founding of the Meissen factory was the result of his imprisonment of a young self-proclaimed alchemist, Johann Friedrich Böttger, whom Augustus appointed to a team of inventors charged with discovering the secret to making Chinese porcelain. Böttger is generally credited with creating the formula in 1707.41 Although porcelain from Meissen quickly became as sought-after as that from China—the English traveler Richard Pococke noted that Meissenware “is sold only in one place in Dresden and Leipzig, and the cheapest of it is dearer than Chinaware of the same quality in England”42—Augustus continued to build his collection of Chinese imports, even trading an entire infantry of dragoons, fully equipped including horses, to the King of Prussia in exchange for one hundred and fifty pieces of Chinese porcelain.43 Augustus’ taste for china, though perhaps excessive, was not at all out of character for a European state leader. At the time of Montagu’s visit, the Viennese court had already set in motion various plots of espionage and enticement to lure the secret of hard-paste porcelain out of the closely kept gates of Meissen. Porcelain was evidently essential, not tangential, to the political aesthetics of early eighteenth-century Vienna. Art historian J. F. Hayward observes, “The Viennese nobility, having built for themselves a series of palaces that has hardly parallel in northern Europe . . . were not likely to accept anything other than the finest porcelain to adorn their tables.”44 In 1718, following the meeting in Vienna of two former employees of Meissen and a Dutch potter named Claude Innocentius Du Paquier, a patent granted Du Paquier the exclusive right to produce hard-paste “Indian china ware” in Austria. The central European courts’ claim to chinaware, both as collectors and producers, became part of china’s broader significance as a cosmopolitan object in Europe. Porcelain embodied not only a European nation’s relationship to the universal order signified by the Chinese ecliptic, but also that nation’s productive ties to other European nations as part of the fabric of that order. When England started producing soft-paste porcelain in the 1750s, one of the Worcester factory’s most popular designs was the “King of Prussia” motif commemorating both Frederick II’s success in the Seven Years’ War and his alliance with England against the French.45 And as Michael E. Yonan has shown, the spectacular manifestation of Habsburg splendor in the court of Maria Theresa relied heavily on the family chinoiserie, which “expressed as much [Vienna’s] connections to the rest of Europe as it did any hypothetical connection to Asia.”46 Porcelain keepsakes gave material form to the kinds of international relationships and affinities that

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made eighteenth-century nation-states powerful actors on the world stage. Such objects confound the orientalist logic of “East is East, and West is West”; they are the point at which the twain meet. European porcelain was fashioned deliberately to retain traces of “Chineseness”: both Meissen and Du Paquier specialized in chinoiserie designs, as did the English manufactories of the later eighteenth century, and to this day porcelain is called “china” in English. It was precisely this quality of porcelain that enabled it to express the global significance of local European accomplishments and alliances. Chinaware’s legacy as an emblem of modern European power well into the nineteenth century is a residual quality of the cosmopolitan constitution of that power in the early eighteenth century. The Habsburgs epitomized this quality in their architecture and interior decoration; in Yonan’s words, “The message exuding from each architectural commission is the same: the Habsburgs are defined by their multiplicity and diversity; their power arises from their dynastic right to bring together distinct, seemingly unrelated peoples.”47 Montagu’s minute observations of Vienna, Saxony, and Germany are thus very much part of a diplomatic mission to gather information on what “the world” looks like, so that it can be reproduced in English spaces. In Dresden, she visits the palace of Augustus, which she deems “very handsome, and his repository full of Curiositys of Different kinds . . . very much esteem’d” (1:282), and in Hanover, where a “vast number of English crouds the Town” due to the recent Hanoverian ascension to the throne of Great Britain, she dines with the Portuguese ambassador and is entertained by a resident company of French comedians at court (1:286–87). Everywhere, these experiences are punctuated by things “Chinese”—objects that refer visibly to the traffic in Eastern goods that attends the movement of people through the world. There is no single object, no great masterpiece, that in and of itself captures the cosmopolitan ethos; all is collection, variety, distinction—an array of things that collectively suggest a repository of global wealth well-ordered by a discriminating taste. The aesthetic is perfectly captured by the games in which Montagu participates at the palace of the Dowager Empress Amelia: I had there the pleasure of seeing a Diversion wholly new to me, but which is the common Amusement of this Court. The Empress her selfe was seated on a little Throne at the end of a fine Alley in her Garden, and on each side of her rang’d 2 partys of her Ladys of honnour with other young Ladys of Quality, headed by the 2 young Arch Duchesses, all dress’d in their Hair, full of Jewels, with fine light Guns in their Hands, and at proper distances were plac’d 3 oval Pictures which were the Marks to be shot at . . . Near the Empresse was a Gilded Trophy wreath’d with Flowers and made of little Crooks on which were hung rich Turkish Handkercheifs, Tippets, ribands, Laces etc. for the

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small prizes. The Empresse gave the first with her own hand, which was a fine ruby ring set round with di’monds, in a Gold Snuff box. There was for the 2nd a little Cupid set with brilliants, and beside these a set of fine china for a tea table enchas’d in Gold, Japan Trunks, fans, and many Galantrys of the same nature. All the men of Quality at Vienna were Spectators, but only the Ladys had permission to shoot . . . This is the favourite pleasure of the Emperour, and there is rarely a week without some feast of this kind, which makes the young ladys skilfull enough to defend a fort, and they laugh’d very much to see me afraid to handle a Gun. (1:268–69)

The spectacle of ladies demonstrating martial skill in competition for Eastern trophies is particularly resonant in Vienna as a ritual of cosmopolitan peace and plenty. While these women may be “skilfull enough to defend a fort,” this game is set in a world that requires no defense. With the Turkish threat effectively eliminated, the Viennese army can bequeath its guns to the ladies as playthings, and the city can open its doors to receive the Chinese things that flow in on the tides of global commerce. As spectator, the Emperor takes pleasure in a scene composed to celebrate the product of his victory over the Turks: a world in which Viennese power is so uncontested that it passes into the hands of women, who deploy it in aestheticized domestic rituals overseen by a retired Empress. Montagu’s descriptions of court life gracefully combine an appropriate appreciation for its splendor with subtle turns of rhetorical irreverence for many of the rituals she witnesses among various elite classes—her reticence to handle a gun in the scene above, for example, a polite way of distinguishing herself culturally from the participants, much like the English stays she suggests she is unable to remove in the more famous Turkish bath scene.48 Denys van Renen has suggested that Montagu’s representation of court fashions actually takes European court ladies to task for not being cosmopolitan enough: their “stylistic and behavioral choices,” he argues, constitutes a “semiotics of fashion” that “reifies a European worldview predicated on territorial expansion through defining European-controlled borders.”49 By focusing on these “undiplomatic” fashions on display in ostensibly cosmopolitan spaces, “Montagu emphasizes how fashion signals females’ carefully guarded conception of identity and their unwillingness to experiment with new conceptions of selfhood.”50 The satiric distance she puts between herself and her hosts paradoxically insulates her from their more uncosmopolitan stances. Even when she seems skeptical or critical of the postures assumed by Europe’s old aristocracies, however, Montagu consistently admires their things, effectively distinguishing a material, aesthetic form of worldliness and severing it from its strict association with aristocratic privilege,

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imperial might, and other traditional forms of power. She makes a similar move in her cheerfully blasphemous account of visiting a Jesuit church in Cologne: Having never before seen anything of that nature, I could not enough admire the magnificence of the altars, the rich Images of the Saints (all massy silver) and the enchasures of the Relicks, thô I could not help murmuring in my heart at that profusion of pearls, Diamonds and Rubys bestow’d on the adornment of rotten teeth, dirty rags, etc. I own that I had wickedness enough to covet St. Ursula’s pearl necklace . . . but I went yet farther and wish’d even she her selfe converted into a dressing plate, and a great St. Christopher I imagin’d would have look’d very well in a Cistern. These were my pious refflexions . . . (1:253)

Her satirical translation of Catholic relics into luxury commodities is mirrored in her more earnest consideration of the ways the furniture of Europe’s great houses might be adapted to a modern English lifestyle. While dining with the King of Hanover, for example, she is suitably impressed by the unlikely variety of tropical fruits that are served in the middle of winter—“I could not imagine how they could come there but by Enchantment” (1:290)—but she immediately translates her “wonder” into a pragmatic proposal to adopt the technological innovations of the King’s palace to reproduce such luxuries in English households. “Upon Enquiry,” she writes, “I learnt that they have brought their Stoves to such perfection, they lengthen the Summer as long as they please, giveing to every plant the degree of heat it would receive from the Sun in its native Soil” (1:290). She continues, I am surpriz’d we do not practice in England so usefull an Invention. This reflection naturally leads me to consider our obstinacy in shakeing with cold 6 months in the year rather than make use of Stoves, which are certainly one of the greatest conveniencys of Life; and so far from spoiling the form of a Room, that they add very much to the magnificence of it when they are painted and gilt as at Vienna, or at Dresden where they are often in the shapes of China Jars, Statues, or fine Cabinets, so naturally represented they are not to be distinguish’d. If ever I return, in defiance of the Fashion you shall certainly see one in the chamber of, Dear Sister, etc. (1:290)

In moments like this, she is both aristocratic guest and consumer, sizing up the material culture of European palaces not only to interpret the status of her hosts but also to wrest these items from their displays and imaginatively import them into a specifically English order of things. In an English context, these objects’ associations with Habsburg dynastic inheritance recede,

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and their significance as signs of English innovation, wealth, and comfort come to the fore. Each of these mental appropriations is part of an ongoing process of self-fashioning out of found materials; Montagu mentally dismantles her hosts’ microcosms to construct her own. This process of discriminating observation and selective appropriation is the modus operandi of her travels. She treats the world as a marketplace of ideas equally adaptable to herself; the more of the world she encounters, even in the form of microcosms, the more opportunity she finds for self-fashioning. Montagu’s access to the world of aristocratic things is, in this way, similar to her access to the all-female baths of Constantinople: she participates as a privileged member of an exclusive society, but her written representation of what she sees disseminates her observations to a much wider audience—in the case of the baths, to European men, and in the case of material displays, to nonaristocratic consumers of luxury goods. These letters illustrate how processes of mental consumption produce a self defined by constant improvement, where improvement is measured by a transcendence of particularity. As Montagu’s tastes and ideas become more diverse, “the world” in all its variety becomes more familiar as a whole than any of its particular cultures singularly. “’Tis true the Austrians are not commonly the most polite people in the World or the most agreable,” she notes, “but Vienna is inhabited by all Nations, and I had form’d to my selfe a little Society of such as were perfectly to my own taste” (1:294). Montagu’s descriptions of the materials of European aristocratic culture introduce a form of cosmopolitanism that emphasizes the empirical, sensible qualities of material objects in addition to—and occasionally above— their embodiment of inherited prestige. In the sections below, I examine how the English discourse of taste in the early eighteenth century was organized around precisely this distinction and eventually produced a new category of mental experience that relocated aristocratic pleasures to sensible and aesthetic encounters between subjects and objects, experiences open to a much wider category of people. In England, the increasing availability of Chinese things combined with theories of empiricism that fashioned relationships between people and things based on mental rather than physiological qualities produced a kind of consumer-based cosmopolitanism sustainable at the national level. Empiricism and trade, in other words, collaborated to produce a culture in which any English person could, in theory, imagine himor herself a member not only of a certain class or trade, not only of England or Great Britain, but of “the world.” Well before it achieved economic, industrial, or political dominance over its European neighbors, England laid claim in its literature to this capacity for cosmopolitanism—a capacity, that is, to fashion an English identity of things not English. This was the foundation of

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England’s remarkable rise to global prominence in the years between 1660 and 1830. By tracing how the materials of English cosmopolitanism—epitomized by chinoiserie—were revised and repositioned in relation to English identity over this period, we are able to see the emergence of modern forms of nationalism, class, gender, and orientalism and their roles in constituting a new English subjectivity.

JOHN WEBB: CHINA AND THE NATIONAL BODY

The amount of cultural work performed by things Chinese in Montagu’s version of modern English identity makes sense only if we establish the way the figure of China had become a part of the English vocabulary on Englishness itself in the tumultuous and transitional decades of the seventeenth century. Markley’s The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 offers the best account to date of this phenomenon; rather than attempt a similarly comprehensive overview, I focus here on several particularly articulate examples of the kind of thinking that turned China into a measure of Englishness by the beginning of the long eighteenth century. By pairing the relatively obscure voice of John Webb with the better-known one of John Locke, the next two sections of this chapter offer a narrative account of how the Chinese ecliptic made its way into modern revisions of English national identity—specifically the relocation of Englishness from the body of the nobleman to the mind of the individual. Only in the context of this shift could Englishness itself be identified with the kinds of material and aesthetic practices foregrounded in Montagu’s letters. John Webb, architect and aspiring philologist, is one of the more interesting figures recovered from historical obscurity by recent scholarship on the early modern European interest in China. Prior to the Civil War, Webb was on track to become one of England’s great architects: assistant and son-inlaw to Inigo Jones, he inherited Jones’s collection of designs and was the obvious heir to the position of Surveyor of the King’s Works. Unfortunately, his would-be ascendance coincided with the Interregnum, which permanently derailed Webb’s career. After the Restoration of Charles II, Webb was passed over as the crown’s chosen Surveyor in favor of first the poet Sir John Denham and second the young Christopher Wren.51 In 1669, the year of his retirement from court service, Webb published An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability that the Language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language, which claimed that the Chinese written language was the original language imparted to man by God, and spoken by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Although the topic of the Essay may

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seem a radical departure from Webb’s professional interests, Rachel Ramsay has argued that for a seventeenth-century English Royalist, China is a logical place to turn to try to make sense of apparent flaws in the Restoration system of governance. “In this climate of capricious political patronage and unstable monarchical authority,” Ramsay writes, “the Jesuit accounts of China’s systematic examination system that selected and promoted civil servants based on merit and exempted them from paying taxes—under the auspices of a prosperous and secure monarchy—apparently fascinated an ardent but disappointed Royalist like Webb. His treatise . . . emerges from this climate of political disappointment in the monarchy’s failure to deliver economic and political stability.”52 Books on China and the Far East were a mainstay of the English gentleman’s library from the mid-seventeenth century onward, making it an intuitive point of comparison. Markley claims that “no literate man or woman in western Europe could plead ignorance of the relative size, wealth, and natural resources of . . . England and China. By the middle of the seventeenth century, China had become a crucial site of contention and speculation in a variety of fields.”53 During the Restoration, English accounts of China “became an intellectual rallying point for supporters of the Stuarts and a favorite topic for royalists seeking preferment: the translators of Jesuit accounts and armchair historians of China, were, to a man, ardent monarchists.”54 In a 1662 letter to the author of one such volume, John Evelyn wonders “whether this whole piece will be to the purpose, there being of late so many accurate descriptions of those countries in particular . . . all of them now speaking the English language.”55 Despite Evelyn’s misgivings, English-language histories and travelogues of China, many of them translations of European Jesuit accounts, continued to flourish well into the eighteenth century. As David Porter has shown, Jesuit writings on China were largely invested in demonstrating cultural and theological continuities between Confucianism and Catholic doctrine; they established a model for European representations of China that emphasized existent and potential points of commonality between the distant cultures, rather than treating the Far East as an exotic curiosity.56 Webb’s central claim that China was peopled by direct descendants of Noah prior to humanity’s thwarted attempt to build a Tower at Babel, so that the original or “primitive” language remained intact there even as language everywhere else became multiplied and “confused,” is undeniably idiosyncratic. But, as Ramsay suggests, his argument reveals certain strains of mainstream political thought in seventeenth-century England, as well as the importance of China as a touchstone in political discourse. The Essay offers an illuminating example of the tension between traditional understandings of what constituted a nation and the contemporary turn toward commerce and cosmopolitanism as national projects. In particular, Webb’s arguments

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about the range of purity in the world’s “tongues” as extensions of national bodies rely on a model of national integrity based on an identical relationship between noble bodies and the nation. That this long-standing model of national identity could lead Webb to such seemingly strange conclusions when put to the field of global philology suggests that this understanding of the nation is already being dismantled, both by the culture and economic policies of the Restoration court, and in the literature and natural philosophy of the period. By suggesting that English readers look to China to see an image of their own lost past—a pure, authentic, autochthonous language and culture given to man by God and unaltered by history—Webb’s Essay remained consistent with the Jesuit trope of a universal authority that transcends the seeming differences between disparate cultures. In Webb’s schema, however, China’s culture is that universal authority, and the degree to which any other culture varies from the Chinese is a measure of corruption. Charles II’s cosmopolitan court, characterized by its penchant for French fashions and its eagerness to compete with the Dutch and Portuguese in East India trade, was for Webb the epitome of such corruption. He attacks in particular the ascendance of a certain kind of Restoration aristocrat, the cosmopolitan gentleman, whose taste for foreign things makes him, in Webb’s eyes, a flawed bearer of English cultural authority and political power. His defective Englishness manifests itself in the very way that he speaks: [C]oncerning Intercourse and Commerce, it is true, that in such a Nation, where a general Commerce is permitted, and free access granted to all Strangers to trade and inhabit, aswel [sic] in the Inland parts of the Countrey; as upon the Frontires or Sea-coasts, there a change of Language may by degrees happen. And we need not go far for Example. For, with us our selves, by this means chiefly, the Saxon tongue, since the time of the Normans is utterly lost. Insomuch that what by Latinizing, Italianizing, Frenchizing, and (as we must have it called forsooth,) Refinizing, or rather Non-sensizing, our old Language is so corrupted and changed, that we are so far from Saxonizing, as we have scarcely one significant word of our MOTHER speech left.57

Webb appeals here to the narrative of the “Norman Yoke,” a version of English history that gained credence in the second half of the seventeenth century and equated the loss of native English identity with the demise of the Anglo-Saxon language—the English “mother tongue”—as a consequence of the Norman invasion of 1066.58 This myth effectively figured England as a fallen nation, severed by foreign conquest from its own roots. Here, Webb conflates the Norman invasion with modern trade and commerce as the cause of transformations in the English

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language; for him, a foreign trade embassy poses as grave a threat to the nation as a fleet of enemy warships. In refusing to distinguish between the two types of foreign convoy, Webb dismisses the very principle of cosmopolitanism, as Kant later theorized it: the “right of visit,” which “means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another.”59 For Webb, hospitality must have its limits; the nation suffers when the English ruling class is too permissive with strangers, granting them “free access . . . to trade and inhabit.” Even worse, in this case the nobility—a large portion of whom had spent the Interregnum in France—has actively participated in the corruption of England by privileging cosmopolitan culture and knowledge of the world over a more native culture and knowledge of England’s own “MOTHER speech.” As culture bearers, the aristocracy are responsible for embodying and reproducing English identity, which in Webb’s argument cannot be severed from the original (here, “Saxon”) English language. When the aristocracy joins with the merchants who engage in international commerce, adopting the languages and customs of foreigners in their efforts to become citizens of the world, this original identity “is utterly lost.” Annihilated by self-imposed “Latinizing, Italianizing, Frenchizing, and . . . Refinizing, or rather Non-sensizing”—a parade of terms that flaunt the very corruption of proper English to which they refer—the tongue that bears English identity is irretrievably gone, survived only by an array of hybrid gibberish. Webb’s Essay thus introduces two competing definitions of what it means to be English: a historically earlier, homogeneous, and lost version based on Anglo-Saxon language and culture, and a historically later, heterogeneous version based on the diversity that is the result of “Intercourse and Commerce” with foreign nations. The problem, for Webb, is that only the first, now departed model offers the means of reproducing national identity—which raises the question of what, exactly, makes a nation a nation, particularly in the context of international trade and commerce. Webb offers China as an answer to this very question. Again using language to measure the integrity of national identity, the Essay recommends strict restrictions on trade and commerce as a way of protecting the nation’s original or native tongue: “where Commerce is made, and Intercourse allowed, upon the Seacoasts and Frontires only,” Webb writes, “there we find the Language of the Natives in the In-land parts, to remain without suffering any alteration” (40).60 The Chinese, in this regard, are exemplary: Their Laws in all times . . . have prohibited forein [sic] Commerce and Intercourse; and Their dominions ever shut up against strangers, never

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permitting any to set footing within Their Empire, unless by way of Embassy solely; nor suffering Their own Natives to travail abroad without especial license from their Emperour: So jealous have they evermore been, lest Their Language and Customes should be corrupted. (44)

As a result of their vigilance against foreign corruption, the Chinese have succeeded in preserving not only their own mother speech, but the very “PRIMITIVE Tongue” of mankind itself. Chinese must be the universal primitive language, Webb concludes, because “it could never be branched into several Languages, or Dialects . . . by the Commerce and Intercourse which they had with Nations of a different speech; when they [the Chinese] never had Commerce or Intercourse with any” (44). The difference between China and England, however, is not entirely a matter of trade policy. Webb also attributes Chinese resistance to the debilitating effects of “commerce and intercourse” to China’s ability to assimilate any foreigners who manage to penetrate its borders, rather than allowing itself to be transformed by them. He argues that although China has, in the course of its long history, been occasionally overtaken by foreign invaders, its identity has never been corrupted or obliterated by them. Instead, as in the classical example of the Roman conquest of Greece, China’s would-be conquerors found themselves in the role of the culturally conquered: For, instead of compelling the Chinois whilst they had them under obedience to submit to their Laws and Customs, they themselves submitted to the Rites and Manners of those, whom they had for that time subjected; applying diligently themselves to understand and learn, the Language, Conditions, Arts, and Manufactures of the Chinois, which at their expulsion they carried into Cathay with them. (129)61

One of the things Webb admires most about the Chinese is their ability to assimilate foreigners and eliminate all forms of difference within national borders. Again, this sentiment contradicts the principles of cosmopolitanism set down by Kant at the end of the eighteenth century, which assert that certain forms of difference must be maintained in order to prevent the world from falling under “one universal monarchy” and “a soulless despotism.”62 Such universal monarchy is precisely Webb’s ideal state: like his version of China, “out of one body and one Off-spring peopled, so at length it grew into one body and form of Empire” (118). In his view, nations must not tolerate difference, for in the absence of homogeneous identity contained in “one body,” there is no nation at all. Webb holds China up as an ideal—a people and a language of pure ancestry, traceable all the way back to the origins of mankind—in contrast

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to an image of England as deeply flawed, corrupted beyond recognition from its original state by a long history of intermarriage with and cultural infiltration by other nations. His emphasis on ancestry and offspring situates the Essay within a more general nostalgic appeal to traits of the early modern elite body, particularly its purity of blood, as the basis of English national identity.63 By appealing as well to the Norman Yoke narrative, Webb presents a theory of language as a component of national identity that remains wedded to strict notions of embodiment, language being represented by the distinctly corporeal figure of the tongue. The tongue is a particularly vulnerable part of the national body, here, subject to corruption through the slightest contact with foreign influence. This form of identity inheres in blood, in the tongue, and requires pure, self-enclosed lines of reproduction. The Essay insists on this kind of embodied identity in order to mourn its absence in England, an absence made all the more conspicuous by Webb’s having to “go” to as distant a land as China for his example. By displacing the traits of early modern English identity to China, however, Webb unwittingly makes room for a radical reconception of English identity, establishing China as an official placeholder for a set of qualities as they are drained of their authority to define what is English. As the two models of English identity that Webb pits against one another—on the one hand, the early modern identity borne in elite bodies that must be internally reproduced; on the other, the emergent notion of a heterogeneous and permeable culture that maintains rather than assimilates difference— competed for dominance, China came effectively to stand in for the older kind of identity as it was discredited and disavowed as an English national ideal. As the new ideal of England as a “polite and commercial nation” gradually gained hegemonic status in the eighteenth century,64 writers commonly invoked the figure of China to refer to an outdated model of homogeneous identity and set it outside the definition of what was English. Although Webb and his Essay, in the words of Chen Shouyi, “seem to have been accidentally forgotten, if not deliberately neglected, by posterity,”65 the unintended legacy of his writing is long and deeply ingrained in English political discourse. Two centuries later, one hears an echo of Webb’s China in John Stuart Mill’s caution against the “despotism of custom” that threatens English individualism: “We have a warning example in China,” he insists. “They have become stationary—have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be farther improved, it must be by foreigners. They have succeeded beyond all hope in what English philanthropists are so industriously working at—in making a people all alike, all governing their thought and conduct by the same maxims and rules; and these are the fruits.”66

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JOHN LOCKE: THE POWER OF THE ENGLISH SLATE

By the time Webb published his nostalgic appeal to a form of nationhood “out of one Body . . . peopled,” this model had already been definitively challenged by the theory of commonwealth detailed in Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). Hobbes began from the premise that a state is an “Artificiall Man”67 constructed rather than born, and designed specifically to confer unity on a populace that was by nature diverse. As Srinivas Aravamudan has argued, the Hobbesian state is “formally created by the mechanism of ‘institution’ or ‘acquisition,’” such that “the theory of compact in Hobbes functions as a logical construction that is indifferent to the historicity of questions of custom, usage, and tradition.”68 Narratives of state power acquired through conquest, suppression, or force of custom—Webb’s preferred modes of explanation— are replaced in Leviathan by what Aravamudan, drawing on Foucault, calls “the natural law fiction of political formalism,” which “rationaliz[es] political acquisition through a dehistoricized notion of the institution of commonwealth” (643).69 In Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty, the timelines that organize historical accounts of conquest give way to an aesthetic concept of commonwealth as a multitude formally represented as a unity: “A Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented . . . For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One” (114). In Aravamudan’s words, “Hobbes seeks a synchronic contemporaneity whereby a political theory or science that was based on notions of time gets rearticulated in terms of a politics of mechanical space” (648). Not only does such a theory of sovereignty naturalize the body of empire built through processes of colonial acquisition, but, Aravamudan notes, Hobbes’s preferred metaphor of the sea-based Leviathan recognizes the role of maritime and commercial power in reinventing England according to principles of acquisition (635). By reorienting the nation as the effect of “the unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented,” the Hobbesian commonwealth replaces the national imperative to preserve the purity of bloodlines, languages, and customs with the project of accommodating as many versions of these particulars as possible within the nation’s self-representation. Cosmopolitanism, which posed such a threat to Webb’s national body, proves more resonant with the commonwealth’s imperative to imagine a unity comprising diversity. The shift from the “represented” to the “representer” relocates the nation itself from the realm of ontology to that of epistemology: the nation is not what it is, but what it is understood to be. Daniel Defoe made this point forcefully in his verse satire of the concept of native bloodlines as the foundation of English identity, The True-Born Englishman (1701):

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For Englishmen to boast of Generation, Cancels their Knowledge, and lampoons the Nation. A True-Born Englishman’s a Contradiction, In Speech an Irony, in Fact a Fiction. A Banter made to be a Test of Fools, Which those that use it justly ridicules. A Metaphor invented to express A man a-kin to all the Universe.70

Part of the new national project to realize this kinship “to all the universe,” a growing body of literature on China and other foreign cultures represents not only an English readership’s increased interest in the world beyond its own national borders, but also an increased sense that knowledge itself— particularly knowledge of one’s “others”—is a crucial component of national well-being. European writings on China in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries reflexively emphasize their own cosmopolitan orientation by repeating the trope of China’s peculiar lack of interest in the outside world. China’s widely touted cultural insularity, which Webb offered as a sign of cultural integrity, was more often framed by European writers as a curious form of willful short-sightedness.71 A typical example appears in John Ogilby’s Atlas Chinensis (1671), which observes that, despite their being (especially in the Southern provinces) a “Politick and Civil” people, “Learned” and “of great Understanding,” [t]he Chinese . . . have a strange Opinion of themselves, accounting none equal to them, and looking upon all Affairs of foreign Kingdoms and People as not worthy their knowledge nor description; insomuch, that we find not one Countrey which they have frequented with their Ships, mention’d in their Histories, when they are very exact in the describing of those Countries within their own Dominions: Moreover, all the Names with which they express foraign [sic] places are ridiculous, and signifying either Barbarians, Slaves, or the like, for they never take notice of the proper and true names of Strangers.72

The reported Chinese disdain for “Strangers” suggests that despite their sophistication, they lack “knowledge of the world,” or, more precisely, the desire for that knowledge—the curiosity—that characterizes the European elite. This unwillingness to see or write about one’s nation within the broader context of the world, we are assured, is itself “strange”—specifically, it estranges the Chinese from the growing global community of citizens of the world whose prestige is signified by their accurate understanding and

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appreciation of foreign cultures. Recognition of this curious “fact” of the Chinese character not only implies but generates the comparative cosmopolitanism of the European reader. Such assertions of the value of commerce, not only economic but also cultural, resonated with English readers—whether aristocratic or common— invested in commercial enterprise. Webb’s Essay was remarkably ill-timed in this respect, launching a critique of commerce at precisely the time England was finally achieving some measure of commercial success on the world stage. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the English East India Company gradually acquired territory in India, including Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta, securing the key positions it needed along eastern trade routes to compete with Portugal and the Netherlands as an importer of Chinese and other East Asian goods to Europe. As the Company sent increasing numbers of ships home to England laden with porcelain, lacquerware, silk, and tea, it actively cultivated markets at home, which it could now supply; the demand for these imported goods grew rapidly not only among the aristocracy but also among a merchant class now expanding to maintain the nation’s growing commercial infrastructure.73 The increasing demand for Chinese things among an emergent consumer class in England guaranteed the preeminence of England’s China trade. But how was the East India Company so successful in convincing people with money to spend that they should spend it on things Chinese? In part, the taste for chinoiserie was rooted in preexistent trends among the European elite for collecting Eastern things, such as the Habsburg collections discussed above. Such china, however, signified political alliances, imperial reach, and royal tribute—things to which no private person aspired. Refashioning china from an emblem of aristocratic privilege to a desirable commodity required a radical reconsideration of how objects are significant to persons, which entailed a redefinition of personhood itself, and its capacity to be made significant by objects. By 1669, Webb already sensed that traditional aristocratic authority was threatened by the cosmopolitan culture of England’s elite classes, a culture that substituted knowledge of the world for more traditional forms of power: title, land, and noble blood. In 1690, the early modern ideal of embodied identity was dealt a fatal blow by the publication of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke’s Essay radically redefines the self as a body of knowledge that accumulates over time as the individual interacts with the external world of objects. Unlike the early modern subject whose identity is a patrilineal inheritance, the Lockean self is acquired gradually as the individual channels his or her sensations of objects into a system of ideas that mirrors the order of the material world. Locke names the subject’s capacity to formulate and organize ideas the “understanding,” and uses this capacity as the foundation of a new kind of subjectivity. Where

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Hobbes had rewritten the nation as the effect of its subjects’ understanding, Locke completes the picture by elaborating how the understanding itself worked to produce ways of knowing the world that could be called particularly English. The Lockean understanding is a “capacity” in a quite literal sense: an empty space that gradually fills with ideas derived directly from sensory information or produced by reflecting upon ideas already collected. Locke’s preferred metaphors for the human mind accentuate its inherent void: The Senses at first let in particular Ideas, and furnish the yet empty Cabinet: And the Mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the Memory, and Names got to them . . . In this manner the Mind comes to be furnish’d with Ideas and Language, the Materials about which to exercise its discursive Faculty: And the use of Reason becomes daily more visible, as these Materials, that give it Employment, increase.74

Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have emphasized that this “voiding” of the human mind is a radical intervention in the definition of the political subject, one that deliberately nullifies the power of both aristocratic inheritance and national membership to define the individual subject. “To represent the mind as terra nullius,” they write, “was to imagine it as a territory unclaimed by any nation, a territory without an owner. Like a sheet of ‘white paper,’ such a territory awaited inscription.”75 The result is a model of “the mind as something that comes to exist only as the individual receives and orders information gleaned from external sensory experiences,” such that “the acquisition of reason in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is . . . exactly analogous to the acquisition of property described in his Second Treatise of Government” (132). As they argue elsewhere, Locke’s theory of property, by insisting that property is created when an individual infuses it with his own labor, posited a mode of identification between an individual person and a material object that was independent of the aristocratic distribution of power. By using his own notion of property produced by “labor power [that] is potentially both self-generated and self-generating” as a metaphor for the contents of the mind, Locke provides a way of imagining a self capable of turning objects into personal property without appealing to forms of aristocratic authorization.76 Originally a “yet empty Cabinet,” the mind is not exactly identical with the materials that it eventually contains; rather, it is both the space those materials come to occupy, and the faculty of acquiring and arranging them such that they become meaningful—no longer external objects, but “Ideas” which are “familiar” to the subject. Even language is represented here as one of the mind’s acquired “Materials”: there is no “native tongue,” no individual language that bears an innately close

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relationship to the subject, but only acquired systems that the mind, through its labors, uses to generate meaning. The Lockean mind is defined wholly by its properties, a term that refers to both the things themselves (in the “familiar” form of ideas), and the faculties by which those things come to be possessed by the individual (sensation and reason). Although Locke’s emphasis on the mind does not in and of itself topple aristocratic authority, it does destabilize it by relocating the definition of self from the body as bearer of blood to the body as conduit between mind and external world of objects. As birthright became supplemented by certain mental qualities such as good taste as the basis of aristocratic identity, there appeared a cultural space in which those without birthright might cultivate the kind of mental property that would distinguish them as persons. Here, the metaphor of the “yet empty Cabinet” is particularly resonant, as it invokes the culturally authorized space of the aristocratic collector’s cabinet only to show how easily it might be cleared out to make room for someone else’s things.77 Locke seems fully aware of the implications of his theory, framing it as a kind of cultural housecleaning that implicitly devalues existent forms of authority. The “Epistle to the Reader” describes the author as “employed as an Under-Labourer in clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge” (10). Locke understands this “Rubbish” as received wisdom in a dual sense: both those notions we hold to be true because others before us have held them to be true, and the whole store of qualities we believe determines who we are (blood, tongue, estates, and so on) because others before us have held that belief. By sweeping away the concept of “native ideas,” Locke insists that the subject of his inquiry lives in a world in which nothing of value is inherited, and the value of nothing—of a foundational void—is primary. “I know it is a received Doctrine, That Men have native Ideas, and original Characters stamped upon their Minds, in their very first Being,” Locke writes. But “[l] et us suppose the Mind to be, as we say, white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas” (104). The doctrine removed with the ideas, the blank space of the mind displaces inherited traits. No longer the part of the body that bears the stamp of God’s creation, the mind becomes a form of potential: a vacant room waiting to be furnished, a text that has yet to be written. Locke’s Essay thus reframes the loss of innate qualities as a productive evacuation. What is innate to human beings, according to Locke, are not the materials of the self but rather the promise of obtaining them—importing them, even—through sensation and reflection: “We have nothing in our Minds, which did not come in, one of these two ways” (106). Moving away from an embodied definition of identity, Locke focuses instead on what the individual does with his capacity for housing certain kinds of knowledge. The double significance of the term “capacity” neatly illustrates how Locke’s

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Essay transforms the notion of lack evoked by Webb. Rather than lament the lack of certain qualities as the loss of identity, Locke figures lack as a fertile space, the ground upon which identity is built through processes of discovery and learning. Emptied of native traits, the mind is defined not by what it lacks, but by the potential contained in the lack itself—by what it has the capacity to create. Substituting the accumulation of ideas for innate qualities as the basis of the self, Locke’s theory of understanding offered a new model of identity. The Lockean self was founded on the acquisition of imported objects (in the form of ideas) to “furnish” the self through repeated acts of sensation and judgment. As a result, identity became something one does rather than something one is; the self became a thing one creates over time rather than a thing one inherits. One of the most important differences between the Lockean self and the more traditional embodied subject was how Locke’s model emphasized the necessity of self-transformation and improvement as a condition of the self ’s very existence. This is a dynamic, progressive self that is different from itself—more cultivated, more improved, more fully itself—from one moment to the next; its identity resides in this ongoing production of a new and improved version of the self rather than the faithful reproduction of what is already there. Locke directly addresses the problem of “personal identity,” or what it is that remains constant enough in a dynamic person for one to identify it in different contexts: “we must consider what Person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different time and places” (335). Locke insists that “personal Identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational Being,” must be measured by consciousness rather than by substance, because “different Substances, by the same consciousness (where they do partake in it) [are] united into one Person” (336). All that remains consistent about a person over time is his or her mental capacity for creating and recognizing as the self a diverse and growing collection of materials. By questioning sameness of substance as the basis of identity, Locke made it possible to rethink not only the individual person but also the nation. Webb had argued that, since identity inhered in the embodied traits of the elite, national identity depended on protecting aristocratic bodies from “Intercourse and Commerce” with outsiders; in this context, the homogeneous empire of China seemed a paradigm of national coherence. But a model of identity like Locke’s that allowed for progressive accumulation and privileged dynamic improvement lent itself to another way of imagining the social body. The ideal nation no longer resembled monolithic China, rich but unchanging, but instead England, which was rapidly transforming itself from a globally insignificant and isolated nation to an integrated member of

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the world economy through commerce and the accumulation of knowledge of the world in print. The materials of the nation, like those of the person, shift from native bodies to acquired property. The argument of Locke’s Essay itself moves from an individual to a collective scale as it continues to offer evidence against the existence of innate ideas. One of the most persuasive proofs against them, Locke suggests, is the fact that some foreigners lack ideas that his English readers would consider innate—the argument being that if they were truly innate, such ideas would be universal. He offers as an example the idea of God. “Besides the Atheists, taken notice of amongst the Ancients, and left branded upon the Records of History,” he asks, “hath not Navigation discovered, in these latter Ages, whole Nations, at the Bay of Soldania, in Brasil, in Boranday, and in the Caribee islands, etc. amongst whom there was to be found no Notion of a God, no Religion[?]” (87–88). Substituting deist advancement for knowledge in general, Locke uses atheism as a measure of primitive ignorance among entire cultures. Nations with no idea of God, he argues, have not yet advanced their collective understanding to interpret the empirical evidence of His existence. He attributes their limitations directly to a lack of cosmopolitan inquiry: nations with weak or incomplete understandings of God have “never employ’d their Parts, Faculties, and Powers, industriously that way, but contented themselves with the Opinions, Fashions, and Things of their country, as they found them, without looking any farther” (92). Nations differ not in their native composition (“Parts, Faculties, and Powers”), but rather in their disposition toward mental labor, curiosity about the world, and willingness to pursue new knowledge beyond the bounds of the already known. They differ, in other words, in their capacity for collective improvement through discovery. “Had you or I been born at the Bay of Soldania,” Locke continues, possibly our thoughts and notions had not exceeded those brutish ones of the Hottentots that inhabit there. And had the Virginia king Apochancana been educated in England, he had been perhaps as knowing a divine, and as good a mathematician as any in it; the difference between him and a more improved Englishman lying barely in this, that the exercise of his faculties was bounded within the ways, modes, and notions of his own country, and never directed to any other or further inquiries. And if he had not any idea of a God, it was only because he pursued not those thoughts that would have led him to it. (92)

The “more improved Englishman” sets himself apart from the atheists by being less “bounded” by his own culture, more willing to import ideas from abroad. This tendency to compromise the “ways, modes, and notions

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of his own country” by combining them with those of foreign countries emerges, paradoxically, as a virtue of national character, one particular to the English. A desire for intercourse and commerce with foreigners, which Webb identified as a weakness of the English character, Locke rewrites as an advantage. To emphasize the universal superiority of English understanding, Locke turns to the trope of Chinese insularity, contrasting England’s capacity for new knowledge, its readiness to acquire “foreign” ideas, with the supposedly hermetic character of Chinese culture. Were we simply to consider the American Indians and the Hottentots, he submits, we might attribute the absence of any idea of God to a general want of learning and civilization, as “these are Instances of Nations where uncultivated Nature has been left to it self, without the help of Letters, and Discipline, and the Improvements of Arts and Sciences” (88). He invites us, however, to consider the peculiar example of China, where even the most highly educated individuals yet have no idea of God. Not only those writers critical of China, Locke informs us, but also “the Missionaries of China, even the Jesuits themselves, the great Encomiasts of the Chineses, do all to a Man agree and will convince us, that the Sect of the Litterati, or Learned, keeping to the old Religion of China, and the ruling Party there, are all of them Atheist” (88). This rather crude distortion of the Jesuit interpretation of Confucianism—an interpretation that was the focus of the heated Chinese Rites Controversy in progress as Locke is writing—turns China into an anomaly in the logic of cultural progress.78 In its particularity as a civilized yet atheist nation, this version of China serves Locke as proof that inherited wisdom is potentially as useless as complete lack of learning. The strength of human understanding can thus be mapped comparatively on a global scale, with the English at the vanguard of intellectual “improvement.” What sets them apart from other nations is not their existent storehouse of knowledge (by which measure the Chinese excel), but the “unboundedness” of their learning, their drive to look to foreign places for materials with which to furnish the self. By contrasting the English way of thinking to the Chinese, Locke suggests that being English, like being a thinking person, is something one does rather than something one is. As he redefines English identity as the effect of constant accumulation of knowledge and improvement of understanding, Locke substitutes China for aristocratic England in order to discredit an older definition of national identity based on the reproduction of innate qualities, and, indeed, to void Englishness of its own historicity. This substitution does not follow the logic of analogy, but is instead the effect of displacement that attends a well-deployed example. Unlike Webb’s Essay, Locke’s is clearly not “about” China. His negative invocation of the Chinese, one might argue, speaks more to Locke’s animosity toward the Jesuits than to China.79 Yet,

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by reading Locke as a response to Webb (something Locke himself surely never intended) we can see more clearly how Locke’s reduction of China to an arbitrary example in the analysis of “human understanding” in general situates a figure of China in the topography of philosophical inquiry into English subjectivity. No longer an ideal, China serves instead to generate what Eric Hayot calls the “example-effect,” where “the force of Chinese exemplarity” in English thought is to create “the possibility of philosophy by appearing as a seemingly arbitrary historical or political detail whose value lies precisely in its having ‘nothing’ to do with the philosophical material it illustrates.”80 Consigning to China the premodern attachment to that which is “native”—as opposed to that which is acquired—is Locke’s way of disavowing England’s own “native ideas” so that he can identify Englishness instead with change, revision, and improvement itself. Packaged as an example of the myriad limitations of understanding found among non-English peoples, the figure of China also stands for the kind of thing the “more improved Englishman” is himself capable of understanding. Like the Hobbesian commonwealth, the Lockean Englishman dwells in a synchronic contemporaneity; in relation to him, the outside world, in all its diversity, becomes unified as a field of potential acquisition. The figure of China marks the boundary of the English individual’s cosmopolis. It is the nation as sameness of substance—an idea that has been discredited and disavowed from English understanding, and relocated to the far edge of the universe, where it can be encountered and reincorporated as knowledge of the world.

CHINOISERIE: “A MIXT KIND OF FURNITURE”

Locke’s model of human understanding implied that the quality and character of the individual no longer came from the inside, but from the outside, through repeated acts of perception and judgment that incorporated external objects in the form of ideas. Unlike the older notion of embodiment, which privileged innate qualities already safely enclosed within the self, the notion of incorporation privileged the acquisition of outside materials that were taken into the self. The subject that takes shape as a result of this process is not based on reproduction of the same, but on variety, change, distinction, order, and above all improvement. Locke’s model of the mind as a room that is filled with information based on encounters with objects outside the self proved similarly productive as a model of the nation, increasingly imagined as a collection of spaces in need of furnishing.81 The cultural appeal of this new model of identity can be seen in how the English—not only the aristocracy, but also the growing merchant-consumer class—set to

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work literalizing and materializing Locke’s metaphor of the self a “vast store” of imported materials gathered to furnish interiors. The material accumulation of new things in English spaces has been well documented since Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb’s The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England shifted the paradigm of economic analysis from production to consumption;82 more recently, cultural historians have, in the words of Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, “moved the discussion away from social scientific preoccupations with the origins of consumer society, towards a recognition of the integral relation between material and intellectual culture.”83 Recent collections including Berg and Eger’s Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg’s Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What European Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past, and Alden Cavanaugh and Michael E. Yonan’s The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain all demonstrate how a growing and diverse catalog of material objects purchased by English consumers for use and display in the household negotiated new forms of English identity in a global context.84 The trends that made up what McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb call the “consumer revolution” of the eighteenth century—trends now understood as combining material and intellectual practice—work in concert with Locke’s philosophical departure from traditional definitions of self and substance. While aristocratic subjects certainly made up a significant part of the consuming public, consumption as a mode of acquiring property was also accessible to those who had money but not necessarily titles and estates. Paul Langford has observed that by mid-century, “very ordinary households were affected by the characteristic combination of self-conscious taste working with money. The carpets, wall-hangings, furnishings, kitchen and parlour ware in the homes of many shopkeepers and tradesmen in the 1760s and 1770s, would have surprised their parents and astonished their grandparents. It is a measure of the transformation that few of them would have been found even in aristocratic households half a century earlier.”85 Certain trends in household furnishing that, a century earlier, were identifiable with aristocratic status—including and perhaps especially chinoiserie—were, by the mid-eighteenth century, the basis of what Langford calls “middle-class materialism.”86 This shift represents much more than a simple “trickle-down” of tastes from the elite to the common; it constitutes a transformation in what luxury objects indicated about the persons to whom they belonged.87 “For the ancien régime,” writes Katie Scott, “consumption in its widest sense was not a matter of personal and private gratification but a public act of social responsibility.”88 The “magnificence” of Europe’s great houses in the seventeenth century was a sign not only of status but also of

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the public, political nature of that status; it “served to keep the door of the nobleman’s residence permanently ajar.”89 There was no equivalent expectation of public display for non-aristocratic consumers. The display of luxury in middling households indicated privatized qualities of personal taste, judgment, and self- and social improvement, rather than political power and public beneficence. The collections of European aristocrats spoke to the power of the state as it inhered in dynastic lines; the furniture of the English household, in contrast, reflected the mental activity of a nation of individual subjects. While luxury goods as a general category have received significant attention from scholars investigating the role of commercial and aesthetic objects in eighteenth-century English life, only recently has critical focus been trained on the particular trend of chinoiserie.90 David Porter’s book-length study, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, points out that this relative neglect of things Chinese as “culturally embedded objects” in English culture derives both from “the paucity of direct evidence” of ownership history, much less of how individual persons understood or performed their relationship to the things they owned, and from “a traditional resistance to the serious historical study of consumer culture on the grounds both of its seeming triviality and its awkward association with bad taste, crass materialism, and other less-than-noble impulses of human nature.”91 Perhaps more than other commercial goods, things Chinese have, for as long as they have registered in representations of English life, been used to mark the boundary at which tasteful aesthetic appreciation (coded variously as male, aristocratic, and disembodied) gives way to monstrous imitations of such experiences (coded, conversely, as female, commercial, and materially embedded).92 Periodicals such as The Spectator provide evidence both of chinoiserie’s ubiquity in English decorative schemes and the mixed feelings such displays evoked among those English subjects capable of reflection and aesthetic judgment. Spectator 252 (December 19, 1711), for example, presents a letter whose author complains that “Every Room in my House is furnished with Trophies of [my wife’s] Eloquence, rich Cabinets, Piles of China, Japan Screens, and costly Jars; and if you were to come into my great Parlour, you would fancy your self in an India Ware-house” (2:480). A Dutch painted design for a fan from around the same period suggests that a consumer of chinoiserie may well have desired to recreate the effect of an “India warehouse” in the home: the painted image of a well-stocked shop containing a wide selection of porcelain, lacquerware, painting, and textiles would have allowed the owner of the fan to hold and display a shop’s entire inventory of Chinese export ware in her single hand (see figure 1.1). Porter argues that such desires, coming to exemplify the antithesis of bourgeois taste and moderation as these values were articulated over the course of the

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Figure 1.1 Painting of interior of a shop dealing in Chinese export goods, originally the leaf of a fan, 1680–1700. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

eighteenth century, have met with sustained derision in the scholarly tradition that descends largely from Kantian models of taste and judgment. For Porter, a reevaluation of the taste for Chinese things thus amounts to a feminist revision of aesthetic experience as theorized in the eighteenth century; to address the cultural role of chinoiserie is, for him, the equivalent of asking, “what do women want?”93 While I, among others, would warn against conflating the female figures representationally associated with chinaware with “actual women” of the eighteenth century, or any period—on this point, Stacey Sloboda usefully points out that “the mythomorphic figure of the female china collector was certainly more a literary device than a description of actual collecting practices”94—it is clear that in popular literary outlets like The Spectator, the fashion for things Chinese is predominantly (though not exclusively) attributed to female taste, for better or, more frequently, for worse.95 Porter calls attention to Addison’s description of a “Lady’s Library” (April 12, 1711) that introduces not only the principle of decorating in the Chinese taste, but also some of the anxieties emerging in response to its rising popularity: At the End of the Folios (which were finely bound and gilt) were great Jars of China placed one above another in a very noble Piece of Architecture. The Quartos were separated from the Octavos by a Pile of smaller Vessels which rose in a delightful Pyramid. The Octavos were bounded by Tea Dishes of all Shapes[,] Colours and Sizes, which were so disposed on a wooden Frame, that they looked like one continued Pillar indented with the finest Strokes of Sculpture, and stained with the greatest Variety of Dyes. That Part of the

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Library which was designed for the Reception of Plays and Pamphlets, and other loose Papers, was enclosed in a kinds of Square, consisting of one of the prettiest Grotesque Works I ever saw, and made up of Scaramouches, Lions, Monkies, Mandarines, Trees, Shells, and a thousand other odd Figures in China Ware. In the midst of the Room was a little Japan Table, with a Quire of gilt Paper upon it, and on the Paper a Silver Snuff-box made in the Shape of a little Book. I found there were several other counterfeit Books upon the upper Shelves, which were carved in Wood, and served only to fill up the Number, like Fagots in the muster of a Regiment. I was wonderfully pleased with such a mixt kind of Furniture, as seemed very suitable both to the Lady and the Scholar, and did not know at first whether I should fancy myself in a Grotto, or in a Library. (1:153–54)

A room specifically designed to be visually gratifying, the “Lady’s Library” is a hybrid space: a harmonious combination of books and ornament, learning and leisure, “very suitable both to the Lady and the Scholar.” Throughout, this “mixt kind of furniture” is marked by Chinese things: porcelain jars, japanned tables, tea equipage, and “odd Figures in China Ware.” The domestication of the scholar’s library as part of the well-furnished English home, its transformation into a space that gratifies both intellect and taste, is marked here by its feminine, Chinese touches. The irony of Addison’s praise becomes apparent as the entry continues; he is concerned, in particular, that the books in the lady’s library “are of little more use than to divert the Imagination,” not unlike the ornaments that surround them (1:154). Perhaps, he suggests, a library should not be so easily confused with a grotto. But Addison’s criticism of Leonora, the owner of this library, is ultimately rendered with a light hand that suggests the ambivalence of his response. Porter makes use of this ambivalence to suggest that things Chinese offered their English owners— women in particular—access to certain kinds of intellectual pleasure and stimulation akin to those provided by the kinds of fiction dismissed as “romance”; where history has judged against the value of Leonora’s library, Porter invites us to rediscover its various rewards.96 Kathleen Lubey’s recent reassessment of Addison’s writing on the imagination alongside Eliza Haywood’s fiction suggests that even for Addison, the line between material and intellectual pleasures is less fixed than conventional readings have acknowledged.97 In later installments of The Spectator, Addison does indeed address the ambivalence of Chinese taste to explore the real intellectual possibilities posed by the imagination and chinoiserie alike, a development I discuss in more detail in chapter 2. One of the risks of framing the Chinese taste predominantly as a question of gender is that the category of “women” and the issue of their “wants” flattens the problem of status—the shift of cultural privilege from royals and

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aristocracy to unblooded persons of means—that chinoiserie brings to the fore. While there is arguably a relationship between, say, Queen Mary’s china cabinet at Hampton Court and a Spectator reader’s wife’s hoard of porcelain, it seems reckless to take a commentator like Daniel Defoe at his word when he attributes these collections to the same female “humour.”98 What cultural forces might become visible if we suspend the eighteenth century’s relentless feminization of chinoiserie and made a critical comparison of the cultural and political function of things Chinese in different kinds of European spaces? For example, Michael E. Yonan’s readings of Habsburg deployments of chinoiserie in state palaces offers a useful counterpoint to the examples of the Chinese taste favored by the Spectator. In addition to evoking traditions of cosmopolitan tribute and imperial cultural contact discussed above, royal chinoiserie came to function as a new technology of representing and reproducing the power harnessed in elite bodies. In his analysis of Maria Theresa’s cabinet chinois in the Schönbrunn palace, Yonan argues that “Asiatic materials [in European palaces] foreground the process of physical transformation, of natural forces harnessed to reshape matter, and this concept resonated with a wide-ranging set of imperial, political, artistic, and scientific concerns” intimately bound in eighteenth-century discourse.99 In the Habsburg context, “both the material aspect of the Chinese cabinet and the patterns of display encountered in them—that is, their formal arrangement— . . . [display] physical mutability [as] a communicator of elite power” (67). Central to the aesthetic of the cabinet chinois was a sense of multiplicity and diversity, a combination of various kinds of materials—porcelain, lacquerware, glass, and other precious substances—arranged to suggest the very processes of collection and arrangement, rather than the static ownership of any particular object. In the context of Maria Theresa’s Chinese writing cabinet, this aesthetic performs a very particular kind of cultural and political work: Transformation here is . . . visualized, but it is the transformation of space and, through the role that such activities played in the imperial education program, the transformation of human subjects . . . The Habsburg family is great, this room tells us, because they can produce art like this, and furthermore became art like this themselves. Therefore the room intermingles at least three different kinds of becoming: the creation of art, the creation of noble princes and princesses, and the creation of beautiful matter. (80)

At Schönbrunn, in other words, the Chinese room participates in “the dual imperial industries of art-making and making nobles” (80). The “substance” of elite embodiment has been expanded to include not only the body but a range of foreign materials, and the mode of reproduction includes aesthetic self-production as well as physiological regeneration, but the cabinet chinois

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remains in service to the cultural preservation of nobility as it inheres in material forms. Maria Theresa ultimately appears as one of the cabinet’s natural wonders: universal power manifest in a beautiful body. While the principle of the Chinese aesthetic described here—diversity, multiplicity, changeability—proved adaptable to non-aristocratic contexts, the cultural significance of the desires, practices, and experiences associated with chinoiserie were necessarily different when the imperative to reproduce nobility was removed from the equation. As I suggest above in my discussion of Montagu, upper-class English women were perhaps uniquely positioned to translate things Chinese from signs of traditional elite power to bearers of new social meanings as part of a more Lockean order of things. When, for example, she is inspired by the King of Hanover’s table to import indoor heaters tastefully disguised as china jars, Montagu represents her own taste as bridging Continental aristocratic traditions and a more modern appreciation for fashion and technological innovation. Stacey Sloboda has argued that the Duchess of Portland’s renowned collection of curiosities performs a similar function of cultural transition: the collection, which combined chinoiserie porcelain and other decorative objects with specimens of natural history from around the globe, “hovered productively between the model of an early modern cabinet of curiosities, where materials prized for their singularity, curiosity, or rarity were set in relation to one another, and the modern Enlightenment museum, in which disparate materials and forms were cataloged and systematized.”100 Citing Jo Dahn’s work on Mary Delany,101 Sloboda shows how “curious” objects—chinoiserie porcelain in particular—serve as an “important component of sociability” among upper-class English women, “as they both facilitated and signified political, familial, and affectionate bonds” (464). Such networks of sociability, while they resemble the kinds of political connections among elite families signified by diplomatic gifts and objects of tribute, are reframed to emphasize acts of interpersonal intimacy forged through shared appreciation of innovation and improvement in the English home. Sloboda quotes a 1758 letter by Delany describing how she spent the day “at Whitehall, and helped the Duchess to reinstate all her fine china and japan in her cabinets, which were emptied in the summer, in order to new hang her dressing-room with plain blue paper, the colour of that in my closet.”102 Delany’s letters, Sloboda writes, “are filled with accounts of making, remaking, arranging, and displaying all manner of crafts, particularly while in Portland’s company” (464), suggesting that the Lockean work of furnishing space is not only a mode of self-production but a means of forging social relationships among women of a certain status. Such shared activities generate forms of sociability rather than spectacles of nobility. At the same time, as Hahn’s reading of Delany’s letters makes clear, the social networks negotiated through this kind of shared china were still

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demarcated by status, distinguishable from the growing marketing of “new” china by entrepreneurs like Josiah Wedgwood to “his own up and coming middle class.”103 The Duchess of Portland’s china cabinets, as spaces of self-display and shared decorative work, thus translate certain qualities of the royal cabinet chinois but generate a different kind of subjectivity than that housed by the noble body. As such cabinets and closets became a regular feature of English domestic spaces—by the mid-eighteenth century, it had become common for fine houses to have a “Chinese room” set up specifically to display elaborate combinations of objects in the Chinese style—the political work of imperial cabinets was subordinated to the functions of what Locke presents as universal (yet distinctly English) self-making. Adapting examples like Daniel Marot’s Chinese rooms for William and Mary at Hampton Court (see figure 1.2), midcentury architects and designers like Robert Adam, John Linnell, and Thomas Chippendale installed Chinese rooms not only for members of state but also for any private clients who could afford them. The actor David Garrick, for example, commissioned a Chinese bedroom furnished by Chippendale, in the style of the age’s most celebrated state bedrooms, including the bedchamber Chippendale furnished at Nostell Priory for Sir Rowland Winn and the one Linnell designed at Badminton House for the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort.104 Manufacturers such as Chippendale and

Figure 1.2 Print of a design by Daniel Marot for a Chinese room, 1700. This print may echo Marot’s design for Mary II’s china collection room at the palace of Het Loo, built in the 1680s. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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Wedgwood designed chinoiserie with an eye toward how different kinds of Chinese things would be combined in such displays; Chippendale’s suggestion in the third edition of The Gentleman & Cabinet-Maker’s Director (1762) that his “Designs of Chairs after the Chinese Manner . . . are very proper for a Lady’s Dressing-Room: especially if it is hung with India Paper” is typical.105 These lavishly decorated rooms were a source of domestic pride, as well as a significant financial investment. One of the most celebrated examples was the Chinese room commissioned from William and John Linnell by Elizabeth Montagu, cousin by marriage to Lady Mary and prominent member of the Bluestocking circle.106 Sloboda’s reading of Montagu’s Chinese room suggests that, aesthetically, it drew on chinoiserie’s myriad cultural associations at midcentury to create a space that, on the one hand, facilitated a form of conversation that rejected “the rigid courtly separation of the sexes, and [was] predicated on rational intellectual pursuits that seemingly stood in opposition to an increasingly commodified cultural sphere,” and, on the other, embraced the materials made available through commercial culture and manipulated its increasingly gendered connotations to fashion a modern form of femininity.107 Such deployments neither perfectly reproduce nor reject the aesthetics of royal cabinets, but rather echo them strategically to authorize new forms of subjectivity and sociability based on social commerce and intellectual improvement. These recent reassessments by Sloboda, Yonan, and Porter of the cultural work performed by chinoiserie represent a major shift in the way scholars account for the role of Chinese and other “foreign” objects in the constitution of European selfhood. They counter the presumption that chinoiserie satisfied a certain self-explanatory need for “fantasy” in English life, a need that also fed the eighteenth-century vogue for oriental tales and other fanciful representations of the East.108 In doing so, they open up new possibilities for conceiving of how the “Chineseness” of chinoiserie is, effectively, a form of Englishness—a mode of English cultural and epistemological work that cannot be reduced to misinterpretations of other cultures. In the interest of distinguishing the regional origins of different movements, art historians have always been careful to point out that chinoiserie is not authentically Chinese, but a European fantasy of Chineseness.109 Dawn Jacobson explains, for example, that “true chinoiseries are not pallid or incompetent imitations of Chinese objects. They are the tangible and solid realizations in the West of a land of the imagination.”110 Hugh Honour similarly warns that the term chinoiserie is misleading because “the decorations on these objects was composed of a gallimaufry of eastern and European motifs.”111 Honour attributes the confused quality of chinoiserie to European geographical ignorance: “In the late seventeenth century very few Europeans were capable of drawing nice distinctions between the products of China,

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Japan, Siam, and India—or indeed between any non-European styles . . . Nor was this confusion confined to styles of decoration. The very geography of the Far East was still hazy” (84–85). While it is likely true that the average European of the early eighteenth century had an imprecise notion of world geography, there is no evidence that chinoiserie as a style became less “confused” as the world was mapped in greater detail. Porter provides useful guidance away from the conventional paradigms of “images, imitations, and influences” that have framed our understanding of cross-cultural aesthetic styles; he argues that by focusing solely on how certain forms or ideas are “translated” from one cultural context to the next, we neglect “the very real psychological impact of the moment of encounter and its effects on the process of conceiving and representing the culturally alien.”112 If we suspend the question of what chinoiserie “is” and focus instead on the experience it was designed to facilitate, its hybridity comes to the fore as a positive and deliberate effect. Even Honour himself provides plenty of evidence that chinoiserie’s convoluted quality was part of its appeal to English consumers, so much so that as early as the mid-seventeenth century, English merchants were customizing their orders from Asian manufacturers, even supplying them with their own “Chinese” patterns designed in England, to make sure they struck the right note for an English market. The discovery of such patterns accompanying East India Company orders as early as 1643 suggests that the English conception of what eastern fabrics should, ideally, look like was sufficiently distinct by the 1640s to necessitate the instruction of eastern craftsmen in making textiles in the English “China fashion.” This extraordinary episode was not to end here, however, for the Indian weavers, being by nature unable to copy exactly the English designs unwittingly created a new, doubly, if not trebly, cross-bred style. And finally yet another twist was to be given to the story when, to quote Mr. Irwin, “chinoiserie of this even more hybrid kind had become so far removed from genuine Chinese tradition that it was exported from India to China as a novelty to the Chinese themselves.” In the eighteenth century, therefore, Chinese weavers were producing fabrics adorned with the now famous “tree of life” design, based on Indian patterns, derived from English originals which were an expression of the European vision of the Orient. There have been few more bizarre incidents in the whole of taste. (50)

Bizarre as it may seem to Honour, or to us, neither English traders nor consumers seemed to think it strange that the Chinese taste comprised objects and styles that did not originate in China. The “Chineseness” of chinoiserie— the quality borne in certain kinds of objects and incorporated into English

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space—resided somewhere other than place of manufacture, real or imagined. To borrow Porter’s terms, the “moment of encounter” presented in the form of chinoiserie was never conceived as contact with “China” itself. Instead, it seems to be precisely the “mixed” quality of chinoiserie—its visual representation of the varieties of difference that exist in the world, and of their harmonious combination—that appealed to English viewers and consumers. Descriptions of Chinese rooms like those above, typical of the way chinoiserie collections are recorded in literature of the period, do not emphasize the material history of particular objects but rather the overall effect of their combination. Cynthia Sundberg Wall identifies this type of description with developments in late seventeenth-century natural philosophy, arguing that the sustained attention paid not to any individual object but to the collection, the variety and extent of it composing an “expressive whole,” resonates with the new empiricism practiced by Royal Society members like Robert Boyle. “The bare prospect of this magnificent Fabrick of the Universe, furnished and adorned with such strange variety of curious and usefull Creatures, would suffice to transport us both with wonder and Joy, if their Commonesse did not hinder their operations,” Boyle writes.113 Chinoiserie enabled the kind of seeing Boyle advocates by creating spaces in which nothing was “common,” so that the “strange variety” of the world could strike the viewer with full force. This was for Boyle no mere exercise of vanity, but a philosophical practice. “The book of Nature,” he writes, “is to an ordinary Gazer, and a Naturalist, like a rare Book of Hieroglyphicks to a Child, and a Philosopher: the one is sufficiently pleas’d with the Oddness and Variety of the curious Pictures that adorne it; whereas the other is not only delighted with those outward objects that gratifie his sense, but receives a much higher satisfaction in admiring the knowledge of an Author, and in finding out and inriching himself with those abstruse and vailed Truths dexterously hinted in them” (quoted in Wall, 77–78). “The point,” Wall writes, “is to make the child into a philosopher” (78). Margaret Jacob has explained how, in the late seventeenth century, the Royal Society promoted work like Boyle’s to negotiate empirical investigation, Christian doctrine, and social and political order; his corpuscular philosophy, she argues, “amounted to a Christianized Epicurean atomism . . . which Boyle afforded the status of a hypothesis to be tested by experiment, not that of dogma.”114 Boyle’s figure of the “magnificent Fabrick of the Universe, furnished and adorned with such strange variety of curious and usefull Creatures” directly implicates the kinds of materials mobilized in curiosity cabinets and Chinese rooms alike in offering perceptive subjects everyday access to evidence of natural and divine order. Chinoiserie was part of this project: it simulated the diversity of the world itself in miniature, domesticated form. It was the vast and varied world customized to individual experience. As a microcosm, the Chinese

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room reproduced not a replica of the world at large, but an example of the kinds of difference the world sustained, one that emphasized the beauty of their coexistence. Chinoiserie thus constitutes a semiotic system similar to that of the contents of the Lockean mind. It is a set of information defined, on the one hand, by its extent and variety, and, on the other, by its meaningful arrangement—its order. “Whence comes [the mind] by that vast store, which the busy and boundless Fancy of Man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety?” Locke asks, also emphasizing that “unless the mind had a distinct perception of different objects, and their qualities, it would be capable of very little knowledge . . . On [the] faculty of Distinguishing one thing from another, depends the evidence and certainty of several, even very general Propositions, which have passed for innate Truths.”115 The Chinese room, like the mind, is a cabinet of difference. It is part of the culture of order Foucault identifies in the late seventeenth century, following an epistemic break with the medieval system. Until the seventeenth century, he argues, signs derived meaning from relations of resemblance and kinship with the material world—they were only meaningful representations of the world, in other words, insofar as they were materially of that world. In contrast, in the Classical age, signs only signify following their severance from the material world and containment in a self-enclosed realm in which they constitute their own system of identity and difference. They derive their meaning in relation to one another as they refer to the world beyond. “The activity of the mind,” Foucault writes, “will . . . no longer consist in drawing things together, in setting out on a quest for everything that might reveal some sort of kinship, attraction, or secretly shared nature within them, but, on the contrary, in discriminating, that is, in establishing their identities, then the inevitability of the connections with all the successive degrees of a series.”116 Like Lockean ideas, Chinese things in the English household become what they are, not because of where they come from, who made them, or any other detail of their material history, but instead by virtue of how they fit within the differential system of a well-furnished space. They represent the world not as icons or relics of a place of origin, but to the extent that their successful, orderly combination refers the mind to ideas of ever greater complexity, the “world” being the horizon of infinite diversity. Chinese things are objects of semiotic as well as commercial exchange in this culture. They participate in the epistemological economy that sustains the Lockean self, in which external objects inform the mind, and the mind, in turn, brings order to the world’s objects. This exchange sustains a cosmopolitan order of things that promises the individual the possibility of knowing the world—not by experiencing every actual thing in the world, but by experiencing enough of it to understand the relations of difference that give

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the world its structure. Locke provided a way of incorporating virtually anything into the field of personal knowledge without compromising the integrity of the person, whose identity depends only on how ideas are accumulated, selected, and arranged, not on where they come from. Writers such as Addison and Pope, with whom I began this chapter, extend this idea to a principle of national character, proposing an English nation that improves itself by importing foreign goods, and improves those goods by incorporating them into England’s particular cosmopolitan order. In Spectator 69, England’s native “wants” are framed as her greatest strengths: If we consider our own Country in its natural Prospect, without any of the Benefits and Advantages of Commerce, what a barren uncomfortable Spot of Earth falls to our Share! Natural Historians tell us, that no fruit grows Originally among us, besides Hips and Haws, Acorns and Pig-Nutts, with other Delicates of the like Nature; That our Climate of itself, and without the Assistances of Art, can make no further Advances toward a Plumb than to a Sloe, and carries an Apple to no greater perfection than a Crab: That our Melons, our Peaches, our Figs, our Apricots, and Cherries, are Strangers among us, imported in different Ages, and naturalized in our English gardens. . . . Traffick . . . has improved the whole Face of Nature among us. Our Ships are laden with the Harvest of every Climate: Our tables are stored with Spices, and Oils, and Wines: Our Rooms are filled with Pyramids of China, and adorned with the Workmanship of Japan: Our Morning’s Draught comes to us from the remotest Corners of the Earth: we Repair our Bodies by the Drugs of America, and repose ourselves under Indian Canopies. My Friend Sir Andrew calls the Vineyards of France our Gardens; the Spice-Islands our Hot-beds; the Persians our Silk-Weavers; and the Chinese our Potters. Nature indeed furnishes us with the bare Necessaries of Life, but Traffick gives us greater Variety of what is Useful, and at the same time supplies us with everything that is Convenient and Ornamental. (1:295–96)

The self-deprecating posture at the beginning of this description works like Locke’s disavowal of “innate ideas”—it turns England in its original state into the conceptual terra nullius that, Armstrong and Tennenhouse argue, enables the creation of a nation “from the ground up,” through the work of its subjects, not the hereditary lines of its aristocracy.117 Like a modern individual, England only becomes itself through the accumulation of experience and varied contact with the outside world. The national character is its capacity for diversity of experience, its ability to weave objects from different corners of the world into a “Convenient and Ornamental” way of life. Addison’s description of England presents it as a collection of imported objects simultaneously “foreign” and quintessentially English. Windsor-Forest

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performs a similar naturalization of foreign goods by representing them as consumable elements of the English landscape, most strikingly when it figures imported riches as fish “supplied” by England’s rivers: The bright-ey’d Perch with Fins of Tyrian dye, The silver Eel, in shining Volumes roll’d, The yellow Carp, in Scales bedrop’d with Gold, Swift Trouts, diversify’d with Crimson Stains, And Pykes, the Tyrants of the watry Plains. (142–46)

Ichthyomorphizing popular foreign ornaments like dyes, silver leaf, and gilt as England’s native fish, the poem provides an image of the world’s variety—the diversity of things supplied by many nations, that flow from these nations in and through England—as part of England’s natural landscape. The nation’s rivers become its lifelines, the streams that bring in objects from every nation in the world and incorporate them into England’s natural order. England is neither land mass nor social body, but a set of pathways connecting ports. A nation made of flow and movement, England is destined to overflow its own geographical bounds and flood the world: “The Time shall come,” the poem prophesizes, “when free as Seas or Wind / Unbounded Thames shall flow for all Mankind, / Whole Nations enter with each swelling Tyde, / And Seas but join the Regions they divide” (397–400). In this glorious moment, the Thames is flowing both out and in; England’s waterways spread throughout the world while simultaneously taking in “Whole Nations.” Laura Brown identifies this image of the Thames with an emergent “fable of modernity” that uses images of fluidity to understand the relationships between seemingly disparate areas of life. She associates the Thames of Windsor-Forest with Swift’s Description of a City Shower: “the same system of tributary rivers that makes up the sewers of the urban poetry . . . becomes the source of the pax britannica, the historical force of modern imperial expansion . . . The ‘Flood’ in both of these poems names the irresistible energy at the core of contemporary experience.”118 While Pope undeniably supplies a potent, even prescient, image of British imperial power, pairing Windsor-Forest with Addison rather than Swift illuminates the way Pope puts this energy to different cultural use. Images of the sewer, Brown writes, “by mingling, mixing, or joining, generate indiscriminacy, level hierarchy, repudiate genealogy, or overturn order” (49). Pope’s Thames, in contrast, despite the rush of unbounded movement, engenders not chaos but order, as English commerce holds nations in proper relation to one another. England continues to “divide” the nations of the world even as it “joins” them; it does not eradicate difference between itself and its others as it incorporates them,

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but manages and maintains difference in the form of an aesthetic order among various nations. The poem’s vision of Britannia makes use of figures offered by the new science to reconcile worldly diversity to principles not only of natural but also social and political order. Isaac Newton, in his initial studies of light, offered a perfect metaphor for this type of mixture. Natural white light, he wrote in a letter to the Royal Society, “is a confused aggregate of rays indued with all sorts of colors, as they are promiscuously darted from the various parts of luminous bodies. And of such a confused aggregate . . . is generated whiteness, if there be a due proportion of the ingredients; but if any one predominate, the light must incline to that colour.”119 Mixing different colored rays produces new colors—blue and yellow, for example, make green— but only white light contains every color combined in perfect proportion. In addition, if these compound colors are examined at the microscopic level, one finds the individual components retain their original hue; they are “not . . . transmuted, but only blended” to create the effect of a single unity (3082). Similarly, the elements of Pope’s England are Not Chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d, But as the World, harmoniously confus’d: Where Order in Variety we see, And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree. (13–16)

The beauty of England, here, is precisely its ability to hold an infinite variety of different things in perfect relation to one another, so that the overall effect is nothing less than the order of nature itself. Windsor-Forest resonates with Newton’s letter to suggest that Englishness resembles nothing so much as the sun’s own white light that most perfectly illuminates the world.120 “Whoever thought any quality to be a heterogeneous aggregate, such as Light is discovered to be[?]” Newton writes (3085); yet heterogeneity emerges in science and poetry alike to explain the central role of meaningful organization in the production of beauty and order. By rewriting English identity as a principle of order rather than a matter of substance, late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century literature made it possible for arrangements of foreign things to signify Englishness itself. Chinese objects were privileged in this order of things precisely because China represented a distant point in the cosmopolitan imagination. This helps to explain why the demand for chinoiserie only increased as representations of China became increasingly skeptical and sinophobic in English writing—the more different China was from England, the better Chinese things signified a unique English ability to sustain universal order. In The Analysis of Beauty (1753), William Hogarth writes of painting and sculpture

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in China that “the whole nation in these matters seems to have but one eye: this mischief naturally follows from the prejudices they imbibe by copying one anothers work.”121 His ideal of beauty was structured in strict opposition to this Chinese sameness: “Shakespear, who had the deepest penetration into nature, has sum’d up all the charms of beauty in two words, infinite variety; where, speaking of Cleopatra’s power over Anthony, he says,/— —Nor custom stale / Her infinite variety:——” (10). Despite his explicit disavowal of Chinese influence on his theory of beauty, Hogarth nevertheless makes use of the logic of chinoiserie by reading Shakespeare’s Cleopatra as a Chinese object in the sense I have elaborated in this chapter: that is, as an object incorporated into an English text as a signifier of variety itself.122 Until the mid-eighteenth century, this was chinoiserie’s primary cultural function: to confirm that the very concept of “infinite variety” was within the purview of the English mind, that difference could be wonderful without disrupting one’s sense of self. It played a fundamental role in how England reinvented itself as a diverse, changing, ever-improving, and distinctly cosmopolitan nation by setting a growing number of people to work creating and sustaining within English spaces a world “where Order in Variety we see, / And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree.”

2 The Chinese Touchstone of the Imagination But hold, that “touchstone” is equivocal, and by the strength of a lady’s imagination may become something that is not civil. —William Wycherley, Epistle Dedicatory to The Plain Dealer (1676)1

The cosmopolitan subject of the early eighteenth century was defined by certain qualities of mind that enabled him or her to reproduce, internally, an order of things reflecting the full diversity of the world itself. Locke, addressing the question of how the mind comes to be furnished with its variety of ideas, described an epistemological economy in which sensory information is translated by reason into the foundation of the understanding. But as writers explored the full range of objects promised by a world of “endless variety,” many found the faculty of reason alone insufficient to account for the ways the mind incorporated things of increasing novelty. Locke himself introduces terms to describe the mind’s appetite for new materials that anticipate theories of imagination and aesthetics: “Whence comes [the mind] by that vast store, which the busy and boundless Fancy of Man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety?”2 Before the faculty of reason has arranged the mental furniture, the mind resembles a storehouse stocked with materials “painted” by “Fancy.” The imagination thus plays a crucial supplementary role to reason in Lockean subject formation. In this chapter, I examine how Chinese things communicated with the English imagination, focusing specifically on chinoiserie’s structural role in the faculty of taste, which was responsible for regulating the imagination as part of a rational subjectivity. Until recently, the term chinoiserie was used almost exclusively by art historians to name the flourishing of Chinese-style furniture and architecture in Europe from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.3 In this context, the term describes an outlandish form of rococo often associated 66

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with the florid tastes of the nouveaux riches and the cultural gluttony of the Prince Regent and his circle. But as Ann Veronica Witchard proposes, the term might be understood more broadly, as “a wide ranging phenomenon that began in the fourteenth century and which has continued in various manifestations ever since.”4 Even in the eighteenth century, during the height of the China “craze” in Europe, the forms and cultural meanings of Chinese things were multiple and often contradictory. Thus Michael E. Yonan suggests that, “rather than understanding eighteenth-century chinoiserie as a unified phenomenon, we might conceptualize multiple and overlapping chinoiseries, each with different configurations and goals, in order to address its fullness and complexity.”5 In this vein, I use the term to describe a range of appearances that things and figures Chinese make in British literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. I argue that it was precisely chinoiserie’s multiplicity and conceptual changeability that made it such a central figure in English theories of taste and imagination in the early eighteenth century. The Chinese object’s ability by turns to delight and to disgust, rather than posing a threat to English reason, initially served to confirm the functions of reason’s supplemental faculties. The category of chinoiserie, broadly conceived, has been pushing us toward the concept of a “long eighteenth century” since long before the idea took hold in literary and cultural scholarship. In a 1968 response to A. O. Lovejoy’s influential definition of the eighteenth century as a neoclassical age, Roland N. Stromberg suggests that the well-documented “exceptions” to the Enlightenment norm—“the sentimentalisms, picturesques, Gothics, sublimes, chinoiseries, etc.”—may outweigh “the regularities,” even during the first half of the century.6 Lovejoy himself, in “The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism,” argued that a Romantic aesthetic could be traced back as far as Sir William Temple’s championing of the Chinese style of gardening in the 1680s.7 Still, the notion of an eighteenth century divided into one body of writing that idealized reason and regularity and another that privileged sentiment and imagination continues to dominate our literary historiography of the period. As Adela Pinch, Robert J. Griffin, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, and others have pointed out, this insistence on a “great divide” between Enlightenment and Romanticism, empiricism and imagination, or reason and sentiment, obscures important currents of thought that link Locke and Newton’s versions of objective epistemology to later theories of judgment, feeling, and aesthetics by Hume, Kant, and the Romantic poets.8 The insistence on a Romantic “reaction” to Enlightenment reason and neoclassicism has held an especially tight grip on readings of the British taste for chinoiserie, compelling certain chronological acrobatics to account for the emergence of such a fanciful trend at the height of the Age of Reason.

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For example, in order to explain how the taste for Chinese objects constituted a “Romantic” reaction to the Enlightenment, Lovejoy has to demonstrate that chinoiserie is simply Romanticism before its time; the English affinity for Chinese gardens in the eighteenth century, he argues, presciently anticipated the Romantic refutation of neoclassical regularity. Thus the “gradual conscious revolt against neo-classical standards” began in the late seventeenth century, before those standards had even been standardized.9 David Porter’s recent work on chinoiserie offers an explanation both more nuanced and more persuasive than Lovejoy’s; Porter argues that the Chinese taste constituted a sustained alternative aesthetic tradition in eighteenth century England, a tradition more open to the possibilities of sensual pleasure, cultural hybridity, female subjectivity, and the intellectual rewards of exoticism than were “the reigning discourses of classical taste and polite bourgeois culture.”10 While Porter more successfully accounts for the Chinese taste as a major thread in eighteenth-century aesthetic thought, one that “signals the consolidation in the first half of the eighteenth century of a distinctive new form of aesthetic subjectivity” (20), his argument reproduces the fundamental distinction between the appeal of things Chinese and neoclassical theories of beauty that privilege order and reason.11 Departing from this kind of reading, I suggest in this chapter that English writers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century became interested in chinoiserie precisely because it collapsed the distinction between reason, order, and empirical knowledge, on the one hand, and feeling, imagination, and aesthetic experience on the other. I consider the English fascination with things Chinese neither as Romanticism avant la lettre, nor as an aesthetic reaction to Enlightenment epistemology, but rather as a central part of the development of the Enlightenment discourse on taste as it emerged to reconcile operations of rational and aesthetic thought. Alongside and at times in conjunction with natural philosophy, this discourse explored the relationship between perception, knowledge, and power as they met and formed a new English subject defined by his mental capabilities. Understood from this perspective, the theories of taste put forward in such early eighteenth-century texts as Addison and Steele’s periodicals would have supplemented the empiricist emphasis on an external world of objects with an account of how the human mind interacts with, alters, and ultimately possesses external objects as a kind of imaginary personal property. In this endeavor, Chinese things proved useful in figuring the intermediate stage between external, “natural” objects and the imaginary objects that Locke called “ideas,” as well as between empirically supported knowledge and the subjective pleasures of the imagination. In the early eighteenth-century literature on things Chinese, in other words, we can see just how entangled the discourses of epistemology and

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aesthetics were, as both grappled with the question of where the object world ended and the realm of the subject began. In writings of this period, reason and sensory experience were not always distinct from one another, nor were the pleasures and satisfactions that each generated. Both Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Newton’s Optics (1704) posed knowledge as an effect of perception—a transaction between the human mind and the natural world of objects by way of the senses.12 Combined with the notion of a mechanical universe elaborated by Newton in his Principia (1687)—arguably a universally knowable universe—these works suggested that all human beings could perceive and understand the world according to the same natural laws, and thus introduced the possibility of a universal subject constituted through perceived knowledge.13 Approaching the question of empirical knowledge from the perspective of subjective experience, George Berkeley suggested in his Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) that, although we all look out on the same world of objects, different individuals perceive that world in different ways, effectively creating as many versions of the object world as there are subjects to perceive them. For Berkeley, these differences were naturally hierarchical: those who perceive the world solely in terms of laws and equations reduce the great “Volume of Nature” in a way that is “beneath the Dignity of the Mind”; in contrast, those who take something akin to aesthetic pleasure in the world of objects do justice both to the human mind’s capacity for knowledge, and to the complexity of the world that God created for us to discover. “We shou’d propose to our selves nobler Views,” he writes, “namely, to recreate and exalt the Mind with a prospect of the Beauty, Order, Extent, and Variety of Natural Things.”14 We increase our store of knowledge, in other words, only to the extent that we recognize the world as an array of beautiful things. Berkeley’s appeal to “nobler Views” invokes, provocatively, the figure of the noble or aristocratic subject, whose “prospect” of his estate would, indeed, differ from the view of someone with no property to behold. But Berkeley is not describing different kinds of people so much as different ways of seeing; his Treatise performs an important shift from “noble” versus “common” bodies to “noble” versus “common” modes of perception.15 This shift underwrote the emergent theory of taste, which posited a specific way of seeing that was both reasonable and sensual without being either mechanical or animalistic. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, appeals to a similar concept in order to argue that “[i]t is not merely what we call principle but a taste which governs men”: though individuals may be perfectly reasonable in their thoughts and beliefs, “yet, if the savour of things lies cross to honesty, if the fancy be florid and the appetite high toward the subaltern beauties and lower order of worldly symmetries and proportions, the

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conduct will infallibly turn this latter way.”16 Taste is the mental faculty that mediates internal workings of reason and external displays of behavior; it is responsible for guiding the subject toward a realm of experience somewhere between mere mechanical calculation and the satisfaction of animal desires. Berkeley suggested that taking the “nobler View” both revealed a better world and “exalt[ed] the Mind: Hence, by proper Inferences, to enlarge our Notions of the Grandeur, Wisdom, and Beneficence of the Creator.”17 Shaftesbury, arguing in the interest of social rather than divine order, makes a similar case for the faculty of taste, which, by seeking out a better realm of worldly experience, improves the social conduct of the individual. Despite their different political ends and orientations, both writers helped lay the theoretical groundwork for a new kind of subject defined by how he or she sees: a subject whose way of seeing represented an improvement over a lesser way of seeing, and whose perceptions were capable of improving both the objects they beheld and the subjects whose mind they furnished. In the early eighteenth century, the notion of taste thus supplemented the natural world of objects with an imaginary version of that same world, what we might call the perceived world. This new aesthetic afforded certain kinds of pleasure and power above and beyond plain knowledge to those who were capable of accessing it. In this new model, social agency is linked to aesthetic experience: an ability to see what cannot commonly be seen and to take a certain kind of pleasure in one’s perceptions. By turning the act of seeing and incorporating objects as part of the mind’s mental storehouse of ideas into the basis of social status, the discourse on taste paved the way for a social mobility that was impossible in the traditional aristocratic social order.18 In a series of essays in The Spectator (411–421, June 21–July 3, 1712), Joseph Addison defined this faculty as the imagination, which is “furnishe[d] . . . with its Ideas” in the same way as the understanding in Locke’s model—through sensation and reflection—but which is governed by aesthetic pleasure rather than by reason alone. When the imagination is stimulated, he writes, “We are struck, we know not how, with the Symmetry of any thing we see, and immediately assent to the Beauty of an Object, without enquiring into the particular causes of it.”19 The imaginary pleasures offered by the world of objects are immediately available to those who can perceive them: “the Pleasures of the Imagination have this Advantage, above those of the Understanding, that they are more obvious, and more easie to be acquired. It is but opening the Eye, and the Scene enters” (3:538). By distinguishing the imagination from the understanding by the immediacy of its gratification, the “ease” with which it acquires its objects, Addison introduces a supplement to the rational mind theorized by Locke. While the understanding labors, through the exercise of reason, to furnish itself with ideas inspired by sensory experience,

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the imagination performs its function effortlessly. Merely by registering the act of perception as a pleasurable experience, the imagination “gives [the person who has it] a kind of Property in everything he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated Parts of Nature administer to his pleasures” (3:538). As Daniel Cottom has argued, this definition of property is more akin to aristocratic ownership than Locke’s notion of property as a product of labor. “The aristocracy is empowered by the claim of disinterest,” he writes, “to defend its property by ceding its ownership of that property to the realm of the imagination.”20 But the shifting foundation of entitlement from body to mind is significant, and introduces new perils as well as possibilities for social agency. In order for the imagination to play its role translating uncultivated nature into the imaginary property of the subject, that subject must temporarily suspend his own active faculties, including reason, and become a passive vessel, an open eye, into which the “Scene enters.” The implied vulnerability of the subject during this encounter emphasizes the delicacy of the experience: the pleasure derives from being temporarily overpowered by an external object, but that pleasure is also what empowers the subject over the object. Only a polite imagination is calibrated to keep this exchange of power between subject and object in perfect balance.21 According to Cottom, the privacy of this encounter between the individual and the world, the way it inscribes a distinction between the “rude uncultivated Parts of Nature” and aesthetic objects that is purely imaginary, protects the pleasures of the imagination from encroachment by non-aristocrats. “The pleasures of the aristocracy must be secret,” he argues. Incapable of seeing the world from the perspective of the aristocratic man of taste, the commoner not only does not experience pleasures of the imagination, but does not even know that any such realm of pleasure exists.22 This presents a particular challenge to Addison, whose Spectator papers are interested specifically in laying out examples of good taste for the education and improvement of his readers. He must therefore both give away the secret of the imagination—that is, that imaginary pleasures really exist—and offer instruction in how to perceive these creatures of the imagination. To achieve this aim, he turns to the figure of the Chinese garden: Writers, who have given us an Account of China, tell us, the Inhabitants of that Country laugh at the Plantations of our Europeans, which are laid out by Rule and Line; because, they say, any one may place Trees in equal Rows and uniform Figures. They chuse rather to shew a Genius in Works of this Nature, and therefore always conceal the Art by which they direct themselves. They have a Word, it seems, in their Language, by which they express the particular Beauty of a Plantation that strikes the Imagination at first Sight, without discovering what it is that is so agreeable an Effect. Our British Gardeners, on

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the contrary, instead of humouring Nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our Trees rise in Cones, Globes, and Pyramids. We see the Marks of the Scissars upon every Plant and Bush. I do not know whether I am singular in my Opinion, but, for my own Part, I would rather look upon a Tree in all its Luxuriancy and Diffusion of Boughs and Branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a Mathematical Figure. (3:552)

The European garden here represents what Shaftesbury called “the lower order of . . . symmetries and proportions”; the “equal Rows and uniform Figures” reveal a lack of “Genius,” or taste, in shaping the landscape. It thus resembles the natural world seen from the less noble of the two perspectives defined by Berkeley, which “affect[s] an Exactness, in reducing each particular Phenomenon to general Rules” (156). Reflected in the European garden, this perspective is both dull and ridiculous; the Chinese are perfectly right, Addison implies, to laugh at such perversions of nature. Also apparent in the European garden is the labor associated with less noble ways of seeing: the “Marks of the Scissars upon every Plant and Bush” indicating crudely executed artistry, and the “Mathematical Figures” demanding too much intellectual work on the part of the viewer simply to figure out what, exactly, he is looking at. The Chinese garden, in contrast, uses art so perfectly that nature looks exactly like itself, thus pleasing rather than straining or disrupting the tasteful imagination. Nature is uncultivated, and the European garden overcultivated; the Chinese garden is the ideal middle ground sought out by good taste, and a reflection of what the world looks like to a tasteful observer. Addison uses the term “Chinese” to designate an invisible yet real aesthetic operation on the natural world, an artistic transformation so delicate and perfect that it completely disappears, leaving only its positive effect on the imagination. An aesthetic principle, this “Chineseness” indicates that which is perceived by the imagination; if you can see the Chineseness of the garden, you know that you are looking with taste. The Chinese object is Addison’s way of placing imaginary things back into the world, where those not yet in possession of them still might encounter them. Empirically identical to “uncultivated nature,” the Chinese garden designates an imaginary difference created by the interaction between the mind and the world. It is, in other words, a point of contact between the private pleasures of the imagination and the external world of objects.23 Tony Brown has argued that “Addison, whose ‘Pleasures’ form one of the first full attempts at an aesthetic theory, does not simply refer to China while describing the aesthetic: it is by thinking through the exotic figure of China that he thinks the aesthetic.”24 Emphasizing the etymological valence of “exotic”—“exotikos, literally ‘from the outside’”—Brown shows

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how the figure of China “supplies [Addison] with a geopolitical principle of differentiation that he turns to remark a limit of another order, namely a subjective one” (180, 172). Much like Locke’s invocation of the Chinese discussed in the preceding chapter, Addison’s Chinese garden marks the boundary of a mind with a capacity for endless variety. The Chinese object sits at the threshold of self and not-self: it represents the subject’s ability, through the exercise of taste, to transform objects into personal property, but also the object’s ability to transform the subject, engendering an internal complexity that strives toward the “infinite variety” of nature itself. Brown describes the Addisonian imagination as “a faculty edging onto an abyss,” one that subjects itself to “too big” objects that threaten to annihilate the thinking subject altogether: “the imagination . . . opens itself up to something foreign, something that alienated the faculty by filling it up, taking its place” (182). Even more so than the understanding, the imagination that defines the English subject operates in a state of perpetual risk of “becoming other” as it incorporates exotic objects; the faculty of taste is called upon to regulate aesthetic experience so that it remains mutually beneficial to subject and object. Standing for the “exotic” quality of any object—that is, its status as something that encounters the subject from the outside—the Chinese object represents both the triumph of English taste over the alterity courted by the imagination, and the lingering possibility of its failure. The following sections show how chinoiserie emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century as an aesthetic category defined not by the material characteristics of its objects, their decorative motifs or processes of manufacture, but rather by the mental processes such objects stimulate in their viewers. David Porter has called this the “catalytic function of objects”: the historically contingent ways that material things “might have worked to catalyze and thereby bring into being new, perhaps inarticulable ways of seeing and knowing for those who traded, owned, or admired them.”25 By tracing the appearance of things Chinese from Restoration diaries to early eighteenth-century periodicals, we can see how they sit at the fulcrum of a turn from what Barbara Benedict has called the “ocular appetite” for novelties26 to a discourse of taste that confirms the subject’s mastery of those things he visually consumes. The pleasures of that mastery are directly related to the “exotic,” or “outside,” quality of objects per se, such that the pleasures of the tasteful imagination always sit on the precipice of tastelessness, in which the subject loses mastery over both the object and herself—a danger whose comic potential is incisively exploited by William Wycherley on the Restoration stage. This early phase of the social life of Chinese things in England shows that before chinoiserie became associated with bad taste, it served in literature to invent the very concept of taste.

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FROM THING OF WONDER TO OBJECT OF TASTE

In 1592, privateers belonging to an Elizabethan fleet led by Sir Walter Raleigh took the Spanish ship Madre de Dios, seizing its cargo of Eastern goods. Richard Hakluyt describes the cargo as consisting of valuable spices, drugs, silks, calicoes, pearl, and perfumes. Following these, “[t]he rest of the wares were many in number but lesse in value; as elephants teeth, porcellan vessels of China, coco-nuts, hides, ebenwood as blacke as jet, bedsteads of the same, cloth of the rindes of trees very strange for the matter, and artificiall in workemanship.”27 Hakluyt’s separation of Chinese porcelain from the more valuable commodities, classifying it instead with random oddities and curiosities, suggests that Chinese decorative wares were not wholly unknown in England in the late sixteenth century, but were not yet coveted items on the market. (“Unwrought China silke,” in contrast, is included in Hakluyt’s list of the ship’s more precious goods.) As Hugh Honour points out, Chinese decorative objects “were then regarded as mere curios on a level with elephants’ teeth and coconuts, the quantities imported being as yet insufficient to create a fashion for Chinese art.”28 With the Portuguese and Dutch heavily dominating all European trade in the Far East in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English ships struggled to obtain direct access to Chinese traders. Nevertheless, there is evidence that chinaware was making its way into English life by the early seventeenth century.29 In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604), Pompey mentions some dishes that “are not china dishes, but very good dishes,”30 and in Jonson’s Epicoene, or The Silent Woman (1609), Clerimont says of Amorous La Foole, “He has a lodging in the Strand . . . to watch when ladies are gone to the china-houses or the Exchange, that he may meet ’em by chance and give ’em presents, some two or three hundred pounds’ worth of toys.”31 Still, well into the seventeenth century, Chinese goods remained curiosities valued primarily for their novelty. In 1660, Samuel Pepys wrote that he “did send for a Cupp of Tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before,”32 and in 1662, John Evelyn recorded seeing at the home of Lord Aubignie “divers . . . Curiosities; especialy a kind of artificial Glasse or Purcelan adorn’d with relievo’s of Past[e], hard & beautifull.”33 Evelyn’s description suggests that by the mid-seventeenth century, porcelain was one of the more remarkable curios one might find in an aristocratic collection. China was present but still uncommon in England, being found primarily in the greatest houses or in the collections of travelers.34 Even as curiosities, however, by the second half of the seventeenth century Chinese objects were no longer so easily dismissed as mere trinkets

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and toys. In 1664, Evelyn wrote the following description of a collection of eastern “rarities”: One Tomson a Jesuite shewed me such a Collection of rarities, sent from the Jesuites of Japan & China to their Order at Paris (as a present to be reserved in their Chimelium, but brought to Lond[on] with the East India ships for them) as in my life I had not seene: The chiefe things were very large Rhinoceros’s hornes, Glorious Vests, wrought & embrodered on cloth of Gold, but with such lively colours, as for splendour & vividness we have nothing in Europe approaches: A Girdill studdied with achats, & balast rubies of greate value & size, also knives of so keene edge as one could not touch them, nor was the mettal of our Couler but more pale & livid: Fanns like those our Ladys use, but much larger, & with long handles curiously carved, & filled with Chineze Characters: A sort of paper very broad thin, & fine like abortive parchment, & exquisitely polished, of an amber yellow, exceeding glorious & pretty to looke on, & seeming to be like that which my L[ord] Verulam describes in his Nova Atlantis; with severall other sorts of papers some written, others Printed: Also prints of Landskips, of their Idols, Saints, Pagoods, of most ougly Serpentine, monstrous & hideous shapes to which they paie devotion: Pictures of Men, & Countries, rarely painted on a sort of gumm’d Calico, transparant as glasse: also Flowers, Trees, Beasts, birds &c.: excellently wrought in a kind of slevesilk very natural. Divers Drougs that our Drougists & physitians could make nothing of . . . with innumerable other rarities. (3:373–74)

This was one of Evelyn’s first glimpses at chinoiserie. He describes the spectacle in terms of diversity, hyperbole, and novelty. The various types of objects—ivory horns, embroidered and jeweled clothing, knives, fans, papers and screens, pictures and drugs—are listed in a rapid succession that collapses distinctions between things that are worn, used, “looked on,” or ingested; between men’s things (such as knives or swords) and women’s (such as fans); and between the “glorious and pretty,” the “most ugly,” and the “very natural.” This description is typical of what Cynthia Sundberg Wall calls the “vivid texture” of Evelyn’s lists: Evelyn exploits the “visual heap” of the list to reproduce the experience of wonder in seeing. Of Evelyn’s description of Charles II coronation, Wall writes that he “is reproducing the magnificence of a restored throne in a verbal procession as overwhelming as the actual one.”35 Similarly, in reproducing the visual effect of chinoiserie, Evelyn aims to overwhelm both the senses and the understanding. Everything is larger, brighter, more vivid, sharper, shinier, prettier, finer, more monstrous, or more natural than anything the Englishman has ever seen before. Such a horde of objects, the qualities of which “nothing in Europe approaches,” momentarily stymies English judgment. Like the drugs that confound English druggists,

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the things in this collection seem to overwhelm even Evelyn’s descriptive powers, which are exhausted before the “innumerable other rarities” can be catalogued. To borrow Barbara Benedict’s terminology, this passage communicates wonder, which, “like awe, reveres the novelty it encounters,” not curiosity, which “seeks to explain it.”36 The passage suspends assessment and simply marvels.37 Missing from Evelyn’s description is the dismissive tone of Hakluyt’s earlier account of the Madre de Dios’s Chinese curiosities: “many in number but lesse in value.” Evidently, chinoiserie had, by the 1660s, taken its place among the rich Eastern fabrics and jewels that had long been coveted in Europe; in terms of value, they are here indistinguishable from the more traditional luxury items. One explanation for this shift is the 1662 arrival of Queen Mary, who famously brought her continental taste for Chinese things to the English court. Following a visit to Hampton Court in June, 1662, Evelyn reported, “Hampton Court is as noble & uniforme a Pile & as Capacious as any Gotique Architecture can have made it: There is incomparable furniture in it . . . The Queene brought over with her from Portugal, such Indian Cabinets and large trunks of Laccar, as had never before ben seene here” (3:322–24). Whether or not as a direct result of Mary’s influence, in the second half of the seventeenth century, it became increasingly common for respectable houses in England to incorporate Eastern curiosities as part of their furniture. On July 30, 1682, Evelyn describes a neighbor’s house in a way that suggests that Chinese objects were no longer limited to scholarly collections: We went . . . to visite our good neighbour Mr. Bohune, whose whole house is a Cabinet of all elegancies, especially Indian, and the Contrivement of the Japan Skreens instead of Wainscot in the Hall, where an an excellent PenduleClock inclosed in the curious flower-work of Mr. Gibbons in the middst of the Vestibule is very remarkable; and so are the Landskips of the Skreens, representing the manner of living, & Country of the Chinezes &c.: but above all his Ladys Cabinet, adorn’d on the fret, Ceiling & chimny-piece, with Mr. Gib[bon’s] best Carving; there is also some of Streeters best painting, & many rich Curiosities of Gold & sil[ver] growing in the Mine: &c.: Besides the Gardens are exactly kept, & the whole place very agreable & well watered: The Owners good & worthy neighbors, & [Mr. Bohune] has also builded, & endowed an Hospital for Eight poore people, with a pretty Chapell, & all accommodations. (4:288–89)

In the eighteen years between Evelyn’s descriptions of the Jesuit’s collection and Mr. Bohune’s house, Eastern objects have shifted from mere “rarities” to domestic “elegancies.” The appeal of such objects continues to be their

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diversity and “curiosity,” but they have begun to be integrated into a recognizable domestic order. Evelyn’s description of this house lacks the manic energy of his earlier entry, the sense that he has insufficient language to capture the range of objects and their wonderful qualities. Instead, Mr. Bohun’s Chinese things are represented as thoughtfully arranged alongside more familiar ornamentation, such as the work of the famous Restoration carver Grinling Gibbons, or innovatively substituted for mundane decoration like wainscoting. The objects’ arrangement in the house lends them a sense of placement and order they lacked in the earlier description; instead of a “visual heap,” Evelyn offers us a guided tour of spaces deliberately laid out to produce specific aesthetic effects. Overall, chinoiserie gives the interior of the house the same air of being “exactly kept” and “very agreeable” that Evelyn notes of the garden. Nor does the decor speak well only of itself, but lends itself to characterizing its owners as “very good neighbours,” improving the community as well as the property. Evelyn’s description illustrates the effect that the domestication of chinoiserie had on its relationship to English subjects. As Renaissance curiosities, Chinese things inspired a level of awe appropriate to marvels; they seemed to exercise over the viewer the kind of power contained in royal displays of magnificence, commanding reverence without judgment. The response of wonder, in Stephen Greenblatt’s words, “stands for all that cannot be understood, that can scarcely be believed. It calls attention to the problem of credibility and at the same time insists upon the undeniability, the exigency of the experience.”38 In contrast, the Bohunes’ chinaware, as a result of how it has been incorporated into the household furniture, confirms the respectability of its owners precisely by appealing to Evelyn’s aesthetic judgment. As part of a familiar regime of domestic elegance, chinoiserie has become a medium of social exchange that allows the quality of non-aristocratic individuals to be displayed for interpretation by persons of similar quality and taste. In the years following this visit, Evelyn cultivated his eye for good china. In 1693, he again visited Hampton Court and described the Queen’s collection in greater detail: I saw the Queenes rare Cabinets & China Collection, which was wonderfull rich & plentifull, but especialy a huge Cabinet, looking Glasse frame & stands all of Amber much of it white, with historical Basrelievos & statues with Medals carved in them, esteemed worth 4000 pounds, sent by the D[uke] of Brandenburg, whose Country Prussia abounds with Amber, cast up by the sea &c: Divers other China, & Indian Cabinets, Schreens & Hangings. (5:147)

One of the most interesting aspects of Mary’s china collection is that it inspired imitation not only among aristocrats but also among private citizens.

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This suggests that in addition to indicating the Queen’s status as part of a cosmopolitan elite (one who would receive a lavish gift from the Duke of Brandenburgh), her collection displays a good taste that might be exercised through common consumption. In A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–26), Daniel Defoe observed that Queen Mary “brought in the custom or humour, as I may call it, of furnishing houses with china-ware, which increased to a strange degree afterwards, piling their china upon the tops of cabinets, scrutoires, and every chimney-piece, to the tops of the ceilings, and even setting up shelves for their china-ware, where they wanted such places, till it became a grievance in the expense of it, and even injurious to their families and estates.” But, he added, “The good queen far from designing any injury to the country where she was so entirely beloved, little thought she was . . . laying a foundation for such fatal excesses, and would no doubt have been the first to have reformed them had she lived to see it.”39 While Defoe’s contempt for the excesses of the popular taste for china resonates with criticisms aimed at chinoiserie throughout the eighteenth century, his care to distinguish “such fatal excesses” from the example that spawned them is typical of early eighteenth-century representations of the Chinese taste. China in and of itself does not signal good or bad taste; the way in which it is consumed and displayed does. A china-enthusiast like the Queen might well possess a taste strong enough to “reform” the bad taste of those around her. Only later do we see this important distinction between “good” and “bad” chinoiserie collapse into a general indictment. In his mid-nineteenth-century history of England, for example, Thomas Babington Macaulay declared that Mary had acquired at the Hague a taste for the porcelain of China, and amused herself by forming at Hampton Court a vast collection of hideous images, and of vases on which houses, trees, bridges, and mandarins, were depicted in outrageous defiance of all the laws of perspective. The fashion, a frivolous and inelegant fashion it must be owned, which was thus set by the amiable Queen, spread fast and wide. In a few years, almost every great house in the kingdom contained a museum of these grotesque baubles.40

In Macaulay’s account, chinoiserie is grotesque, “frivolous and inelegant” regardless of its context or owner; in contrast, Defoe’s observation that the fashion “increased to a strange degree afterwards” suggests a range of ways of exercising the Chinese taste, some more successful than others, depending on the status or taste of the subject. Evelyn’s diary captures more successful imitations of the Queen’s taste, notably at the house of his friend Samuel Pepys. In a 1700 entry, he writes, “I went [to] visite Mr. Pepys at Clapham, who has there a very noble, &

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wonderfully well furnished house, especialy with all the Indys & Chineze Curiositys, almost any where to be met with, the Offices & Gardens exceedingly well accomodated for pleasure & retirement” (5:427–28). Though their friendship was already firmly established by the time of this visit, Pepys’s “wonderfully well furnished house” remained for Evelyn inextricably bound with his general good character. After Pepys’s death in 1703, Evelyn described him as a very worthy, Industrious, & curious person . . . [he] lived at Clapham . . . in a very noble House & sweete place, where he injoyed the fruit of his labours in greate prosperity, was universaly beloved, Hospitable, Generous, Learned in many things, and skill’d in Musick, a very greate Cherisher of Learned men, of whom he had the Conversation. His Library & other Collections of Curiositys was one of the most Considerable; The models of Ships especialy &c. (5:537–38)

Evelyn memorializes his friend as a preeminent member of what David Hume later called “the conversable world”: those “of a sociable disposition, and a taste for pleasure, an inclination for the easier and more gentle exercise of the understanding, for obvious reflections on human affairs, and the duties of common life, and for observation of the blemishes or perfections of the particular objects that surround them.”41 The conversable world is, in fact, sustained by two types of conversation—that between subjects (these topics, Hume writes, “require the company and conversation of our fellow-creatures, to render them a proper exercise for the mind”) and that between subject and object (“observation . . . of the particular objects that surround them”). In contrast to the isolated scholar, this kind of subject participates in a matrix of interactions that “brings mankind together in society, where everyone displays his thoughts in observations in the best manner he is able, and mutually gives and receives information, as well as pleasure” (38). As a site of London’s culture of polite conversation, Pepys’s house provides a space furnished with “curiosities” and other objects to stimulate the imagination of his guests, who in turn, through their shared observations, integrate those objects into their collective experience. Pepys’s model ship collection accentuates the significance of imported things to these processes of socialization, making explicit the link between the influx of foreign goods into England and the English subject’s growing capacity to converse with ease on a variety of topics. Conversation broadens subjects while it domesticates objects. A modern gentleman defined by taste, sociability, and mental dexterity, Pepys has taken care to fashion a worthy heir not by birth, but through cosmopolitan experience: his work will be continued, Evelyn writes, by Pepys’s nephew, Mr. Jackson, “a young Gent[leman] whom his

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Unkle had educated in all sorts of usefull learning, Travell abroad, returning with extraordinary Accomplishments, & worth to be his Heire” (5:538). Evelyn’s detailed descriptions of his friends’ well-furnished homes marks a shift in how the English subject saw the world—and, in particular, saw England as part of the world—in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Wall writes that “England began touring itself in earnest from about 1700”:42 domestic tourism, particularly the touring of great houses, was the foundation of an education in perspective that produced a mind capable of conversing with ever stranger, more novel, more exotic objects. In combination, foreign objects and an active imagination promised to produce new forms of agency and sociability in English culture that would improve individuals and the nation alike. At the same time, however, objects and imagination threatened to collude against the subject when not regulated by a good taste. Restoration comedy made much of the imagination’s potential to flout the bounds of propriety, taking the emergent ideals of commerce and social intercourse a step too far. No writer dramatized the perilous flipside of a culture of imagination to more hilarious effect than William Wycherley. By scandalizing London audiences with his impolite deployment of china in The Country Wife, Wycherley actually made one of the most persuasive arguments for the need to cultivate good taste alongside an active imagination in the modern world of global commerce.

THE “PORCELAIN PRIAPUS”43 OF RESTORATION COMEDY

In the late seventeenth century, while natural philosophers explored subjective experiences of the object world, Restoration poets and playwrights exploited the bawdy potential of imaginary delights and objects of pleasure. The enjoyment of worldly pleasures free of moral or political restraint was one of the hallmarks of Charles II’s court; its flamboyant rejection of Puritan values was a sharp political backlash against the Interregnum regime clothed as a return to the “natural” inclinations of man. The question of whether the “natural” desires of sexual attraction have any limits at all is raised, as it were, again and again in the literature of this period. If, as plays such as The Country Wife (1675) and The Man of Mode (1676) propose, nature drives men to pursue sex out of wedlock, what else might nature compel? Does it compel women the same way? What variety of objects might gratify it? Can it ever be satisfied? These questions address cultural concerns beyond sexual behavior, of course; they resonate particularly powerfully with contemporaneous concerns about the consumption, both commercially and imaginatively, of material things.44

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The conflation of women’s endless desire for things and for sex supplied a great part of Restoration comedy. The joke frequently turns on the way female desire objectifies the phallus as a mere “thing” of pleasure, seizing the symbol of masculine power and stripping it of any agency associated with the male subject. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, plays on this theme in the song “Signior Dildo,” which tells of how the eponymous “noble Italian” is passed around among the “ladies of merry England,” cuckolding Englishmen in just revenge for their anti-Catholicism.45 Rochester entreats the female reader: “This signior is sound, safe, ready, and dumb / As ever was candle, carrot, or thumb; / Then away with these nasty devices, and show / How you rate the just merit of Signior Dildo” (73–76). Once given a role in libertine literature, voracious female desire, which empowers the libertine among men when a woman prefers him to her husband, eventually runs amok. It leaves the libertine behind with all other men as it pursues pleasure in various “devices”—first common household things, then the exotic import. Perhaps the only foreign object in all of Restoration literature to pose a greater challenge to English virility than Signior Dildo is the imaginary china of Wycherley’s The Country Wife. The play’s notorious “china scene” turns porcelain into a wonderfully potent double entendre that carries an entire scene (and, one might argue, established Wycherley’s professional reputation). This scene has received plenty of critical commentary, some recent examples of which I summarize below, but I believe it worth revisiting here in order to address Wycherley’s own commentary, in his follow-up play The Plain Dealer (1676), on the scene and its effect on audiences. Taken together, Wycherley’s plays not only turn china into a source of comedy but also place it at the center of a theory of the imagination—the female imagination in particular—that is foundational to eighteenth-century discourses on taste, aesthetic pleasure, consumer practices, and social conduct. In The Country Wife, china makes its entrance as a turn of phrase that enables the play’s libertine hero, Horner, to seduce Lady Fidget before the very eyes of her husband. When Sir Jaspar catches his wife at Horner’s house, he asks, “But is this your buying china? I thought you had been at the china house?” to which she answers that she needs Horner’s assistance in procuring china, “for he knows china very well, and has himself very good, but will not let me see it lest I should beg some. But I will find it out, and have what I came for yet.”46 She and Horner disappear to his chamber; when they re-emerge to find Sir Jaspar joined by Mrs. Squeamish, the china metaphor begins to outperform Horner himself:

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(Enter Lady Fidget with a piece of china in her hand, and Horner following) Lady Fidget: And I have been toiling and moiling for the prettiest piece of china, my dear. Horner: Nay, she has been too hard for me, do what I could. Squeamish: O Lord, I’ll have some china too. Good Master Horner, don’t think to give other people china, and me none. Come in with me too. Horner: Upon my honour I have none left now. Lady Fidget: What, d’ye think if he had any left, I would not have had it too? For we women of quality never think we have china enough. Horner: Do not take it ill, I cannot make china for you all, but I will have a roll-wagon for you too, another time. Squeamish: Thank you, dear toad. (4.3.187–205) Numerous critics have observed the way this scene uses china’s status as a fashionable commodity to turn the tables of desire on the libertine by unleashing the appetites of women. “What makes the scene work especially well,” writes Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, “is the connection between china as a precious, coveted commodity and Horner’s irrepressible phallicism . . . The ‘hardness’ of the china makes it an appropriate phallic image . . . Wycherley’s use of china as a metaphor for the male body establishes both the desirable qualities of the commodity and a distinctly female demand for it.”47 David Porter furthers the point: “a Chinese artifact appears in this exchange as a symbol of extravagant and illegitimate sexuality, a porcelain priapus evoking a vivid scene of rampant cuckoldry and voracious sexual desire. The ladies’ newly horned husbands, after all, are not the only losers here: Horner himself . . . finds himself figuratively emasculated again as the scene begins.”48 Even a determined libertine, in other words, is no match for the level of desire inspired in women by chinaware. Barbara Benedict explains how the discourse of consumption ultimately absorbs the libertine into an economy in which he is a mere object; she writes that Horner “acts as a facilitator of female inquiry, a version of Rochester’s town tool, Signior Dildo, whose dedication to women’s pleasure entails becoming a kind of curio. Horner’s service to women makes him a servant and a collectible: in the act of possessing them, he is possessed by ambitious women.”49 The scene thus relies on the suggestive potential of china’s qualities as an object—its “hardness,” its commercial value, its exotic appeal to a new population of consumers—qualities that expose the true and potentially terrifying extent of female desire. Less attention has been paid, however, to the way in which this scene relies pointedly on the work of the imagination. The only actual porcelain in the scene is the piece Lady Fidget carries as a substitute for the figurative “china” she has received offstage; the china that does the work in this scene is not material but an imaginary object, a figure. The scene as a whole

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mimics the operation of the double entendre, whose terms serve as fronts for invisible eruptions of meaning: it leaves the audience with the innocent Sir Jaspar, in a space where china continues to mean only china, and invites us to imagine what happens between Horner and Lady Jasper offstage, where the meanings of “china” multiply in what Porter calls “a shudder of pure jouissance.”50 What transpires in this invisible space—what “china” signifies as a double entendre—depends not on Lady Fidget’s sexual desire but on the imagination of the viewer. The play makes us complicit with the appetites of the play’s female characters; their desire, curiosity, and transgressions can only extend as far as the reach of our own imaginations. Thus it is that the playwright can disavow any responsibility for obscenity in the play: as Wycherley argues in The Plain Dealer, there is no illicit material in the play itself, but only, perhaps, in the minds of its audience, for which he can hardly be held responsible. Addressing the Epistle Dedicatory to the well-known London procuress Mother Bennet, “great and noble patroness of rejected and bashful men,” he writes, . . . this play claims naturally your protection, since it has lost its reputation with the ladies of stricter lives in the playhouse . . . you, I say, madam . . . have as discerning a judgment in what’s obscene or not as any quick-sighted civil person of ’em all, and can make as much of a double-meaning saying as the best of ’em; yet . . . you would not be one of those that ravish a poet’s innocent words, and make ’em guilty of their own naughtiness, as ’tis termed, in spite of his teeth. Nay, nothing is secure from the power of their imaginations, no, not their husbands, whom they cuckold with themselves by thinking of other men and so make the lawful matrimonial embraces adultery, wrong husbands and poets in thought and word, just to keep their own reputations. But your ladyship’s justice, I know, would think a woman’s arraigning and damning a poet for her own obscenity like her crying out a rape, and hanging a man for giving her pleasure, only that she might be thought not to consent to’t . . . . 51

Wycherley plants his tongue in his cheek by his choice of dedicatee. Like others of her profession, Mother Bennet profited by the prostitution of young women to men of the town, women who frequently came under her purview through false pretences or desperate circumstances. Pepys describes how a young woman he liked “was served by the Lady Bennet (a famous Strumpet), who by counterfeiting to fall into a swoune upon the sight of her in her shop, became acquainted with her, and at last got her ends of her to lie with a gallant that had hired her to Procure this poor soul for him.”52 By launching in her name his indictment of women’s falsely “crying out a rape,” Wycherley ensures that the charge of obscenity, even

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as he deflects it onto his female audience, is reflected right back onto him. But in raising the question of obscenity, the Epistle introduces a number of questions about the power of the imagination that Wycherley’s plays take quite seriously. His comedy’s preferred unit of currency does, after all, depend on the mind’s ability instantaneously to multiply and transform the meanings of simple terms, to explode them beyond the boundaries of licit significations. If the imagination so effortlessly breaches the limits of linguistic meaning, of what other kinds of transgressions is it capable? Can it turn any innocent and insignificant word or object into an obscenity? Does it have the power to transform “lawful matrimonial embraces” into “adultery”? How far might its reach extend into the material world? Can anything stop it? Wycherley proposes that the contact zone between the imagination and the external world be monitored by way of a kind of touchstone. If there is something suspect about the way women’s minds work, the way to expose overactive imaginations is to show them his play and see what they make of it: . . . as Master Bayes says of his [play], that it is the only touchstone of wit and understanding, mine is, it seems, the only touchstone of women’s virtue and modesty. But hold, that “touchstone” is equivocal, and by the strength of a lady’s imagination may become something that is not civil.53

The metaphor of the touchstone—an object that bears the traces of precious metals on its surface after touching them—nicely captures the liminal chemistry of the double entendre, whose meaning is generated only when mind meets matter.54 It also implies that the play, like the stone, is only marked by the greater powers of that which acts on it. An inversion of Locke’s figure of the mind as a tabula rasa inscribed by external impressions, here the play is the slate on which the mind impresses its own meanings. An “equivocal” touchstone, the play is an ambiguous and changeable object; whichever way it turns, whether it appears ultimately civil or uncivil, polite or obscene, reveals something about the nature of the imagination that has acted on it. The body of The Plain Dealer dramatizes exactly how a play like The Country Wife exposes the various turns of women’s minds. Olivia, a hypocritical and sexually promiscuous lady of fashion, censures another woman for being “seen at The Country Wife after the first day”—that is, after word of its obscenity was out (2.1.390–91). Lord Plausible protests,

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Lord Plausible: But, madam, she was not seen to use her fan all the play long, turn aside her head, or by a conscious blush discover more guilt than modesty. Olivia: Very fine! Then you think a woman modest that sees the hideous Country Wife without blushing or publishing her detestation of it? (2.1.392–94) Lord Plausible defends the lady on the grounds that she watched the play innocently, without getting the dirty jokes. If she had been less virtuous of mind, she would have discovered the play’s illicit meanings, and registered them with at least a guilty blush. This comment confirms Wycherley’s suggestion that obscenity originates in the mind of the beholder, not in the play itself. Olivia reveals her own imaginative inclinations in her response to Plausible, which shows that she cannot imagine the possibility of not getting The Country Wife’s double entendres. By revealing that it seems obscene to her, she fails the touchstone test, exposing her own overactive imagination. Seeing this, her more level-headed cousin Eliza teases out further evidence that Olivia’s imagination is out of control: Olivia: Then you would have a woman of honour with passive looks, ears, and tongue undergo all the hideous obscenity she hears at nasty plays? . . . O hideous! Cousin, this cannot be your opinion; but you are one of those who have the confidence to pardon the filthy play. Eliza: Why, what is there of ill in’t, say you? Olivia: O fie fie fie, would you put me to the blush anew, call all the blood into my face again? But to satisfy you then; first, the clandestine obscenity in the very name of Horner. Eliza: Truly, ’tis so hidden I cannot find it out, I confess. Olivia: O horrid! Does it not give you the rank conception or image of a goat, a town-bull, or a satyr? Nay, what is yet a filthier image than all the rest, of an eunuch? Eliza: What then? I can think of a goat, a bull, or a satyr without any hurt. Olivia: Ay; but cousin, one cannot stop there. Eliza: I can, cousin. (2.1.407–29) Eliza’s disingenuous claim not to perceive the connotations of Horner’s name explicates the split in the play’s language between literal and figurative—licit and illicit—meanings. Eliza’s ability to pause at the split, to stop at the literal, emphasizes her capacity to distinguish the two sides of a double entendre, and frames Olivia as a woman incapable of making such a distinction because of her overactive imagination. Olivia’s insistence on moving

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instantaneously from a word or an image to its implicit meanings makes her accountable for the production of these meanings; the more she claims to be offended, the more offensive material she brings into being. After stating that she “cannot stop” at the literal meaning, Olivia spins Wycherley’s double entendre into a full-blown sexual fantasy: Olivia: O no, for when you have those filthy creatures in your head once, the next thing you think is what they do; as their defiling of honest men’s beds and couches, rapes upon sleeping and waking country virgins under hedges and on haycocks; nay farther— Eliza: Nay, no farther cousin; we have had enough of your comment on the play, which will make me more ashamed than the play itself. (2.1.430–37) Olivia’s imagination traps her in a world of excessively figurative language where nothing is what it is, but only what she fantasizes it to be. She is so quick to leap to figured meanings that in describing the motion of her thought, she skips the very step of figuration, where goats, bulls, and satyrs turn into the kinds of men who are called goats, bulls, and satyrs. For her, a goat or a bull is instantly a “dirty creature” because it is never just a goat or a bull; it is always also a rapist. Moreover, these figured meanings take on a life of their own in her imagination, raping their way across an imaginary countryside in adventures that she is powerless to stop. Wycherley’s satire of the lady playgoer is, of course, disingenuous; he knows as well as we do what the name “Horner” implies. But the joke works because the double entendre makes it possible to divide every instance of language into the innocent and the obscene along the lines of literal and figurative meanings, where the literal is housed in the external world of objects and the figurative in the individual imagination. Wycherley delights in the way language sits at the threshold between subject and object, reverberating with various meanings both public and private. The more Olivia insists on the play’s being obscene, the more the obscenity adheres to her: “O, believe me, ’tis a filthy play; and you may take my word for a filthy play as soon as another’s,” she says, unwittingly transferring the “filthy play” from the play’s words to her own. Olivia insists on carrying the figure so far that the obscenity taints not just words and images but actual material objects—specifically, her china: Olivia: . . . But the filthiest thing in that play, or any other play, is— Eliza: Pray keep it to yourself, if it be so. Olivia: No, faith, you shall know it; I’m resolved to make you out of love with the play. I say the lewdest, filthiest thing is his china; nay,

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I will never forgive the beastly author his china. He has quite taken away the reputation of poor china itself, and sullied the most innocent and pretty furniture of a lady’s chamber, insomuch that I was fain to break all my defiled vessels. You see I have none left; nor you, I hope. Eliza: You’ll pardon me; I cannot think the worse of my china for that of the playhouse. Olivia: Why, you will not keep any now, sure! ’Tis now as unfit an ornament for a lady’s chamber as the pictures that come from Italy and other hot countries, as appears by their nudities, which I always cover or scratch out, wheresoe’er I find ’em. But china! Out upon’t, filthy china, nasty, debauched china! Eliza: All this will not put me out of conceit with china nor the play, which is acted today, or another of the same beastly author’s, as you call him, which I’ll go see. (2.1.439–59) Olivia is ridiculed for her inability to make distinctions—in this case, her inability to distinguish the obscene figure of china from The Country Wife from the actual china in her dressing-room. The china of the world of objects has become, for her, tainted with the meanings attached to it on the stage; every piece of porcelain has become a double entendre. Eliza, on the other hand, easily distinguishes her china from “that of the playhouse.” Her powers of distinction enable her to leave the filthy play of figures in the playhouse, such that her own bedchamber and the china that furnishes it remain pure of sexual innuendo. As Olivia attempts to acquit herself of the connotations of “china,” she only ensnares herself further. If, as Olivia insists, china is a sexual figure, it is necessarily suggestive of her own sexuality—and a pile of broken china suggests nothing good about the virtue of lady who owns it, as Pope made plain in The Rape of the Lock (1714) four decades later, when he playfully equated damaged china to lost virginity: “Whether the Nymph shall break Diana’s law, / Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw.”55 In contrast, Eliza’s integrity of both mind and virtue is mirrored in her own china, still intact. It is precisely Eliza’s ability to control her imagination that allows her both to keep her china and to see Wycherley’s plays without compromising her virtue. That she has an active imagination is evident in her enjoyment of the plays, but her ability to appreciate a dirty joke without becoming implicated in it suggests that her imagination is kept within bounds of reason. She possesses some quality of mind that upholds the distinction between object and subject worlds even as tricksters like Wycherley trouble it. As a type, Eliza also reappears decades later in Pope’s poetry, as the ideal woman from An Epistle to a Lady (1735) who remains “Mistress of herself, tho’ China fall.”56

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Wycherley’s use of and attention to the double entendre raises the fundamental question of how meaning adheres to words, and specifically how a word can bear multiple meanings simultaneously in the human mind. When an individual’s imagination overpowers her faculty of reason, the fecundity of language breeds terrible confusion, but when reason and imagination work in concert, the result is, to borrow from Pope, a language more “harmoniously confus’d.”57 The double entendre is, in this case, a figure for figurative language itself. By culminating in a debate over china, Olivia and Eliza’s argument carries the question of figuration beyond language and into the world of material objects. They put to china the question of how meaning adheres to material things and reflects back on their owners. In The Plain Dealer, china represents the very idea of a figurative object, an object whose meaning exceeds the material qualities of the thing itself and depends on subjective interpretation. Like Wycherley’s play, the Chinese object is an “equivocal touchstone” that is transformed by the various minds that encounter it. Under the gaze of subjects like Olivia, Chinese objects become suggestive, frail of meaning, confused with things they are not, and ultimately indecent. Olivia’s loose morals and disordered mind materialize in her corrupted, broken china; though she blames Wycherley’s play, it is obvious that she herself is the agent of ruin. Under the rule of more distinguishing minds like Eliza’s, however, china remains intact, unspoiled, and pure of connotation. Eliza earns her china by demonstrating that she knows how to manage it mentally. Rather than let her imagination run wild, she keeps it within reasonable bounds; she sees the difference between a playhouse and a bedroom, between “china” and china. While Olivia’s uncontrolled imagination has ruined china, Eliza’s restrained imagination salvages and improves it. Wycherley thus places china at the center of a struggle for imaginative control of the material world, where it would remain throughout the long eighteenth century. Recent criticism has tended to focus on how chinoiserie is consistently invoked throughout this period in association with questionable morals, aesthetics, and modes of spending. Kowaleski-Wallace, for example, shows how china repeatedly appears in literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a measure of women’s moral integrity. She demonstrates how a predilection for china marks female characters like Almeria from Anne Finch’s poem “Ardelia’s Answer to Ephelia” (1713), Indiana from Frances Burney’s Camilla (1796), and Lady Juliana from Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (1818) as harboring excessive desires for material objects that threaten to ruin them and their families.58 These characters, she argues, constitute “a political type”: they are members of “a long line of female china lovers whose ideological purpose is to signal an ongoing debate about the role of women in the economy: [are they] avid consumers, conspicuous and

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necessary displayers of mercantile riches, or conservative managers of a familial economy?” (67–68). Porter’s definition of chinoiserie as an “aesthetics of illegitimacy” proceeds in the same vein. Citing The Country Wife among other examples, Porter concludes that in the eighteenth century, “[c]hinoiserie is typically described as a fundamentally transgressive and anarchic perversion of true taste.”59 Certainly, Chinese things are systematically and increasingly associated with “illegitimate” tastes, behaviors, and characters in the eighteenth century, particularly in women. But these representations constitute only half the picture. Until the mid-eighteenth century, at the same time that chinoiserie indicates the depravity of some subjects, it also confirms the virtue of others. For every Olivia, there is an Eliza; for every piece of debauched china, there is another piece tastefully displayed. Chinese things are not stable signifiers; they fluctuate in the ongoing struggle for ideological mastery of the material world. In the early eighteenth century, it was not yet clear who was winning this struggle. In order to understand fully the way Chinese objects illustrated to eighteenth-century readers what was at stake in individual acts of perception, consumption, and aesthetic judgment, we need to take a broader look at the way the discourse of taste distinguished two different kinds of perception—a good and a bad way of imaginatively engaging the material world.

CHINESE THINGS AND THE ENGLISH IMAGINATION

Although Wycherley has been remembered as one of the more outrageous of the Restoration playwrights, The Plain Dealer’s suggestion that culture might contain “touchstones” to guide a collective project of distinguishing polite from lewd imaginations, or good from bad taste, anticipates by several decades the primary cultural concerns of mainstream writing in the early eighteenth century. Addison and Steele, two of the most predominant voices in the literary project to fashion English public taste, seemed to recognize this quality in Wycherley’s plays, exempting him from their general critiques of Restoration comedy. “It is one of the most unaccountable things in our Age, that the Lewdness of our Theatre should be so much complained of, so well exposed, and so little redressed,” Addison writes. “It is to be hoped, that some time or other we may be at leisure to restrain the Licentiousness of the Theatre, and make it contribute its Assistance to the Advancement of Morality, and to the Reformation of the Age. As Matters stand at present, Multitudes are shut out from this noble Diversion, by reason of those Abuses and Corruptions that accompany it.”60 Steele’s review of The Man of Mode

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captures the Spectator’s general take on Restoration libertine comedy: “This whole celebrated Piece is a perfect Contradiction to good Manners, good Sense, and common Honesty . . . there is nothing in it but what is built upon the Ruin of Virtue and Innocence.” He concludes, “I allow it to be Nature, but it is Nature in its utmost Corruption and Degeneracy.”61 But Wycherley he acknowledges to be a satirist, exposing vice rather than spreading it. The social tolerance of prostitution, and of the procuresses who profit by it, writes Steele, “the Ironical Commendation of the Industry and Charity of these antiquated Ladies, these Directors of Sin, after they can no longer commit it, makes up the Beauty of the inimitable Dedication to the Plain Dealer, and is a Master-piece of Raillery on this Vice.”62 As the Spectator attempted to reform the Restoration cultural legacy, it recognized that the structure of that reform was already in place.63 The whole range of Addison and Steele periodicals, including The Tatler (1709–11), The Spectator (1711–12), The Guardian (1713), and The Lover (1714), follow Wycherley’s lead by focusing their moral reform on the relationship between the understanding and the imagination. “Since I have raised to my self so great an Audience,” writes Addison in The Spectator, “I shall spare no Pains to make their Instruction agreeable, and their Diversion useful. For which Reasons I shall endeavour to enliven Morality with Wit, and to Temper Wit with Morality, that my Readers may, if possible, both Ways find their Account in the Speculation of the Day.”64 The papers presume that the imagination is a faculty that might respond to reason, just as the understanding might register pleasure; the balance of the papers’ sentiments will ultimately be reflected in the order of its readers’ minds.65 The authors also seem to have taken a cue from Wycherley that chinaware might be a particularly instrumental figure in the molding of well-ordered subjects. It was in the pages of these papers that the growing popularity of Chinese things in the early eighteenth century acquired the reputation of a “craze”; they portrayed china fanatics as flawed, fragile, and unreliable characters, and frequently cast chinoiserie itself in the same light. The papers’ repeated association of the Chinese taste with mental and social disorder participates in what Anthony Pollock calls The Spectator’s generation of “an ideologically useful image of the public sphere as beyond manageability.”66 Pollock argues that, rather than simply promoting moderation, sociability, and good taste by positive example, Addison and Steele’s periodical papers use scenes of disorder to “stage the failure of their public engagement in order to enable a privately-conducted neutralization . . . of their audience’s impulse to make ethics public,” effectively “enforc[ing] a strict separation between an irremediably antagonistic social realm and a compensatory sphere of ethically legitimated spectatorship” (709). Read in this context, the periodicals’ recurrent scenes of disorderly china do not simply indict things

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Chinese or consumers’ desire for them, but use them as a catalyst to compel privatized operations of taste and judgment as the only solution to the challenges presented by commercial culture. Addison and Steele thus import Wycherley’s touchstone and extend it into a new theory of social order governed by individual acts of aesthetic perception and judgment.67 Even the papers’ most negative representations of chinoiserie gesture toward the possibility of reform—not for the characters described, but for the reader who witnesses the spectacle of bad taste. In The Lover 10 (March 18, 1714), Addison lists the reasons china ought to be avoided: “First, That all China Ware is of a weak and transitory Nature. Secondly, That the Fashion of it is changeable: and Thirdly, That it is of no use.”68 The primary concern of the essay, however, is less the inherent evils of china than the way women consume it: There are no Inclinations in Women which more surprise me than their Passions for Chalk and China. The first of these Maladies wears out in a little time; but when a Woman is visited with the second, it generally takes possession of her for Life. China Vessels are Play-things for Women of all Ages. An old Lady of four-score shall be as busie in cleaning an Indian Mandarin, as her Great Grand Daughter is in dressing her Baby. (44)

The problem here is not china itself so much as the passions it inspires, which lead to inappropriate attachments and priorities: under its thrall, old women act like children, doting on inanimate things as if they were infants. This “malady” of adult play spreads throughout the house, creating a scene of domestic crisis: The common way of purchasing such Trifles, if I may believe the Female Informers, is by exchanging old Suits of Cloaths for this brittle Ware . . . I have known an old Petticoat metamorphosed into a Punch-Bowl, and a Pair of Breeches into a Tea-Pot. For this reason my friend Tradewell in the City calls his great Room, that is nobly furnished out with China, his Wife’s Wardrobe. In yonder Corner, says he, are above twenty Suits of Cloaths, and on that Scrutoire above a hundred Yards of furbelow’d Silk. You cannot imagine how many Night-Gowns, Stays and Mantoes, went to the raising of that Pyramid. The worst of it is, says he, a Suit of Cloaths is not to be suffered to last half its time, that it may be the more vendible; so that in reality this is but a more dextrous way of picking the Husband’s Pocket, who is often purchasing a great Vase of China, when he fancies he is buying a fine Head, or a Silk Gown for his Wife. (44–45)

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The woman who trades in the household’s clothing for china makes a questionable choice while trying to follow consumer trends: by overdecorating the rooms of the house, Tradewell’s wife has implicitly left herself completely undressed. Her excessive consumption of china thus makes her unwittingly indecent; at the same time, it makes her husband a financial cuckold. Like Olivia, the wife’s character flaws are reflected in and transferred to her china, which ultimately ends up in pieces: “How much Anger and Affliction are produced daily in the Hearts of my dear Country-women, by the breach of this frail Furniture,” Addison laments. “Some of them pay half their Servants Wages in China Fragments, which their Carelessness has produced” (45). Addison’s advice to his readers is not to avoid china altogether, but to learn how to own it by learning how to govern themselves. Consumer behavior is something that can be improved through the proper education: “In order, therefore, to exempt my fair Readers from such additional and supernumerary Calamities of Life, I wou’d advise them to forbear dealing in these perishable Commodities, till such a time as they are Philosophers enough to keep their Temper at the fall of a Tea-Pot or a China Cup” (45). The “weak,” “transitory,” and “changeable” nature of china that enables it to expose the flaws of an overactive passion and a feeble mind also makes it the ideal touchstone of a more solid character. “Philosophers,” Addison implies, may have all the china they want, because they are not liable to lose themselves to it. Like Eliza, a “philosopher” for Addison is precisely one who remains in command of him- or herself “though China fall.” The teapots and china cups belonging to these better-tempered subjects are rendered acceptable because their owners know their place in the imaginative scheme of things—they manage their china by perceiving distinctions between themselves and their ware, between necessities and embellishments, arranging themselves and their things accordingly. The specter of the philosopher’s china holds out the promise of the reform of consumption, the assurance that educated minds and self-governing subjects will turn bad china good. Throughout Addison and Steele’s papers, china suffers only when being used to illustrate a prevalent character or behavioral flaw—usually in women—that the periodical seeks to remedy. In Spectator 252 (December 19, 1711), Steele publishes a letter from John Hughes that complains of the persuasive “oratory” of women’s body language: You must know I am a plain Man and love my Money; yet I have a Spouse who is so great an Orator in this Way, that she draws from me what Sum she pleases. Every Room in my House is furnished with Trophies of her Eloquence, rich Cabinets, Piles of China, Japan Screens, and costly Jars; and if you were to come into my great Parlour, you would fancy your self in an India Ware-house. . . . What I would therefore desire of you, is, to prevail with

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your Friend who has promised to dissect the Female Tongue, that he would at the same time give us an Anatomy of a Female Eye, and explain the Springs and Sluices which feed it with such ready supplies of such Moisture; and likewise shew by what means, if possible, they may be stopped at a reasonable Expence: Or, indeed, since there is something so moving in the very Image of weeping Beauty, it would be worthy his Art to provide, that these eloquent Drops may no more be lavished on Trifles, or employed as Servants to their wayward Wills; but reserved for serious Occasions in Life, to adorn generous Pity, true Penitence, or real Sorrow. (2:480–81)

Invoking the well-established image of the unruly female tongue, this passage extends the violations of the overly passionate female body to the eye. The “Female Eye” is here a leaky orifice that is both seductive and excessively desirous of objects. Only through scientific intervention, the author insists, can the female gaze be regulated, the desires of the eye “stopped at a reasonable Expence.” And only through re-education in the distinction between “trifles” and “serious occasions in life” can the eye be redirected, and the female body trained to desire and respond to more appropriate objects. The wife and the house shall be reformed simultaneously; presumably, once her “wayward will” is fixed, her hoard of Chinese “trifles” will dwindle, and the house will no longer be indistinguishable from an “India Ware-house.” China appears again in the Spectator as the favored object of a woman whose tongue and eye seem both confused and insatiable. In Spectator 326 (March 14, 1712), Steele presents a letter by another man besieged by his wife’s desire for china, which is in this case one of a number of senseless pregnancy cravings: I beg you to print this without Delay, and by the first Opportunity give us the natural Causes of Longing in Women; or put me out of Fear that my Wife will one time or other be deliver’d of something as monstrous as any thing that has yet appeared to the World; for they say the Child is to bear a Resemblance of what was desir’d by the Mother. I have been marry’d upwards of six Years, have had four Children, and my Wife is now big with the fifth. The Expences she has put me to in procuring what she has longed for during her Pregnancy with them, would not only have handsomely defray’d the Charges of the Month, but of their Education too; her Fancy being so exorbitant for the first Year or two, as not to confine itself to the usual Objects of Eatables and Drinkables, but running out after Equipage and Furniture, and the like Extravagancies. . . . When she went with Molly, she had fix’d her mind upon a new Set of Plate, and as much China as would have furnished an India Shop: These . . . I chearfully granted, for fear of being Father to an Indian Pagod. . . . But with the Babe she now goes, she is turned Girl again, and fallen

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to eating of Chalk, pretending ’twill make the Child’s Skin white . . . [and] no longer than yesterday, as we were coming to Town, she saw a Parcel of Crows so heartily at Break-fast upon a piece of Horse-flesh, that she had an invincible Desire to partake with them, and (to my infinite Surprize) begged the Coachman to cut her off a Slice as ’twere for himself, which the Fellow did; and as soon as she came home she fell to it with such an Appetite, that she seemed rather to devour than eat it. . . . Let me know whether you think the next Child will love Horses as much as Molly does China-Ware. (3:195–96)

Here, the woman’s desire takes on a life of its own in the form of the “monstrous” offspring she brings forth. This is a vision of truly indiscriminate consumption: the pregnant woman’s longings conflate physical consumption with retail consumption, “eatables and drinkables” with “equipage and furniture.” Again, the family’s financial resources are thrown into crisis as the woman’s “fancies” absorb money needed to raise the children and maintain the house. And again, the disordered and unregulated female senses correspond to a house crammed rather than adorned with Chinese things. The house stuffed with china mirrors the body of the woman gorging herself on chalk, an act that goes beyond the distasteful to the inhuman; the woman’s transformation into a ravenous animal is confirmed by the image of her fighting with crows for a piece of horsemeat. The letter distinguishes her “devouring” from the more human act of “eating”: her appetite is greedy, jealous, and privileges quantity over quality. Chinaware, like horse-flesh, is figured here as a grotesque object of the woman’s insatiable hungers—arousing her unnatural appetite for carrion, but also rendered grotesque by the way she consumes it. In these exemplary cases of an unrestrained desire for material things, china is a “bad” object only insofar as it has been subjected to the disfiguring and damaging effects of indiscriminate consumption. That it is ultimately the imaginative component of consumption that is to blame for material overindulgence is made clear in Spectator 336 (March 26, 1712). Here appears a letter from a “china-woman,” who complains of the tasteless and thoughtless window shopping of china-crazed women who descend on her shop much like a “Parcel of Crows” on a horse carcass: I am, dear Sir, one of the top China-Women about Town; and though I say it, keep as good Things, and receive as fine Company as any o’ this End of Town, let the other be who she will: In short, I am in a fair Way to be easy, were it not for a Club of Female Rakes, who under pretence of taking their innocent Rambles, forsooth, and diverting the Spleen, seldom fail to plague me twice or thrice a-day to cheapen Tea, or buy a Skreen; What else should they mean? as they often repeat it. These Rakes are your idle Ladies of Fashion,

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who having nothing to do, employ themselves in tumbling over my Ware. One of these No-Customers (for by the way they seldom or never buy any thing) calls for a Set of Tea-Dishes, another for a Bason, a third for my best Green-Tea, and even to the Punch Bowl, there’s scarce a piece in my Shop but must be displaced, and the whole agreeable Architecture disordered; so that I can compare ’em to nothing but to the Night-Goblins that take a pleasure to over-turn the Disposition of Plates and Dishes in the Kitchens of your housewifely Maids. Well, after all this Racket and Clutter, this is too dear, that is their Aversion; another thing is charming, but not wanted: The Ladies are cured of the Spleen, but I am not a Shilling the better for it. (3:245)

While the women of Spectator 252 and 326 are faulted for buying too much china, these “female rakes” are faulted for buying too little. Both are examples of bad shopping. In the first case, the women are unable to satisfy their imaginations with a reasonable amount of commodities; in the second, the women are too satisfied without purchasing any commodities at all. Though women may display grotesque behavior as a result of being too fixed on a single kind of object, the image of the “female rake” shows an equal threat in women’s not being attached enough to any one thing. Such women’s desires for things are promiscuous and inconstant; their seductive teasing ultimately ruins the shopkeeper and her wares. In the first two Spectator passages quoted above, bad consumption materializes in a house filled with as much china as an “India shop”—an image that suggests that these women do not care or know how to select items from what is available on the market, but instead buy everything in the store, sacrificing their families to their excessive desires. The third presents a different but equally damaging kind of consumption, which is entirely imaginary and “debauches” the china market itself. The problem emphasized in these periodicals is not the desire for china in and of itself, nor the general culture of shopping, but participation in this culture without the regulating influence of taste. The images of “bad” china in these issues are part of the Spectator’s policing of what Mackie calls “imaginative consumption”: how people see material things in a culture that equates looking with possessing, seeing with knowing. According to Mackie, both the Tatler and the Spectator were devoted to distinguishing “‘good’ and ‘bad’ sorts of looking and acquiring” and thereby “policing . . . the gaze and the modes of consumption, imagining, and desiring it feeds.”69 These periodicals were not opposed to consumer culture, but instruments of it; by regulating consumer practices, they established the rules that made consumer culture universally acceptable. Institutions of an emergent bourgeois ideology, these papers disavow “bad” consumption in order to secure certain forms of “good” consumption. Mackie writes,

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Appropriating the objects and formal strategies of their criticism—fashionability, fancy, and the fantastic conceits of their rhetorical figuration—these projects counter conceit with conceit, fight fire with fire. Yet the Tatler and the Spectator occupy the arena of fancy in order to govern it, in a sense, to liberate it from the arbitrary, alienating, destructive, delusional regime of fashionable emulation. Addison’s and Steele’s strategies, then, do not disown but preserve these forces of fancy in ways that they can understand as compatible with reason, social and personal progress, and national well-being. (62)

By teaching consumers how to replace bad desires and practices with good ones, the papers reform the culture of consumption by regulating the relationship between subjects and objects, not prohibiting it. Imaginary attachments are not eliminated but brought in line with reasonable behavior. Bad consumption eliminates distinctions and tends toward excess, but good consumption reinforces distinctions and upholds principles of moderation and proportion. Under the right mental regime, the papers promise, chinaware might be perfectly compatible with a well-ordered, tasteful, and reasonable way of life. Following Locke’s theory that external objects have the power to produce ideas by stirring the senses, the Spectator continued to think about the relationship between sensual experience, perception, and the formation or transformation of the self through various images of consuming china. In this endeavor, while “good” china helps set up the right modes of “imaginative consumption,” “bad” china breaks down the boundary between good consumption and bad. One similarity among the Spectator’s various examples of bad china is its association with a disappearing distinction between personal and public space, and between the person’s body and external objects. The transformation of the home into an India or China shop reveals anxieties about the public world of trade overtaking domestic space, flooding the household with imported goods undomesticated by the powers of taste. Conversely, the pregnant woman’s grotesque devouring of objects and the female rakes’ raping of the china shop reveal an equal fear of women’s desires and fantasies overwhelming the external world. The new intimacy that consumer culture fosters between individual persons and foreign objects raises these anxieties about an imbalance of power in the romance between things and the imagination. Addison and Steele thus introduce new laws of propriety for precisely this kind of intimacy, rules designed to reinstate a natural order of things at the level of the imagination itself. The Spectator’s feminized images of bad consumption consistently illustrate violations of the boundaries that structure this order, suggesting that imagination can be regulated to the extent that things Chinese themselves can be reformed.

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Although The Lover 10 condemns chinaware for being, like women, “weak,” “transitory,” “changeable,” and “of no use,” the papers leading up to this observation offer models of people who are able to perceive and produce value out of the equivocal matter of things Chinese. Tatler 142 (March 7, 1710), for example, contains an extended recommendation of London “toyman” Charles Mather, whose reputation is impeccable, though he deals in exotic trifles: He is a person of particular genius, the first that brought toys in fashion, and baubles to perfection. He is admirably well versed in screws, springs, and hinges, and deeply read in knives, combs or scissors, buttons or buckles. He is a perfect master of words, which, uttered with a smooth voluble tongue, flow into a most persuasive eloquence; insomuch that I have known a gentleman of distinction find several ingenious faults with a toy of his, and show his utmost dislike to it, as being either useless, or ill-contrived; but when the orator behind the counter had harangued upon it for an hour and a half, displayed its hidden beauties, and revealed its secret perfections, he has wondered how he had been able to spend so great a part of his life without so important an utensil. I won’t pretend to furnish out an inventory of all the valuable commodities that are to be found at his shop.70

Mather’s “particular genius” combines the ability to read material things (“well versed in screws, springs, and hinges, and deeply read in knives, combs or scissors, buttons or buckles”) with an ability to transform those objects through virtuosic description. The toyman’s creative power takes indeterminate matter and stabilizes its value. He is essentially a translator, who, by focusing the traditional art of oration on the unlikely subject-matter of imported “baubles,” teaches his customers to see the objects as he does, elevating them from mere curiosities into meaningful and valuable commodities. There is more at stake in the successful marketing of toys than turning a profit. By performing a dual transformation—mere things into desirable commodities; indifferent people into desiring consumers—the toyman successfully integrates his wares into English life. The essay pointedly links Mather’s ability to fix the value of things on the English market to the production of meaning in the English language: His seals are curiously fancied, and exquisitely well cut, and of great use to encourage young gentlemen to write a good hand. Ned Puzzlepost had been ill-used by his writing-master, and writ a sort of a Chinese, or downright scrawlian: however, upon his buying a seal of my friend, he is so much

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improved by continual writing, that it is believed in a short time one may be able to read his letters, and find out his meaning, without guessing. (3:153)

The use of his “seals” mirrors the function of Mather’s genius: they both transform “a sort of Chinese” into meaningful English. The customer’s illegible scrawl is “Chinese” in its profound ambiguity—it is both unreadable and changeable. It could, in other words, mean anything. Through a process of improvement, it becomes both legible and meaningful in English; as its form is improved, its linguistic value becomes fixed. The same logic can be applied to Mather’s discursive transformation of his baubles, which, though initially appearing “fault[y],” “useless,” or “ill-contrived” to the English shopper, become valuable, desirable, and even indispensable as the toyman’s description of them generates “hidden beauties” and “secret perfections.” The toys have only been altered in the mind of the customer, but this change produces real meaning where there was none, cultivating an intimacy between consumer and commodity that improves both. Mather’s genius is exemplified by his ability to convert things Chinese into components of English self-presentation. This power comes to the fore with regard to imported canes, which he turns through description alone from ambiguous Eastern curiosities into indispensable accoutrements of an English gentlemen’s dress: . . . if this virtuoso excels in one thing more than in another, it is in canes; he has spent most of his select hours in the knowledge of them, and is arrived at that perfection, that he is able to hold forth upon canes longer than upon any one subject in the world. Indeed his canes are so finely clouded, and so well made up, either with gold or amber heads, that I am of the opinion it is impossible for a gentleman to walk, talk, sit or stand as he should do, without one of them. (3:153)

Mather translates the canes so well into English culture that in the customer’s imagination they are practically indistinguishable from his own body (see figure 2.1). The Eastern origin of canes is not incidental but integral to illustrating the extent of the merchant’s skills in manipulating value in the realm of the consumer imagination. The following anecdote illustrates how he makes the highest profit by setting prices based on what he knows his customers capable of paying. When called to account for his variable pricing, his unique knowledge of both his canes and his customers justifies his arbitrary setting of values: He knows the value of a cane, by knowing the value of the buyer’s estate. Sir Timothy Shallow has two thousand pounds per annum, and Tom Empty one.

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They both at several times bought a cane of Charles: Sir Timothy’s cost ten guineas, and Tom Empty’s five. Upon comparing them, they were perfectly alike. Sir Timothy surprised there should be no difference in the canes, and so much in the price, comes to Charles. “Damn it, Charles,” says he, “you have sold me a cane here for ten pieces, and the very same to Tom Empty for five.” “Lord, Sir Timothy,” says Charles, “I am concerned that you, whom I took to understand canes better than any baronet in town, should be so overseen; why, Sir Timothy, yours is a true jambee, and Squire Empty’s only a plain dragon.” (3:154)

“Jambee” and “dragon” were types of the same species of cane grown throughout the East Indies and used to make men’s walking canes for export to Europe.71 An advertisement in the London Gazette from 1704 lists both “Jumbee Canes” and “Dragon’s Blood Canes” in the cargo of a merchant ship returned from India, along with other goods including tea, coffee, and silk.72 There is no indication that there was any discrepancy of value between the two types of cane; a nineteenth-century encyclopedia of Asian goods notes that various kinds of cane differ in color, texture, strength, and flexibility, but that in general “it is not . . . possible to say from what particular species the canes of the shops are obtained, it being probable that they are gathered indiscriminately.”73 The difference Mather produces between his canes is purely aesthetic in the sense that it is entirely of the imagination: his knowledge and his eloquence combine to produce a distinction that is eventually perceived by the customer himself. Far from an indictment of the toyman’s arbitrary pricing, this story serves as a recommendation of his products: “This virtuoso has a parcel of jambees now growing in the East Indies,” it concludes, “where he keeps a man on purpose to look after them, which will be the finest that ever landed in Great Britain, and will be fit to cut about two years hence. Any gentleman may subscribe for as many as he pleases” (3:154). In context, the comic thrust of the story celebrates Mather’s power to manipulate things at the level of perception and imagination. His unique ability to look at two apparently identical canes and perceive a distinction between them, to say one comes from Jambi74 and another from somewhere else, makes them what he declares them to be. The perfection of his own understanding and eloquence guarantees that his canes are “the finest that ever landed in England.” Mather’s imagination, in contrast to those of china-crazed women, has positive and productive effects on the material world. Rather than destroy value, he creates it; instead of sowing disorder and confusion, he selects objects and distributes them in such a way that they complete the identity of modern Englishmen. Mather’s imaginative powers are precisely what Addison identifies in a later essay as a “fine Taste.” In Spectator 409 (June

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Figure 2.1 A man’s walking cane from eighteenth-century England. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

19, 1712), Addison attempts to “lay down Rules how we may know whether we are possessed of [fine Taste], and how we may acquire that fine Taste of Writing, which is so much talked of among the Polite World” (3:527). Like Mather’s canes, a “fine Taste” has become a necessary part of a gentleman’s constitution; by acquiring one, a person may enter a new world—the “Polite World,” or what I identify above as the “conversable world.” To define precisely what a fine taste does, Addison turns once again to the Chinese object as the initially ambiguous material that is rendered distinct by the work of the English imagination. Here, this idea takes the form of China tea: I knew a Person who possessed [a Taste] in so great a Perfection, that after having tasted ten different Kinds of Tea, he would distinguish, without seeing the Colour of it, the particular Sort which was offered him; and not only so, but any two sorts of them that were mixt together in an equal Proportion; nay, he has carried the Experiment so far, as upon tasting the Composition of three different sorts, to name the Parcels from whence the three several Ingredients were taken. (3:527–28)

Addison’s friend is the counterpart to the merchant as virtuoso: the consumer as connoisseur. Supplementing his knowledge of tea, his taste for it enables him to distinguish various sips that to a less refined palate would seem identical, to disentangle the individual ingredients of mixtures, and to identify with his palate alone the origins of each type that passes his lips. By

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allowing him to name “the Parcels from whence the three several Ingredients were taken,” the tea-drinker’s imagination actually traces the tea back to the very region of China in which it was grown, for, like “jambee” canes, different types of tea were named after the regions in China where they were produced and packaged. The man of taste thus translates the confused mixture of a cup of tea into a series of identifiable objects by individuating its components and stating where each comes from. Here and throughout, the Spectator suggests that taste is something that can be learned, cultivated, and improved. It is also presented not as an elite quality, but as one fundamental to English character—something every individual needs in order to participate successfully in modern English culture. Taste is the foundation of social and cultural literacy in a cosmopolitan world. “A Man of a fine Taste in Writing,” Addison writes, “will discern, after the same manner [as the tea-drinker], not only the general Beauties and Imperfections of an Author, but discover the several Ways of thinking and expressing himself, which diversify him from all other Authors, and with the several Foreign Infusions of Thought and Language, and the particular Authors from whom they were borrowed” (3:528). Like China tea, English literature is a kind of “Foreign Infusion”; the best readers recognize the variety and complexity of every aspect of English culture, such that even England’s own literature appears a mixture of various parts, each originating somewhere else. This is the same world Pope celebrates in Windsor-Forest, a cosmopolitan England “as the World, harmoniously confus’d”—the confusion being harmonious precisely because persons of fine taste are able to confirm the individual ingredients, tell where they come from, and confirm the overall balance and proportion of the combination. The confusion becomes harmonious, in other words, only when the man of taste perceives harmony in it. Taste is the point of contact between the imaginary and material worlds. Through the exercise of taste, external objects are subjected to mental principles, becoming material embodiments of imaginary ideals. The sharp distinction between the voracious consumption of the china-crazed and the careful sipping of the tea-drinker confirms that taste, while a part of consumer activity, is more of an epistemological exercise than a corporal experience. Indeed, Addison’s concern here with the passage of external objects to the realm of the mind draws on the Lockean model of ideas derived from sensory experience. But in dwelling on the particular connotations of the term “Taste,” Addison carves out a realm of experience somewhere between the impulsive satisfaction of bodily hungers and the mechanical calculations of reason. He writes,

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Most Languages make use of this Metaphor [of Taste], to express that Faculty of the Mind, which distinguishes all the most concealed Faults and nicest Perfections in Writing. We may be sure this Metaphor would not have been so general in all Tongues, had there not been a very great Conformity between that Mental Taste, which is the Subject of this Paper, and that Sensitive Taste which gives us a Relish of very different Flavour that affects the Palate. Accordingly we find, there are as many Degrees of Refinement in the intellectual Faculty, as in the Sense, which is marked out by this common Denomination. (3:527)

Sitting at the juncture of the “mental” and the “sensitive,” taste figures the peculiar ability of both the body and the mind to “relish” certain encounters with the material world. Taste is a way of knowing something through the sensory pleasure of it. What China tea affords the man of taste, in other words, is a pure aesthetic pleasure. This category of experience is made possible by the imagination, which allows the human mind to interact with its own ideas in the same way the human body interacts with sensible objects. Addison’s example of tea-drinking brings into focus the overlap of these two parallel worlds of experience, a moment when the sensible encounter and the intellectual encounter—as well as the pleasures they produce—are one and the same. Like the term “Taste,” the Chinese object of taste figures the point of contact between the imaginary and material worlds, the site where the external world of objects is made to cater to the pleasures of the imagination.

CHINOISERIE’S GLIMMER

Chinoiserie emerges as an aesthetic category within this broader English discourse of the relationship between sensory and intellectual experience, and between the subjects and objects of such experience. The particular way in which the Chinese object communicated with the emergent “perceiving subject” of this discourse can be summarized by a turn back to the work of Berkeley. In An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), Berkeley attempted to lay out a foundation for studying the precise mental alchemy of visual encounter between subject and object. For Berkeley, the “object of vision,” or what we would call the image, is already a separate creature from the material object, and does not exist independently of the subjective mind.75 The visible realm operates as a kind of language—“the Universal Language of Nature” (172)—in which we are so fluent that we no longer notice the medium of vision; we intuitively translate what we see into ideas

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of what the objects of sight represent.76 In order fully to appreciate the experience of seeing itself, he argues, we must figure it as an exotic encounter: we must approach it “exactly in the Posture of a Foreigner, that never learnt the Language, so as to be affected barely with the Sounds themselves, and not perceive the Signification annexed to them” (186). Learning to see the entire world as if it were written in a foreign language would awaken us to the formal qualities of the visible text of nature, Berkeley suggests, and enable us to appreciate how it mediates the relationship between the individual mind and the external world. He asks us to admire “the vast Extent, Number, and Variety of Objects that are, at once, with so much Ease, and Quickness, and Pleasure suggested by [the visive faculty]: All these afford Subject for much and pleasing Speculation; and may, if any thing, give us some Glimmering, Analogous, Prenotion of Things, that are placed beyond the certain Discovery, and Comprehension of our present State” (174). In addition to introducing the central terms of the eighteenth-century discourse on taste and aesthetics picked up by Addison and others, Berkeley’s theory posits cosmopolitanism as an epistemological effect. One can know the world’s variety—can know how varied the world is even beyond the current limits of discovery—not by seeing different things but by seeing things differently. Chinoiserie, a material example of what the world might look like written in foreign characters, focuses the English subject in exactly this way on the very act of visual perception. Pausing at the experience of mere seeing places us at the speculative stage of knowledge acquisition; and speculation, by which we traverse the gulf between what is already known and what is yet unknown, Berkeley presents as a source of pleasure. When we look around us, what we actually see are projections of our own mind, objects fashioned by a combination of what we know and what we imagine; but as we cast these projections out into the world, they afford us a “Glimmering . . . Prenotion” of things that exist beyond our immediate comprehension—things in the world that we have yet to understand. The “glimmer” is an image of the visible wavering; it hints at the point at which the visible world ends and the external world of the yet unseen begins. Berkeley’s individual, admiring his own visive skills, literally witnesses the extent of his own imagination as it reaches toward the unknown. Thus, for Berkeley, when we look out into the world as if we are beholding a volume written in a foreign language, we feel our own minds casting the threads of association that sustain, enhance, and expand the whole of our knowledge. Berkeley’s glimmer is akin to the “Chineseness” of Addison’s garden: a visual effect that lives in the imagination, as evidence that the mind has made meaningful contact with an external world of objects. Chinoiserie’s association with the imagination certainly implicated it in that faculty’s

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documented excesses and transgressive adventures, but it also integrated things Chinese from the beginning in theories of how the imagination might productively supplement reason as the foundation of modern English subjectivity. Particularly when that subject was expected to be the intellectual master of a much greater territory than his own estate or nation—essentially, of the entire world—a large part of his authority was necessarily of the imagination. While “bad china” marked moments of infraction, “good china” showed how the imagination could be put to work in the building of a cosmopolitan nation. It stood for the appeal of the outside world to English taste, and the natural order English taste offered to confer on the world.

3 Defoe’s Trinkets Fiction’s Spectral Traffic Thus, that which when it was in Coin was not worth Six-pence to us, when thus converted into Toys and Trifles, was worth an Hundred Times its real Value, and purchased for us any thing we had Occasion for. —Daniel Defoe, Captain Singleton (1720)1

Theories of taste and imagination in the early eighteenth century focused on what Berkeley called “pleasing speculation”: acts of self-projection into the external world that enabled the English subject to enjoy pushing the limits of his own knowledge.2 The kind of epistemology Berkeley suggests, which Addison’s essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” extend into a theory of aesthetics, insists that one must imagine what one might know before one can know it. In England, both cosmopolitan subjectivity and mercantilist expansion were founded on this work of the imagination. Speculation prefigured possession. It thus makes sense that a genre of prose closely associated with fancy and imagination—the romance—would be put to the task of thinking through England’s changing position in the world at large, and the English subject’s experience of the world beyond the boundaries of the familiar. In this chapter, I look at how the English travel romance, represented by Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1720), generates strategies for propelling English fantasy into the world at large as a prefiguration of English presence in and possession of foreign territory. Defoe’s romance of global commerce focuses on strategies for circulating private “fancies” as objectively valuable commodities; it fantasizes ways of compromising the boundary between the subjective imagination and the objective world through various forms of commerce. Ever since Ian Watt placed Defoe at the beginning of his critical narrative of “the rise of

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the novel,”3 critics have included Defoe in the novel’s “truth-telling” project, “whereby,” in the words of James Thompson, “novels insist that they describe things as they really are.”4 Captain Singleton, I argue, does precisely the opposite: it experiments with ways of representing things as they are not, in order to imagine how the English might profit by their greatest resource—namely, their imagination. Describing Defoe’s final novel, A New Voyage Around the World (1724), Robert Markley writes that by turning “to the vast, comparatively unexplored regions of the South Seas,” Defoe “adapts the genre of the travel and trade narrative to describe the imaginary conditions under which humankind, or at least British, upper-class, male humankind, can prosper indefinitely.”5 Where A New Voyage offers a fictional account of how the English subject might escape the material restraints of a “real” English existence to prosper under imaginary conditions, Captain Singleton instead narrates how the English subject sends objects of his own imagination across the threshold into the “real” world, where they turn a potentially endless profit. More interested in breaching the bounds of the real than enforcing them, Defoe’s romance behaves less like the realist novel and more like those forms of fiction that, according to Srinivas Aravamudan, perform “the kinds of literary mobilization that unbounded seriality in fiction . . . makes possible: fiction as a form of imagination that transports itself beyond sociological restriction; fiction as the instrument of philosophical reflection and analysis rather than as a mere receptacle of cultural conditionings and ideologies; fiction as the agent of transculturation and cultural exchange rather than the barrier to it.”6 By calling our attention to the “trinket,” both a decorative object associated with chinoiserie and a gambit that realizes aesthetic or imaginary value, Captain Singleton illustrates the ways in which the fictional tale itself, like the Chinese object, mobilizes the work of the imagination to traverse real cultural limits. At the same time, it performs that gambit on its readers, selling its imaginary figures as better versions of the real.

COMMERCE WITH STRANGERS

In seventeenth-century England, commerce rapidly came to be understood as a condition of social health as well as the basis of a thriving economy. In The English Gentleman (1630), Richard Brathwaite defines friends as “men, whom we now have in hand, and whom we have made choice of, as fit companions to converse and commerce with.”7 Good friends, according to Brathwaite, are akin to fair traders: “So well and equally are the ships of these good merchants ballased, as rather than they will make shipwracke of a good conscience, or runne their reputation upon the shelfe of disgrace, they will

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suffer the worst of extremes” (278). While England’s growing involvement in global trade thus informed the meaning of friendship at home, notions of friendship among men simultaneously shaped the English understanding of commercial relationships among nations. Peter Heylyn’s Cosmographie (1652) describes nature’s distribution of resources around the globe as part of nature’s design to encourage “that civill entercourse, and mutuall society which the nature of Mankind doth most delight in.”8 Offering an image later made famous by Joseph Addison,9 Heylyn suggests that the global scattering of riches is God’s way of “unit[ing] all the parts of the World in a continuall Traffique and Commerce with one another” and “maintaining . . . that entercourse between Nation and Nation, which makes them link the closer in the bonds of Amitie.”10 The purpose of international trade was as much friendship as profit.11 In both social and financial commerce, however, one runs the risk of unequal trades. Brathwaite rails against false friends, likening them to those “who make sale of deceitfull commodities,” “trifling Mountebankes,” “Sea-sharkes, who under pretence of merchandize, exercise piracie,” and “inconsiderate Factors, who make exchange of English money with Indian trifles, enriching forraine countries with our treasures.”12 In fictional and non-fictional descriptions of foreign commerce throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such unequal trafficking seems to be the rule more than the exception. While such interactions might be understood as breaches in “civility,” they were frequently the result of culturally disparate notions of what constituted a “trifle” and what a “treasure.” In an ever-expanding network of cultures13 with no standardized system of value, commodities served to translate concepts of worth; an object exchanged was a form of negotiated meaning as well as value. Louis Hennepin makes an observation in A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America (1698) typical of European recollections of trades with American Indian tribes: “We made them some Presents of little Value, which they thought very considerable”—adding immediately, however, that “Presents are the Symbols of Peace in all those Countries,” suggesting that these objects of “little Value” are in fact invaluable to the European traveler in America.14 William Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World (1697) notes that in addition to provisions, the European crew carried “Toys wherewith to gratify the Wild Indians, through whose Country we were to pass”; even a violent tribe can be pacified, Dampier maintains, “by shewing some toy, or knack, that they did never see before: which any European, that has seen the world, might soon contrive to amuse them withal.”15 In the Americas, European “toys” and “knacks” rose to the value of currency, worth enough to buy a man’s life. In the Far East, European travelers frequently found the opposite to be true. As the British, following the Dutch and Portuguese, established trade

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relations with China in the early eighteenth century, they found themselves marginal participants in a booming Asian economy. The British East India Company struggled throughout the century to identify Asian markets for British goods;16 until the nineteenth century, Andre Gunder Frank notes, “gold and silver were never less than two-thirds of total [European] exports.”17 While Europe’s participation in Asian trade cost it “a perpetual deficit,” China’s export of ceramics, silks, lacquerware, tea, and other luxury goods turned it into “the ‘ultimate sink’ of the world’s silver, which flowed there to balance China’s almost perpetual export surplus” (127). Europeans coveted Chinese decorative and luxury goods, but, more often than not, the only thing the Chinese wanted from Europeans was their money. In a reversal of the scenario between Europeans and the natives of America, in Asia it was the Europeans who placed the utmost value on foreign ornaments. Maxine Berg points out that among Europeans, the most popular ornamental goods from Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as calicoes, lacquerware and porcelain, “were part of a group of objects that ‘imitated’ or mimicked gold and silver in crosscultural transmission”; Europeans valued them as “a source of wonder.”18 Much of the vast quantity of gold and silver mined by Europeans in the Americas thus flowed out of Europe and into Asia to pay for a new set of toys and trinkets—objects not necessarily of intrinsic (that is, pecuniary) value but of aesthetic delight. For the English, the question of “imitative” and “real” value haunted all commercial exchanges, particularly as debate raged in England over how the nation ought to define the value of money itself. Even as the Royal Mint took measures to adhere to a gold and silver standard towards the end of the seventeenth century,19 in practice, what counted as money often varied according to context and even individuals. Deborah Valenze has argued that in this period in England, the “heterogeneous money supply schooled a commercially active population in a particular form of technical virtuosity in exchange relations . . . a great deal was left up to the individual in determining the actual value of any given coin.”20 Abroad, the difference between “real” and “imitation” money was even more difficult to determine. Following the English government’s 1684 ban on colonial mints in North America, colonists adopted local currencies including “wampum and ‘commodity-currencies’”; in addition to tobacco, “timber, cattle, furs, dairy produce, musket balls, oats, pork, and many other items became authorized [by colonial governments] as legal tender” (44–45). The recognition of “commodity-currencies” acknowledges that, materially, objects on both sides of any exchange of value are “imitations” of an abstract quantity; all objects that change hands in trade are different tangible versions of a quality that transcends the language of material things.

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Acts of trade are thus essentially acts of communication; across cultural boundaries, they constitute instances of translation in which different languages of value learn to approximate one another.21 Captain Singleton stages such moments of cultural intercourse as part of a developing narrative of English triumph in global trade—a narrative that rapidly integrated itself into the definition of English national identity in the early eighteenth century despite the fact that it did not necessarily correspond to the experience of English traders in either the Americas or the Far East. The novel weaves a fantasy of English economic ingenuity that draws upon and rewrites two coexistent mythologies of seventeenth-century global commerce: on the one hand, European interactions with the indigenous peoples of the “new world,” and, on the other, European trade with the Chinese, who dominated the world economy as the greatest exporters of commercial goods. In doing so, the novel takes responsibility for defining the terms of value in cross-cultural commercial exchanges on a trade-by-trade basis, so as always to give the English the benefit of the exchange—that is, propriety of “true” value, in exchange for a form of lesser or false value. Emphasizing the naïveté of indigenous tribes when faced with English toys and trinkets, Singleton attributes to its English castaways the commercial ingenuity and success that historically were enjoyed by Chinese manufacturers selling to European markets. In their trade with the fictional natives of Madagascar and southern Africa—who resemble closely the tribes of the Americas described by Hennepin, Dampier and other travelers— Defoe’s English characters thrive by trading metal trinkets for food and gold. This narrative of English commercial triumph is haunted, however, by the specter of European experience in the real-life China trade. By substituting the English for the Chinese as the heroes of savvy trinket-trading, Defoe disavows both the existent Eastern dominance of world commerce and the marginal role the English and other Europeans continued to play in the global economy. The trinket thus behaves as what Lydia Liu calls a commodity in “the global network of metonymic exchange,” generating meaning and sustaining its fantasy of European superiority through a “poetics of colonial disavowal.”22 In the second half of Captain Singleton, Defoe sends his protagonist to try his hand trading in the China Seas, as if to reckon directly with the implicit context of the novel’s first half. The fictitious representations of English-Chinese relations in Singleton and other texts serve to ground the coherence of the narrative of English commercial superiority in a global context. The romance’s adamant desire to displace the Chinese as victors of cross-cultural commercial exchange initiates—however unwittingly—a reassessment of the value of commercial objects that reverberates beyond fiction into early eighteenth-century poetics and theories of taste. Defoe’s

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fiction of English success in global trade leads, ultimately, to a new formulation of aesthetic value and native English wit, in which trinkets trump specie after all.

MONEY AND MEANING

Much of the recent scholarship on money and meaning in Defoe’s novels has focused on the advent of paper money and public debt. In the early eighteenth century, these modern forms of credit constituted a new kind of currency whose value resided in abstract forms rather than actual substance. Bills of credit wed money to language, projecting monetary value into imaginary realms of metaphor and speculation; like the Derridean word, paper cash defers its full meaning into a perpetual future. Multiple scholars, notably Sandra Sherman, James Thompson, Patrick Brantlinger, and Robert Markley, have shown how Defoe’s novels as well as his writings on political economy endorse and follow the logic of credit, weaving literature into the emergent capitalist mode of production and circulation.23 But paper was not the only substance to undergo radical transformation in Defoe’s imagined economies. In Robinson Crusoe (1719), Defoe explored the philosophical flipside of the bill of credit: the worthless coin. In an oft-cited episode, Crusoe, while salvaging materials from his wrecked ship, finds a locker containing “about thirty six Pounds value in money, some European coin, some Brasil, some Pieces of Eight, some gold, some silver.” “Thou art not worth to me, no not the taking off of the ground,” he tells them; “I have no manner of use for thee, e’en remain where thou art, and go to the Bottom as a Creature whose Life is not worth saving.” “However,” he adds, “upon second thoughts, I took it away.”24 His decision to take the coins with him belies his declaration that they are “not worth saving.” Although the island’s social vacuum has voided their monetary value, the coins’ sudden uselessness endows them with new symbolic value. No longer useful as money, the coins now serve as tokens of their own uselessness. This revaluation is confirmed when, preparing to depart from the island for good, Crusoe retains as souvenirs the money “which had lain by me so long useless, that it was grown rusty, or tarnish’d, and could hardly pass for Silver, till it had been a little rubb’d, and handled . . . ” (278). The tarnish of age has transformed the coins into relics, mementi mori for the belief in money’s intrinsic value; at the same time, this physical alteration of their surface allows them to circulate in a different network of value and signification, namely fiction’s own economy of meaning. Crusoe’s suggestion that by “rubbing” and “handling”

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the tarnished coins, one might transform them back into objects that could “pass for Silver,” foregrounds both the malleability of the coins’ substance and the role of manual manipulation in determining how this substance will “pass”—how it will be interpreted, and, subsequently, how it will move in different modes of exchange.25 Inverting the figure of the bank note—a worthless substance rendered valuable by inscription—Crusoe’s coins are valuable substances whose rusty surfaces disavow their innate worth. In this sense, they have become what Jayne Elizabeth Lewis calls “spectral currency”: tokens whose meaning is constituted entirely in appearance, or “a medium that has become its own message.”26 Crusoe’s coins dramatize the spectral quality of even the most seemingly solid currency, metal specie. In addition to—or in spite of—its material substance, the coin declares the positive existence of something that is not there: the abstract, universal value that it represents. In Lewis’s words, a coin is “the very sign of the presence of an abstraction” (95). It is thus significant that Crusoe’s stash of useless coins is a diverse combination of national currencies: “some European coin, some Brasil, some Pieces of Eight, some gold, some silver.” This is precisely the “heterogeneous money supply” that Valenze tells us fostered “technical virtuosity in exchange relations” among anyone and everyone engaged in commercial activity.27 In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, according to Valenze, just such a “bewildering variety [of coins] jostled for recognition” in financial transactions at home and abroad” (1); any merchant of Crusoe’s time would have known intuitively that a coin was both a precious thing (in the right context) and a point of theoretical cross-cultural negotiation. Successful trading required skill in managing all different kinds of coins; one had to be able to draw out of each discrete piece the abstract—spectral—quality of universal currency. The island’s transformation of merchants’ specie can be read as part of Defoe’s investigation of the coin’s potential for revision in various cultural contexts, and, by extension, the abstract qualities of real things. If a piece of paper can be invested with the value of gold, can a piece of gold be given the value of paper—can it behave like a text, taking on the life of a fantasy or creature of the imagination? Does a coin refer not merely to itself for value, but to something spectral that would allow the coin to be translated, like a word, from one system to another? A year after the publication of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe published Captain Singleton, a novel that revisits the problem of coin money whose value is not recognized within a primitive economy, this time exploring the prospect of putting useless coins back into circulation. In the narrative’s first half, Bob Singleton finds himself stranded along with a number of his shipmates in the wilds of Madagascar, in desperate need of food. The novel’s Madagascar and

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its inhabitants are modeled closely on the accounts of indigenous tribes of the Americas provided by writers like Hennepin and Dampier:28 the natives are willing to trade with the castaways, but place little value on coin money, preferring to barter for precious goods. Echoing Crusoe, Singleton finds that “our Money did us little Service, for the People neither knew the Value or the Use of it, nor could they justly rate the Gold in Proportion with the Silver; so that all our Money . . . would go but a little way with us, that is to say, to buy us Provisions” (30). Unlike Crusoe’s island, this fictional Madagascar does have an existent economy of exchange, but it is one that completely inverts European values: our Money . . . was meer Trash to them, they had no Value for it; so that we were in a fair Way to be starved. Had we had but some Toys and Trinkets, Brass Chains, Baubles, Glass Beads, or in a Word, the veriest Trifles that a Ship Loading would not have been worth the Freight, we might have bought Cattel and Provisions enough for an Army, or to Victual a Fleet of Men of War, but for Gold and Silver we could get nothing. (36)

Madagascar serves as a topsy-turvy world in which treasure is trash and trash treasure. An imaginary store of “trifles” that, in England, would not have been worth the shipping costs, would here feed an army of men. Like Crusoe, these sailors must completely reimagine the substance of the coins in order to breathe new life into them. As specie, they are indeed “a creature whose life is not worth saving,” but if they can usher the coins into a second life of meaningful uselessness—that is, if they can transform them into “toys and trinkets”—they can tap the coins’ abstract, universal value and put them back into circulation. The important point here is not simply that different cultures have different currencies, and that what might be worth much in one economy is worth little elsewhere. It is, rather, that even that which seems to be valuable in substance—such as a gold or silver coin—is only valuable universally to the extent that substance can be translated from one culture to another. Since translation requires the correspondence of two different terms to the same abstract concept, the translation of substance— the transmutation of one kind of token into another—reveals that even material things have an immaterial life that regulates their movement among and between various systems of meaning. In Singleton, coin money survives in Madagascar by being transformed into its very opposite: the trinket, an innately worthless piece of metal. The coin’s potential value, which propels it across various economies of exchange, lies not in its substance either as specie or as toy, but in its uncanny ability to be both.

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USURY AND FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

In Captain Singleton, it is the ship’s “cutler,” or metal-worker, who transforms money into trinket: he takes the coins “and beats them out with a Hammer upon a Stone, till they were very broad and thin, then he cut them out into the Shape of Birds and Beasts; he made little Chains of them for Bracelets and Necklaces, and turn’d them into so many Devices, of his own Head, that it is hardly to be exprest” (37). When “we try’d the Effect of his Ingenuity . . . with the Natives,” Singleton reports, “[we] were surprized to see the Folly of the poor People”: For a little Bit of Silver cut out in the Shape of a Bird, we had two Cows; and, which was our Loss, if it had been in Brass, it had been still of more Value. For one of the Bracelets made of Chain-work, we had as much Provision of several Sorts, as would fairly have been worth in England, Fifteen or Sixteen Pounds; and so of all the rest. Thus, that which when it was in Coin was not worth Six-pence to us, when thus converted into Toys and Trifles, was worth an Hundred Times its real Value, and purchased for us any thing we had Occasion for. (37)

The transmutable coin turns out to be “worth an Hundred times its real Value”—that is, either the value of the metal itself or the value of the coin in its home economy. This radical inflation derives from the coin-turned-trinket’s ability to wrest value from beyond both its material substance and its native context. To this effect, it taps into and embodies two distinct imaginary realms: on the one hand, the irrational realm of the natives’ fancies and desires, and, on the other, the creativity of the cutler. Drawing on these dual domains of the imagination, the coin becomes a “toy” not only in the sense of an ornament or plaything, but also as a “foolish or idle fancy; a fantastic notion, odd conceit.”29 Matching the cutler’s own “odd conceits” to the “foolish . . . fancy” of the indigenous consumer proves an enormously profitable enterprise. Through his work on the coins, the cutler acquires a new status, becoming the crew’s “artist” or “artificer.”30 The term “artist” in this context does not carry quite the same connotation of “creative genius” that it does today; still, the label is significant. Both “artist” and “artificer” connote someone whose work combines the dexterity of a cutler in the shaping of metal with the imaginative work of the mind—this is a skilled laborer who deals in material “devices of his own head.” Equally significant is the fact that Singleton attributes the remarkable success of the sailors’ trinket trade to the native peoples’ “folly.” The fiction suggests, without criticizing, that there is something devious

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about the artificer’s refashioned coins. Singleton and his men are precisely the kind of “false friends” Brathwaite warns against: those “who make sale of deceitfull commodities” (and, in the novel’s second half, “Sea-sharkes, who under pretence of merchandize, exercise piracie”). But in the scenario presented by the novel, deceit is practically indistinguishable from communication. “Our Correspondence with the Natives was absolutely necessary,” Singleton observes, “and our Artist the Cutler, having made Abundance of those little Diamond cut Squares of Silver, with these we made Shift to Traffick with the black People for what we wanted; for indeed they were pleased wonderfully with them: And thus we got Plenty of Provisions” (45). When the crew reaches the mainland of Africa, the handiwork of the “ingenious cutler” proves “an inestimable treasure” in establishing unlikely friendships. Echoing Dampier’s observation that hostile tribes can be pacified by toys and knacks, Singleton reports that after some of his crew “made something free with [some native] Women . . . we must have gone to War with [the tribal leaders] and all their People” but for a handful of the artificer’s trinkets, which bought them the privilege of a visit to the people’s king (169–70). The trinket is a work of “artifice” in all senses, particularly “an ingenious expedient, a clever stratagem; . . . a manoeuvre or device intended to deceive, a trick.”31 Its “trick” is to facilitate the movement of value across a cultural impasse that “real” or unadulterated coins cannot cross. Defoe himself equated “artifices” with “sleights of hand” in The Complete English Tradesman (1726), arguing that when the people of London find that they have received “bad money,” or clipped coins, they are “not wanting again in all the artifice and sleight of hand they were masters of, to put it off again; so that . . . people were made bites and cheats to one another in all their business.”32 The irony in Captain Singleton is that the Englishmen must become “cheats” in order to pass off good money; they trick the natives into taking their money, and turn a profit in the process. The deceit of the artificer serves to put something real back into circulation. In fact, “trinket” was commonly used in this period as a verb: “to trinket” was to “have clandestine communications or underhand dealings with; to intrigue with; to act in an underhand way.”33 The resulting inflation—or “trinketing”—of the coins’ value resembles the “monstrous generation” of capital identified by Ann Louise Kibbie in Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724). In those novels, Kibbie argues, traditional anti-usury arguments are channeled into narratives about female embodiments of capital that reproduce value in economically unsanctioned ways.34 Indeed, there is something reminiscent of the practice of usury in how the artificer makes money out of money, and at the height of the artificer’s success, Singleton observes that he “sold his Goods at a monstrous Rate” (177). What is unnatural about the profits of this trinket trade is not merely that they are the result of money

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reproducing itself, but that they are generated paradoxically as a consequence of the material devaluation of the coins. Defoe’s trinket thus clandestinely materializes value out of imaginary realms while outwardly disavowing its own innate worth. The novel’s scrutiny of the trinket’s value is consistent with Lockean suspicions about imaginative figures in language. In his well-known attack on rhetoric, Locke argues that figurative speech is nothing less than an “Abuse of Words.” “I confess,” he writes, in Discourses, where we seek rather Pleasure and Delight, than Information and Improvement, such Ornaments as are borrowed from them, can scarce pass for Faults. But yet, if we would speak of Things as they are, we must allow, that . . . all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat.35

But, Locke notes with some dismay, from the continued proliferation of rhetorical language, “’Tis evident how much Men love to deceive, and be deceived” (508). Although Bob Singleton’s tone is more one of incredulous admiration than of Lockean disgruntlement, he shares Locke’s opinion that profiting from ornaments is a “cheat” and that one only gets away with it because men are foolish enough to “love to be deceived.” The novel’s projection of this folly onto the “native” of Madagascar is itself, however, an example of the very sort of misleading figuration Locke condemns. This representation of the native is a perfect example of the imaginative work—the artifice—of fiction: borrowing the register of observational “truth-telling” from the familiar genre of travel narratives, the text presents a stereotypical amalgamation of various images and ideas drawn from such literature and infuses it with the “love of being deceived” that the English noted and feared in themselves.36 The “foolish native” is one of the novel’s own trinkets—an elaborate coinage that displaces a particular economic weakness from the character of the English. That the native’s folly is in fact a fictional distortion of English folly becomes clear if we read this episode in the context of England’s developing China trade as well as the literature on the popularity among English consumers of foreign ornamental goods. As European nations began to tap into Asian commercial economies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Chinese goods signified Europe’s arrival in the modern, commercial world. Lacquerwork, porcelain, and other forms of imported chinoiserie indicated Europe’s participation in global networks of trade that were also, as evidenced by Brathwaite, Heylyn and others, networks of amity, even camaraderie. They were signs, in other words, of Europe’s cosmopolitanism, its

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full participation in the world at large. Maxine Berg has described this particular strain of European enthusiasm for chinoiserie. Distinct from other kinds of “Asian luxury,” she writes, China was associated not with sensuality and excess, but with ethics, harmony, and virtue. China and Confucius inspired Leibniz, then Voltaire and the Encyclopedists to perceive through the prism of Chinese objects their own aspirations to human elegance and refinement. In possessing things Chinese, they sought to access levels of civilization beyond the market.37

As Chinese goods became both cheaper and more plentiful in England, however, their popularity as commodities was matched by a suspicion of their cultural value. As I discussed in chapter 2, periodicals like The Spectator devoted numerous essays to exposing instances of excess in chinoiserie.38 In The Lover, a descendant of The Spectator, Addison declared that “China Vessels are Play-things for Women of all Ages,” reducing the national interest in things Chinese to feminine irrationality.39 This “trinketing” of chinoiserie reverberates throughout writing of the eighteenth century, particularly in poems such as John Gay’s The Fan (1713) and Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714) that parody women’s taste for toys and trifles.40 This strain of cultural thought, which relegates foreign ornamental goods to “toys,” and the English taste for them to fancy and folly, gains momentum throughout the eighteenth century. Robert Dodsley’s play The Toy-Shop (1735) captures this sentiment when the owner of the eponymous shop assures us that “[t]hanks to the whimsical Extravagance and Folly of Mankind, I believe from the childish Toys and gilded Baubles I shall pick up a comfortable Maintenance. For, really as it is a trifling Age, so nothing but Trifles are valued in it.”41 The “natives” of Captain Singleton thus parody English consumption, and their bizarre and primitive fashion sense, by which they “adorn’d [themselves] with little Chains, Shells, Bits of Brass” and, eventually, the figurative charms they buy from the artificer, caricatures the English consumer bedecked in what Robert W. Jones has called “fripperies, fancies, and all manner of Chinese trash.”42 In A Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith perceived that the English, still “lovers of toys,” continued to cut just such ridiculous figures: How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? . . . All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniencies. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number. They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles, in weight and sometimes in value not inferior to an ordinary Jew’s-box, some of which may sometimes be of some little use, but all of which might at all times

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be very well spared, and of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden.43

Smith’s reference to the “Jew’s-box,” the store of cheap goods carried by a street peddler, invokes the long-standing stereotype of the Jewish moneyhoarder, a figure associated with unnatural forms of value. Here, the hoard is worthless, an impotent treasure of useless objects, but it is also frighteningly potent in its uselessness, or potently useless, not unlike Crusoe’s drawer of tarnished coins. Embodying Locke’s fears, the English are a people buried in figures—they are rich in artifice while poor in substance.

SPECTRAL TRAFFIC

In this context, we can see how Captain Singleton articulates an English fantasy of gaining the upper hand in the global trade of decorative objects, which, at least with regard to trinkets, England finally did in the mid-eighteenth century with the establishment of factories in Birmingham and Sheffield that specialized in cheap, fashionable metal-work. Defoe’s choice of metal trinkets as the sailors’ most profitable commodity is, in this respect, allusively rich, another one of the novel’s ingenious sleights of hand in coordinating the traffic of meaning between the material and fictional worlds. Precious metalwork was one material for which the English developed an international reputation in this period; silver- and goldsmiths generated valuable decorative objects that were the basis of a flourishing, domestically produced chinoiserie at a time when porcelain and lacquerwork were still primarily imported from the East. Berg points out that “[c]onsumer goods in metals . . . became, over the course of the eighteenth century, characteristic British products . . . London toy and goldsmith shops were tourist attractions for Europe’s elites, and the city was also a major producer of toys and decorative metalwares”; London’s luxury shopping centers contained “goldsmiths’ and jewelers’ shops alongside the toy shops and china shops.”44 There is evidence that the early models of these famous eighteenth-century British trinkets were, in fact, Chinese silverwork. One art historian notes that “the British had ample opportunity to obtain silverware of Chinese manufacture through their factory at Amoy between 1678 and 1680; at stations such as Surat, Mantam, Batavia, and Tonquin where they had contact with trading junks arriving regularly from China; from their factory at Chusan between 1700 and 1702, and, later, at Canton itself.”45 In addition, Carl Christian Dauterman has demonstrated that some of the earliest examples of chinoiserie in England—as well as some of the earliest examples of English-manufactured chinoiserie—were silver

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Figure 3.1 Silver sugar box with flat-chased chinoiserie design, made in London 1683–84. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

goods. These were platters, urns, and other objects decorated superficially with “Chinese” designs by a method called “flat-chasing,” which “requires a high degree of draughtsmanship. It was apparently a specialist occupation.” Given this evidence, Dauterman concludes, “we can only surmise that there might have been a London shop [in the period 1670–1690] specializing in the chasing of chinoiserie designs.”46 Although the popularity of silver chinoiserie was limited to the Restoration era,47 it marks a significant moment of transition in which the English mastered the production of certain “Chinese” goods (see figure 3.1). While silver as specie evokes China’s financial successes (and Europe’s financial expenses), silver as ornament alludes to one of England’s early achievements in the production of things Chinese. Captain Singleton’s fantasy of the Englishmen’s “monstrously” profitable trade in Africa thus turns metonymically as well as narratively on the figure of the trinket. If ornamental commodities can be represented as a whole by the metal trinket, then England can stand in for China as the dominant power in the global trade of luxury goods. The coherence of this fantasy wavers, however, as soon as the disavowed figure of China that enables it re-enters the narrative frame. In the second half of Captain Singleton, Defoe reinforces the tale of English commercial ingenuity by having Singleton meet his doppelganger—the Chinese merchant—and recognize him as a kindred spirit. Singleton has, at this point, made a career of pirating, which has proven even more monstrously profitable than trading trinkets. As he heads toward China, following the concentration of seaborne wealth, he overtakes a junk that had three Chinese Merchants in her, and they told us that they were going to meet a large Vessel of their Country, which came from Tonquin, and lay in a

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River in Formosa whose Name I forget, and they were going to the Philippine Islands, with Silks, Muslins, Callicoes, and such Goods as are the Product of China, and some Gold; that their Business was to sell their Cargo, and buy Spices and European goods. (242)

Singleton observes that “[t]his suited very well with our Purpose” (243). Recognizing his singularity of interest with these merchants, Singleton “resolved now that we would leave off being Pyrates, and turn Merchants,” sending his partner William to trade on friendly terms with the large Chinese vessel (243). Upon his return, William gave us an Account, how civilly he had been used, how they had treated him with all imaginable Frankness and Openness, that they had not only given him the full Value of his Spices and other Goods which he carry’d, in Gold, by good Weight, but had loaded the Vessel again with such Goods as he knew we were willing to trade for . . . In short, we traded upon the high Seas with these men, and indeed we made a very good Market, and yet sold Thieves’ Pennyworths too . . . except a Parcel of Tea, and twelve Bales of fine China wrought Silks, we took nothing in Exchange for our Goods but Gold. (244–45)

Singleton finds in the Chinese trader someone with whom he can finally “commerce” on equal and mutually beneficial terms. Even with the English folding “thieves’ pennyworths” into the trade, “we sent them away exceedingly well satisfy’d” (246). Both the “civility” of the exchange and the profit incurred on both sides testify to the commercial kinship at work here. The Chinese are, to borrow Brathwaite’s terms, “fit companions” for the English “to converse and commerce with.” But this is a conspicuously idealistic vision of English-Chinese trade relations that runs aground the common knowledge that the English were not equal partners in trade with China at the turn of the eighteenth century. It is consistent with what Cynthia Klekar has called “the Eurocentric ideology of mutually beneficial trade [that] was promoted by a fantasy of equal exchange that sutured over relations of subjection and domination” between England and the Far East.48 Defoe may have held the realities of the English China trade at bay for the duration of Captain Singleton, but they erupt into his other texts, compelling a new array of fictional “tricks,” or representations, to maintain the fantasy of English commercial success. As David Porter, Robert Markley, and others have shown, the perpetual frustration of English attempts to establish mutually beneficial trading terms with the Chinese finds expression in the sinophobic tracts of The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), which represents the China Seas as a distinctly hostile environment to the English merchant.49 Markley argues that the Farther

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Adventures chooses “to downplay the difficulty of transcultural negotiations, and to idealize the [English] merchant as a free agent in a hostile world,” a strategy that requires the novel to “gloss over” the deep disparity between its “fervid, nearly hysterical assertions of European—specifically British and Protestant—superiority to Asian cultures” and the well-documented Chinese dominance of European markets for luxury goods.50 The Farther Adventures’s narrative of Chinese primitivism and inferiority is just as “artificial” as Singleton’s narrative of Chinese amity; the experience of both of Defoe’s protagonists can take place, in Markley’s words, “only in a virtual realm where fictional pronouncements . . . take precedence over material reality” (196).

CONTRIVANCE, COMMERCE, AND WIT

Defoe’s novels behave, in this sense, like the trinket itself, generating and circulating meaning and value by disavowing the material world in favor of an imaginary, figurative one. If, as Marc Shell has argued, “a formal money of the mind informs all discourse,”51 the preferred currency of prose fiction is the trinket—a generative trick that rewards those who “like to be deceived.” This is not to conclude, however, that fiction is merely false in contrast to other forms of discourse that are true. Rather, it is to suggest that fictions like Defoe’s communicate by displacing value, or “truth,” from fixed material forms to the mutability or translatability of those forms in imaginative commerce. In this sense, Defoe’s trinkets are of a kind with contemporaneous experiments such as Augustan wit, which located value and meaning in the ingenuity of “expression”—the coining, or perhaps trinketing, of ideas in language—and Addison’s theories of the pleasures of the imagination, which founded the very possibility of good taste on the mind’s capacity for “agreeable Visions of Things that are either Absent or Fictitious.”52 These early eighteenth-century cultural movements inscribe a conceptual space in which the trinket can be understood as a form of value whose circulation actually reinvents and improves the culture. While Captain Singleton’s Madagascar may seem a far cry from the London coffeehouse, the work of Defoe’s artificer—who took common coins and “turned them into so many Devices, of his own Head, that it is hardly to be exprest”—is remarkably resonant with Alexander Pope’s famous formulation of wit in An Essay on Criticism (1711). While some poets With Gold and Jewels cover ev’ry Part, And hide with Ornaments their Want of Art,

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True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.53

Pope was an icon of a new English culture and identity produced by a traffic in witticisms, whose clever coinages and quotable devices, when well-crafted, constituted a new kind of cultural currency. Here, the enemies of true value—or truth value—are not trinkets but “Gold and Jewels,” gaudy objects of intrinsic value that require no aesthetic labor, no turning or troping, to make them worthwhile. In opposition to these vulgar ornaments, “Art” and “True Wit” take common knowledge and reinvent it—dress it “to Advantage”—so that it delights the imagination and is thus propelled back into intellectual circulation. In this light, Defoe’s artificer appears less a “trifling Mountebank” than an Augustan hero, who, in recognizing the value of a good trope, thrives in a new market by his wit. Defoe’s mastery of the fictional art of trinketing thus paves the way for a more persuasive renegotiation of the dynamics of English-Chinese trade than that offered by his narrative fantasies. As long as China continued to dictate the global trade in luxury goods, England could only imagine itself an equal or superior trade partner if it could equate the silver specie it expended with the Chinese decorative goods—in Berg’s words, “imitative” goods—it received in exchange. This equation relies upon the work of the trinket to siphon value away from substance and into appearances, out of intrinsic forms and into fantastic ones. While Locke might argue that this logic only leads to self-deception—in owning one’s trinket, one tricks oneself—it seems clear that the English willingness, even enthusiasm, to invest value in imaginary things underwrote its historic pursuit of commercial excellence.

4 “Nature to Advantage Drest” The Poetry of Subjectivity I find that you have a desire to learn Jappan, as you call it, and I approve it; and so I shall of any thing that is good and virtuous, therefore learn in God’s name all Good Things, and I will willingly be at the charge so farr as I am able—though they come from Japan and from never so farr and looke of an Indian hue and colour, for I admire all accomplishments that will render you considerable and Lovely in the sight of God and man . . . . —Letter from Edmund Verney to his daughter (1689)1

Perhaps the greatest artificer in all of Defoe’s fiction is Roxana, who turns a trick of enormous profit when she dons “the Habit of a Turkish Princess” initially purchased as “a Curiosity”: “the Robe was a fine Persian, or India Damask; the Ground white, and the Flowers blue and gold . . . to the Vest, was a Girdle five or six Inches wide, after the Turkish Mode; and on both Ends where it join’d, or hook’d, was set Diamond for eight Inches either way, only they were not true Diamonds; but no-body knew that but myself.”2 When she dances in the dress for an audience of gentlemen, she becomes the celebrated Roxana: an animated chinoiserie object who channels fantasy into real life.3 “Being perfectly new,” she says of her dance, which is actually French in origin, “it pleas’d the Company exceedingly, and they all thought it had been Turkish; nay, one Gentleman had the Folly to expose himself so much, as to say, and I think swore too, that he had seen it danc’d at Constantinople; which was ridiculous enough” (175–76). Roxana is an example of how the work Defoe explicates in Captain Singleton—namely, the organization of imaginary forms into material currency with real-world value—was frequently performed by women. As in Roxana, female acts of “artificing” or “trinketing” were frequently reflexive; women naturalized

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exotic things, mobilizing their imaginary import as part of English culture, by incorporating them into their own self-presentation. As Edmund Verney’s letter to his daughter illustrates, a woman’s ability to create displays of chinoiserie was, by the last decades of the seventeenth century, indicative of her own personal “accomplishment,” a kind of individual maturity measured aesthetically in terms of her own “lovel[iness] in the sight of God and man.” This chapter examines some of the particular syntactical relationships that bound the eighteenth-century Englishwoman to the Chinese object in cultural sites such as the dressing room and the tea table, as well as in the textual space of poetry. These areas of aesthetic production concurrently integrated material objects into the life of the female subject— indeed, I argue, into her very subjectivity. By focusing on the contemporaneous practices of decoration in the Chinese style and the versification of chinoiserie’s aesthetic and social effects, I demonstrate how material culture and poetry collude to produce—and, later, to dismantle—a particular kind of female subject defined by her symbiotic relationship to decorative objects. As I mentioned in chapter 2, recent scholarship on the role of material culture in the development of the eighteenth-century subject, and of the female subject in particular, has focused on chinoiserie’s association with the negative aspects of consumer behavior, illuminating instances in which the Chinese object marks the moment when consumption becomes incompatible with an enlightened, rational English subjectivity.4 These accounts pose female consumers and the Chinese goods they coveted in opposition to the emergent bourgeois subject who embodied taste and self-discipline.5 As I suggested earlier, although there was certainly a persistent argument against the Chinese taste that characterized chinoiserie in just such negative terms, dwelling exclusively on these portraits of wayward or corrupt desire insufficiently explains the centrality of chinaware in eighteenth-century English culture, especially the multiple instances in which such goods as tea and porcelain appealed to the individual of taste. Verney’s admiration for the craft of japanning derives from a mainstream endorsement of chinoiserie as a modern English aesthetic, a movement that includes such prominent voices as Sir William Temple’s promotion of the Chinese style in gardening and John Evelyn’s enthusiastic approval of his friends’ collections of porcelain and japanned screens.6 In his study of the influence of Chinese aesthetics in English theories of landscape in the early eighteenth century, Yu Liu offers compelling evidence that “Chinese” styles played a fundamental part in the thinking of Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury; “in addition to playing a key inspirational part in the radical transformation of the English garden,” he writes, “the Chinese idea of beauty without order can be seen as having participated

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noticeably though inadvertently in the aesthetic revolution of Kant and the formation of European modernity.”7 By the mid-eighteenth century, English manufacture was able to compete with Chinese export goods in the thriving domestic chinoiserie market. The success of Chippendale “Chinese” furniture and Wedgwood china indicate the thorough assimilation of imported products and styles into English culture by the end of the eighteenth century, suggesting a more complex and lasting relationship between English subjects and their chinaware than a transient “craze.” In addition, categorically opposing Chinese things to the so-called proper objects of English taste assumes, wrongly, that objects associated with luxury—expensive ornaments, imported tableware, and richly decorated furniture—were always considered in excess of the modern standard of self-presentation.8 A closer look at the ways in which English women acquired, used, fashioned, and displayed decorative objects, as portrayed in writing of the period, reveals, more often than not, chinaware to be congenial to the emergent concept of taste well into the eighteenth century. Even the most vehement critiques of women’s attachments to chinaware were part of an ongoing and multifaceted effort to establish new sets of rules and recognizable social codes in a world populated by what Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace calls “consuming subjects.” By linking the formal concerns of early eighteenth-century verse with those of the emergent Chinese taste, I show how those “consuming subjects” were, ideally, not only consumers but also the proprietors of a new category of objects, aesthetic preferences, and practices of acquisition, arrangement, and display situated at the crossroads of female domestic work and male connoisseurship. When effectively deployed, England’s Chinese things signified a specific principle of aesthetic order: the particularly English ability to create what Alexander Pope called “Order in Variety”9—a heterogeneous unity—out of the diversity of objects and images entering the nation on the tides of global trade. While both men and women were invested and engaged in the trends of chinoiserie, a particular strain of instructive writing aimed to integrate these aesthetic concerns and practices into a preexistent literature of women’s domestic management. Poetry also concerned itself with women’s particular role in “beautifying” English life in a mercantile age, alternately naturalizing and denaturalizing a range of aesthetic practices assigned to women, from japanning to face-painting to tea-serving. The figure of the woman as both artist and artwork—whether contested or celebrated as such—is best understood as a poetic construction embodying Pope’s formulation of “True Wit” as “Nature to Advantage drest.”10 Observing the extent to which material practices of beautification followed a poetic logic enables us to see how the relationship between women and chinoiserie fluctuates in verse experiments to reconcile the material and the

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ideal through aesthetic form. The contrasting visions of women and chinoiserie in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and Swift’s dressing-room poems tell us much more than whether the English thought of things Chinese in positive or negative terms; they demonstrate that the reconfiguration of women’s relation to chinaware in the early eighteenth century constituted no less than a rewriting of the nature of human subjectivity.

THE ARTS OF BEAUTIFICATION

For most of the seventeenth century, domestic manuals for women emphasized three primary categories of household management: food preservation, everyday medicine, and the preparing and serving of meals. These categories are explicit in the title of The Ladies Cabinet Opened: Wherein is found hidden severall Experiments in Preserving and Conserving, Physicke, and Surgery, Cookery and Huswifery (1639). They were repeated in the structure of the later Ladies Cabinet Enlarged and Opened (1655), attributed to Lord Ruthven, which was divided into three sections: “I. Preserving, Conserving, Candying, &c.”; “II. Physick and Chirurgery”; and “III. Cookery and Houswifery.” By the 1670s, however, a proliferation of similar handbooks reveal emergent trends in the domestic arts. In 1675, Hannah Woolley, author of The Ladies Directory (1662) and The Cook’s Guide (1664), published the third edition of The Queen-like Closet, or Rich Cabinet: Stored with all manner of Rare Receipts for Preserving, Candying and Cookery, which included “A Supplement, presented to all Ingenious Ladies and Gentlewomen,” or, “A Little of Everything.” Among further recipes for syrups, jellies, and medicinal concoctions, the supplement offers formulas for perfumes and hand-washes, directions for washing various types of laces and silk stockings, instructions for upholstering chairs and embroidering clothing, and tips for applying one’s imagination in the “adorning of Closets with several pretty Fancies” and “adorn[ing] a Room with Prints” so as to “make fine stories, which will be very delightful and commendable.”11 The arts of decoration have begun to enter the spectrum of domestic work, mixed indiscriminately with more traditional household skills. Woolley consolidates these new “ingenious” arts into a distinct category of domestic practice in the title and structure of her next publication, The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery (1675). The new category of “Beautifying” is glossed in the book’s preface as a set of recipes for “Rare Beautifying Waters, Oyls, Oyntments, and Powders, for Adornment of the Face and Body, and to cleanse it from all Deformities that may render Persons Unlovely.” The recipes contained in

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this section focus primarily, though not exclusively, on the hair, face, and hands—those parts of the female body on everyday display. Women are directed, for example, in how “to make the face fair,” “to beautifie the face,” “to clear the Skin and make it white,” and “to smooth the Skin” in instructions that borrow, on the one hand, from the language of healing wounds and curing sickness, and on the other from the arts of cleansing and preserving material things such as lace and linens—items that, like a woman’s skin, require maintenance in order to remain clear and white.12 John Shirley’s The Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities, or The Ingenious Gentlewoman and Servant-Maids Delightfull Companion (1687) similarly offers a section on cosmetic treatments. The chapter titled, “Curiosities, rare and new, for the Beautifying and adorning the Female Sex, with other Matters of Moment”— which includes tips “to make a young Face exceeding Beautifull, and an old Face very Tollerable,” a recipe for “an Excellent Oyntment to Beautifie the Hands and Face, and take away any Deformity,” and a method “to make a Rough Skin smooth, and Wrinkles disappear”—is juxtaposed with a section on “Lawndring” that instructs the reader in how to “restore Linnen that is scorched by hanging . . . too near the fire,” “to make Cloaths that have been abused in Washing, Yellow or Mildewed . . . white and fair,” and “to recover Lawn, Tiffany, Musling, or Lace, when they are faded.”13 Both of these manuals emphasize the specific set of skills aimed toward self-beautification, and also categorize cosmetic treatments of the female body alongside the aesthetic maintenance of textiles used for clothing and household decoration. Taken together, “cleansing” and “beautification” constitute a new kind of feminized household labor mobilized toward the production and maintenance of beautiful surfaces in and around the home that please the senses and resist the weathering effects of time. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the arts of beautification expanded beyond cosmetics to include an array of household aesthetic improvements along the lines of Woolley’s advice to “adorn” rooms with decorative “fancies.” These artisinal skills were frequently aimed at imitating the fashionable furniture and ornaments borne into London by the East India Company’s booming trade in chinoiserie. Situated at the crossroads of artistic production, traditionally an area of male expertise, and domestic improvement, a growing sphere of female skill, this emergent category of domestic aesthetics was addressed equally to both sexes in the early eighteenth century. The manual Art’s Master-piece, for example, is specifically subtitled A Companion for the Ingenius of either Sex (1697). The table of contents promises instruction in “the newest Experiment in Japaning, to imitate the Indian way”; how to “make Artificial Tortoiseshell, to Dye or Stain Ivory, Horn, Bone, Bristles, Feathers, and sundry sorts of Woods for Cabinets”; solving “the Mystery of Dying Silks, Stuffs, Woollen and Linnen

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Cloth”; mastering “the Art of Perfuming and Beautifying”; and how to “make London Powder-Ink, other Powder Inks, and the shining Japan Ink.” Female cosmetic arts are included in this pantheon of “ingenious” expertise, in a section titled, “Cosmeticks, or Curious Receipts for Beautifying the Face, Hands, or any Part of the Body.”14 The categorical merging of women’s cosmetics and a wider array of aesthetic faculties serves, at this point, to urge women’s participation in the household arts rather than to assign those arts to women exclusively. John Stalker and George Parker, publishers of the first manual in English devoted to the art of japanning, addressed their Treatise of Japaning and Varnishing (1688) to a pointedly gender-nonspecific “you,” suggesting in the book’s preface that japanned furniture speaks equally to the “amorous Nymph” and the “Narcissus” admiring the surfaces of their beautiful home.15 Not until later in the eighteenth century do japanning and other surface-oriented decorative arts appear in literature as an exclusively female interest, in such publications as The Art of Japanning, Varnishing, Pollishing, and Gilding . . . by Mrs. Artlove (1730), The Lady’s Delight, or Accomplish’d Female Instructor (around 1740), Robert Sayer’s The Ladies Amusement; or, Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy (1762), and Hannah Robertson’s The Young Ladies School of Arts (1766).16 At this brief moment, in which the arts of beautification were expanding but not yet firmly partitioned into men’s and women’s skills, what was the status of women’s artistic work? Ann Birmingham has shown how, by the end of the eighteenth century, women’s “accomplishments” placed them in an economy of connoisseurship as commodified objects of male appreciation and desire. Tita Chico has identified a similar hierarchy of power, distributed across a gendered rivalry of artistic skill, in Pope’s poetry of the early eighteenth century.17 The example of japanning, however, as an emergent art associated with commerce and connoisseurship, practical skill and aesthetic judgment, reveals women’s participation in certain aesthetic processes valued above and beyond mere feminine improvements. The preface to Stalker and Parker’s Treatise of Japaning draws attention to this fine distinction: the authors dismiss women obsessed with the art of face-painting as “Jezebels, who prefer Art to Nature, and a sordid Fucus to a native complexion,” presumably as foils to the practitioners of more admirable forms of “painting,” or surface decoration, including japanning. Unlike the “sordid Fucus” of a slapdash makeup job, skillful painting is “an unchangeable and universal language” that “can decipher those mystical characters of our Faces, which carry in them the Motto’s of our Souls, whereby our very Natures are made legible” (Preface, n.p.). Ornament here takes on polar identities. Done poorly, it obscures nature; executed skillfully, it translates nature, rendering it visible and comprehensible.

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It is perhaps most accurate to say that good painting expresses nature, in the sense coined by Pope in An Essay on Criticism (1711): True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest. (297–98)

Like the art of dressing, the artisinal skills of painting, japanning, varnishing, and gilding potentially give aesthetic form to nature. While there are countless examples of bad painting or sloppy dress that present ruinous, unnatural effects, there is also an ideal form of such arts that communicates nature better than nature could on its own. Success in the art of japanning depends precisely on cultivating the sense of judgment necessary to distinguish natural from unnatural aesthetic effects. The authors of the Treatise reproach the makers of “Bantam-work,” motley pieces of furniture cobbled together from dismantled screens, for “never consider[ing] the situation of their figures; so that in these things so torn and hacked to joint a new fancie, you may observe the finest hodgpodg and medly of Men and Trees turned topsie turvie” (37). Bantam-workers are guilty of “plac[ing figures] in such order by their ignorance, as if they were angling for Dolphins in a Wood, or pursuing the Stag, and chasing the Boar in the middle of the Ocean”; in short, they have “deprived everything of its due site and position” (38). “Such irregular pieces as these,” the authors conclude, “can never certainly be acceptable, unless persons have an equal esteem for uglie, ill-contrived works, because rarities in their kind, as for the greatest performances of beauty and proportion” (38). The dismissal of Bantam-work gestures toward a mode of decorating in the Chinese taste committed to “beauty and proportion” over the “topsie turvey” effect we tend to associate with chinoiserie. In order to guide its reader away from unnatural, irregular chinoiserie effects, the Treatise encourages tasteful selection and arrangement of the multiple “Chinese” and “Indian” prints included in the book: Suppose then you have a large piece of work, as a Table, or Cabinet; take one of the Prints which chiefly complies with your humour, insert others also which may be most agreeable, yet give variety too: borrow a part from one, a figure from another, birds flying or standing from a third; this you may practice until your Cabinet be sufficiently charged: if after all this any thing be wanting, your judgment must order, beautifie, and correct. (40)

The move from following one’s “humour” in the initial stages of the process to finishing the piece through the exercise of “judgment” to “order, beautifie, and correct” indicates an aesthetic effect generated by a system of mental

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preferences and calibrations. The design of japanned furniture is heterogeneous but ordered, varied but beautiful. To emphasize this point, the Treatise pairs certain patterns with specific objects to demonstrate their appropriate application, offering the reader equal parts limitation and freedom with instructive headings such as, “For Drawers for Cabbinets to be Placed according to your Fancy” (plate 18; see figures 4.1–4.4). In the words of the authors, japanning allows one to “alter and correct, take out a piece from one, add a fragment to the next, and make an entire garment compleat in all its parts, though tis wrought out of never so many disagreeing Patterns” (41). Japan-work thus anticipates Pope’s vision of Great Britain itself in the image of Windsor Forest: Not Chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d, But as the World, harmoniously confus’d: Where Order in Variety we see, And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree. (Windsor-Forest 13–16)

Figures 4.1 and 4.2 Plates 9 and 2 from Stalker and Parker, A Treatise of Japaning and Varnishing (1688). © The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. T 3.14 Jur, Plates 9 and 2. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Plate 2 (right) illustrates how the reader should select parts of images like that on plate 9 (left) and combine them by applying them to specific material objects.

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Figure 4.3 Plate 4 from Stalker and Parker, A Treatise of Japaning and Varnishing (1688). © The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. T 3.14 Jur, Plate 4. Image published with permission of ProQuest.

For Pope, the power of “agreement” is supplied by nature—understood as a transcendent order of things—and its linguistic manifestation, poetry, which “confuses” its various materials in syntactical harmony. In the microcosm of the household, japanned expressions of the natural order of things are held together by the “humour” and “judgment” of the artist. The “house

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Figure 4.4 Plate 18 from Stalker and Parker, A Treatise of Japaning and Varnishing (1688). © The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. T 3.14 Jur, Plate 18. Image published with permission of ProQuest. These images are headed, “For Drawers for Cabbinets to be Placed according to your Fancy.”

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beautiful” of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was, “as the World, harmoniously confus’d,” testifying to the aesthetic skills and sensibilities of the household’s occupants, both male and female.

THE ORDER OF THINGS IN THE RAPE OF THE LOCK

The arts of beautification in the early eighteenth century reveal the extent to which dominant literary principles of the age, particularly the “harmonious confusion” of the perfect verse, expanded beyond the page to organize aspects of everyday life. Cosmetic and decorative work at this moment did not simply mirror the work of poetry; they were coextensive with it. In Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, Paul Fussell writes that poetic meter, by distinguishing rhythmic from ordinary statement, objectifies that statement and impels it toward a significant formality and even ritualism. This ritual “frame” in which meter encloses is like the artificial border of a painting: like a picture frame, meter reminds the apprehender unremittingly that he is not experiencing the real object of the “imitation” (in the Aristotelian sense) but is experiencing instead that object transmuted into symbolic form.18

The arts of domestic beautification similarly turned the walls of each room in the house into a kind of frame that invited the viewer to see household objects not merely as such, but as a display of good taste and judgment. Chinoiserie captured the poetic quality of early eighteenth-century ornamental signification in the home; the way it deliberately emphasized its own stylized organization of raw materials infused them with the quality of “having been ordered.” English chinaware, integrated into a decorative scheme, was precisely an “object transmuted into symbolic form” through its importation into an aesthetic syntax of objects. It thus makes sense that poets turned their attention to the kinds of work being performed in the name of beauty in the English home: poetry about beautification was also poetry about poetry. Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714) is a paradigmatic example of early eighteenth-century poetry that focused on the materials of the lady’s dressing room in order to test both the possibilities and the limitations of an aesthetic of harmonious confusion. James Bunn has called this principle an “aesthetic of British mercantilism” in order to explicate the style’s imbrication with Britain’s China trade.19 In moving from the outside world to the inner life of the dressing room, the array of objects culled from international trade entered an English cultural order. The dressing room was thus a site where imported

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objects were impelled, by aesthetic manipulation, toward a “significant formality.” In poems like The Rape of the Lock that dramatize the success of such processes, the work of transmuting object into symbol is represented as a collaborative effort between the poet and the well-dressed woman.20 A dramatic site of collection, arrangement, preparation, and transformation, the dressing room is a liminal space for things in transition between the raw materials of the market and the “framed” objects of the domicile. The female figure who inhabits this space is responsible for creating, even embodying, what Susan Stewart describes as a “tableau,” an arrangement of objects that turns things into cultural signifiers.21 Even while satirizing its subject matter, the poem formalizes the dressing room as a site of cultural activity where everyday objects acquire value from the woman who collects and arranges them. It establishes a real relationship between the female subject and the furniture with which she is identified, one that reflects the poet’s own relationship to the poem’s language. While no poem can be said to be more or less concerned than any other with form per se, I would argue that Pope’s model heroic couplets produce poems uniquely designed to formalize form itself as a verse effect. The heroic couplet, Fussell writes, seems both by its nature and its historical associations to imply something special about the materials enclosed in it. It seems to imply a distinct isolation of those materials from related things, a vigorous enclosure of them into a compact and momentarily self-sufficient little world of circumscribed sense and meaning. To construct a closed couplet is to draw a boundary line, to set something off as special and perhaps a trifle fragile.22

The “fragility” of the couplet, like that of a delicate ornament or of feminine beauty, derives from its dependence upon rigid boundaries not only for its quality but for its very existence. Once those boundaries are compromised—a rhyme broken, a vase shattered, a woman’s skin wrinkled with age—beauty evaporates, leaving only a mass of linguistic, inanimate, or organic matter in its place. Each Popeian couplet is a system of order that produces not only meaning but beauty, which the reader experiences as pleasure; Pope’s poetry thus approximates what Foucault calls “the pure experience of order and its modes of being.”23 The Rape of the Lock employs the figure of Belinda to illustrate the serious consequences for the individual of breaching formal boundaries; in doing so, the poem fashions a subjectivity utterly dependent on formal integrity. The material tableau of Belinda’s chamber reflects both her judgment and the social order of the world of the poem as a whole. The poem’s destruction

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of her ornaments and disruption of the polite scene make real the stakes of the precarious order of things for which women were held responsible. The famous list of potential “dire Disaster[s]” establishes that in this poem, and the social order it represents, keeping a woman’s virtue intact is as difficult as keeping her dress in place: Whether the Nymph shall break Diana’s Law, Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw, Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade, Forget her Pray’rs, or miss a Masquerade, Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball; Or whether Heav’n has doom’d that Shock must fall. (2:105–10)

Leveling the difference between Belinda’s “Honour” and her “Brocade,” her “Pray’rs” and a “Masquerade,” the couplets equate the serious and the frivolous aspects of her everyday life. As generations of Pope’s readers have noted, these zeugmata work both ways: while they miniaturize serious matters as frivolities, they also make trivial objects the measure of serious social violations. Belinda is a creature made of material things, a metonymically constructed subject composed in couplets. The beautiful and orderly arrangement of her ornaments is identical to the integrity of her person. The elegance with which the poem assembles Belinda out of the objects in her dressing room likens the poet to Belinda herself. Canto I reveals Belinda performing a kind of poetic work, delicately managing, with the help of her sylphs, all the components of dress and decor required for the social rituals that constitute her world as well as her self. When Belinda sits at her dressing table to prepare for a public appearance, her “Cosmetic Pow’rs” (1:124) are displayed in an array of “Unnumber’d Treasures,” the “various Off ’rings of the World” (1:129, 130). Like a poet inspired by the Muse, Belinda is assisted by a disembodied “Sylph” who “nicely culls with curious Toil, / And decks the Goddess with the glitt’ring Spoil” (1:131–32). By displacing the actual effort of dressing Belinda onto supernatural agents, the poem simultaneously represents the real work that takes place in the dressing room and mystifies that work—the “labours” wrongly attributed to the maid (1:148)—so that the culminating effect cannot be reduced to the mere product of mundane efforts or a sum of material parts. A labor that is not one, the dressing of Belinda is guided by the same laws of natural order and beauty promoted by the Treatise of Japaning: the principles of discriminating selection, combination, and placing everything in its “due site and position.” As the materials of the toilette are measured out, broken down into acceptable portions, properly combined, and put in their proper “site and position” on her body, Belinda herself is pulled together as a “performance

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of beauty and proportion.”24 The well-born woman’s appearance is not a façade but an aesthetic expression of who she is. She represents the power of the world’s beautiful objects to express nature. An analog to the poet’s own “Wit,” Belinda emerges from the dressing room an example of “Nature to Advantage drest,” turning things into expressions of meaning. She is also the embodiment of “Order in Variety,” animating the very principle of order. Like the poem, Belinda herself is a mode of order. Once it has introduced Belinda as a subject made from the outside in through the aesthetic arrangement of objects, the poem uses her to test the limits of such “Cosmetic Pow’rs” in the social world. To what extent, the poem asks, is an objectified woman still a viable subject? As Belinda leaves her dressing room and enters the public arena, her status becomes ambiguous, even imperiled. To illustrate this point, the poem dramatizes the consequences of Belinda’s self-performance at a public gathering over coffee in Queen Anne’s court: For lo! The Board with Cups and Spoons is crown’d, The Berries crackle, and the Mill turns round; On shining Altars of Japan they raise The silver Lamp; the fiery Spirits blaze: From silver Spouts the grateful Liquors glide, While China’s Earth receives the smoking Tyde. (3:105–10)

Like Belinda’s dressing table, the coffee table at court demonstrates the harmonious integration of Eastern commodities into English culture. If this is the case, however, then why does her appearance at the coffee table get Belinda into so much trouble, producing conflict rather than harmony among elite families? The particular hazards of Belinda’s appearance at court are best illustrated by contrasting the poem’s public coffee scene with the English ritual of the tea table more appropriate to the private domain of the lady’s chamber. While coffee and chocolate were more popular in public venues such as London’s coffee-houses, Chinese tea was the beverage of choice in private homes; it is what a woman of Belinda’s rank would most likely have served visitors in her own “apartment” or “closet.” Part of the emergent category of feminine accomplishments, the English tea ritual was an occasion for the woman of status to display her powers of taste, judgment, and self-composition within designated spaces in the home. As at the dressing table, a woman’s success at the tea table depended on her management of Chinese things. As Marcia Pointon emphasizes, “It is hard to overestimate [china’s] importance as a status symbol and as the central focus of a highly evolved series of competitive social rituals [in eighteenth-century

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Britain] . . . Tea-drinking is a paradigmatic case of a cultural phenomenon in which economics and performativity are inextricably bound up with representation and self-presentation.”25 The tea table was the site of semiotic transactions and aesthetic transformations, where woman and chinaware fused in a display of modern taste; as Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace observes, “A woman’s close proximity to china . . . enabled a semiotic process that allowed her to be ‘read’ as a particular kind of surface.”26 The aesthetic effects begun in the dressing room achieve their perfect expression at the tea table, where the porcelain cup becomes an extension of a woman’s white hand, and each animates the other as part of a living tableau. The economy of meaning that joins woman and china in this scenario resembles Pope’s zeugmata: the syntax of tea service, like that of Pope’s lines, yokes woman and object in semantic union. If she performs her part skillfully, the woman presiding at the tea table presents herself as part and parcel of a world of objects subjected to her own powers of judgment—a world over which she has complete control.27 The coffee scene from The Rape of the Lock, in contrast, is set in the public arena, and the coffee ritual engenders a different set of social relationships that are beyond Belinda’s control. She is on treacherous ground, where objects can take on a life independent of a mistress: “The Berries crackle, and the Mill turns round”; “the fiery Spirits blaze”; “the grateful Liquors glide”; “China’s Earth receives the smoking Tyde.” Entering this scene of self-animated objects, Belinda puts her control of the social life of objects at risk. Part of the problem is that the social meaning of public coffee-drinking was, at the time, ambiguous. Though women certainly drank coffee, it was associated with masculine politics and sociality: “Coffee,” writes Pope, “makes the Politician wise, / And see thro’ all things with his half-shut Eyes” (3:117–118).28 Belinda has made a questionable decision in displaying herself at the coffee table, and the precariousness of her situation is evidenced by the nervous attendance of her “trembling” sylphs (3:116). That there is a darker side to consuming foreign substances becomes clear as the coffee “Sen[ds] up in Vapours to the Baron’s Brain / New Stratagems, the radiant Lock to gain” (3:119–20). The emergence of “Vapours” capable of arousing early modern humors and attendant passions suggests that the social order for which Belinda is responsible cannot sustain itself outside the private domain of the home. The poem treats her public display of femininity as something on the order of a violation of masculine space. The Baron takes advantage of her presence there by seizing control of her “radiant Lock” of hair, now an emblem of her “Honour” (3:107). The “rape” is, from this perspective, a consequence of her transgression as well as of his. Pope has already established that every object decorating Belinda’s chamber is equally emblematic of her virtue. As a composite of all her

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belongings—the effect of an elegantly composed collection of feminine desires, inclinations, poses, and objects—Belinda cannot be summed up by any single material item. In a sense, then, the lock is not a metaphor for who Belinda is but just one of many metonymic components of her person. In another sense, however, the lock is distinguished from the rest of Belinda’s ornaments as a natural outgrowth of her body, rather than an acquired object. Like Belinda at the coffee table, the lock sits somewhere between the categories that order the world of subjects and objects, private and public spaces, feminine and masculine relations. And, like its owner, the lock calls attention to itself by seeming to violate an important boundary, making it the ideal focus for the Baron’s attack. Significantly, however, despite the lock’s prominence in the poem’s title, the verses prefer to dramatize the consequences of this violation—the ruinous movement between symbolically demarcated realms—in and through chinaware. Aubrey Williams has elaborated upon this observation, arguing that “a most important pattern of imagery is established by pervasive reference to a wide variety of vessels: vases, bottles, pipkins, pots, and China jars are signal and memorable articles of the poem’s furniture.”29 Belinda herself is described, as she enters the public eye, as a “painted Vessel” still “secure” from the Baron’s destructive advances (2:47). Of all the vessels that surround her, the one most intimately associated with Belinda is the china jar that the poem fastens early on to her chastity and public reputation. This durable connection, fixed as a rhyme, is coined in the famous couplet, “Whether the Nymph shall break Diana’s Law / Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw” (2:105–06) and called upon again when Belinda declares she should have foreseen the danger by observing “the Morning Omens”: “Thrice from my trembling hand the Patch-box fell; / The tott’ring China shook without a Wind” (4:161, 162–63). The precarious integrity of Belinda’s china throughout the poem indicates just how important are the aesthetic choices that objectify her judgment; her honor and her chinaware both totter between fixed and fallen, secure and shattered. Williams notes that Pope’s reliance on the image of the china vessel was current with the seventeenth-century literary trend of substituting china for the traditional image of crystal glass as a metaphoric reflection of the beautiful woman, a trend that continued throughout the eighteenth century.30 The Rape of the Lock complicates the import of this figure by consistently invoking china in conjunction with an assortment of more symbolically trivial feminine objects: brocades, necklaces, husbands, lapdogs, and patch-boxes. The china jar bears a privileged relationship to the identity of its owner because it provides a synecdoche for the vast multiplicity of things that combine harmoniously to objectify the subject. Like the other forms of chinoiserie discussed above, painted porcelain appealed

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precisely for the way it combined a variety of images and patterns into a beautiful whole. Pope draws on this aesthetic principle to turn the china jar into a figurative shorthand for a whole category of expressive objects; each is intrinsically empty of meaning and value, but all combine to make the modern woman. Belinda’s shrieks at the severing of her lock are thus appropriate to “when rich China Vessels, fal’n from high, / In glittring Dust, and painted Fragments lie!” (3:159–60). They respond to the destruction of the entire tableau that expresses Belinda’s feminine subjectivity. The poem’s satiric conclusion emphasizes this twofold figuration of the relationship between the female subject and her chinaware. On the one hand, Belinda is from the beginning composed of a collection of characteristics, including her material possessions. It is impossible to imagine the mock-heroine without the feminine equipage described in such detail; it is the very stuff of the poem. On the other hand, to imagine that Belinda can be encapsulated by any particular material object—that she can be reduced to, say, a lock of hair—is presented as a tragic misunderstanding of the value of female subjectivity.31 Pope’s verse, vigilant in maintaining a world ruled by moderation, demonstrates that while material objects are significant in relation to human subjects, they are, in and of themselves, still only objects. The lock, once severed from Belinda’s head, is no longer implicated in her person; it is a dead signifier, despite its seeming connection to her body. Belinda’s participation in the battle for the lock is instructive, for if women are responsible for bringing objects to life, they are also responsible to monitoring the limitations of that life, making sure it doesn’t slip into the grotesque world of “unnatural” and “irregular” things animated by something other than a woman’s aesthetic judgment.32 In this respect, Belinda fails. Retiring to her chamber in a fit of the vapors, she allows the disorder of her mind to infect the world of objects. The poem parodies her disordered domestic space in the “Cave of Spleen”: Unnumber’d Throngs on ev’ry side are seen, Of Bodies changed to various Forms by Spleen. Here living Teapots stand, one Arm held out, One bent; the Handle this, and that the Spout: A Pipkin there like Homer’s Tripod walks; Here sighs a Jar, and there a Goose-pye talks. (4:47–52)

The transformation of her tea-things into living beasts that go off on their own to mimic her indicates Belinda’s loss of control over what Susan Stewart calls their “secret life.”33 This relinquishing of her power over the world of objects—particularly the objects of the tea table, associated intimately with a woman’s good taste—overturns the rules of sexual distinction and

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discretion. In a world lacking feminine judgment, “pow’rful Fancy” generates such unnatural visions as “Men prov[en] with Child” and pornographic “Maids turn’d Bottels, call[ing] aloud for Corks” (4:53–54). These “Strange Phantoms” (4:40) illustrate just how important the arts of beautification are to upholding a social semiotic order. As mistress of miniatures, a woman like Belinda is responsible for negotiating and maintaining the distinction not only between subject and object, but also between man and woman; moreover, she is charged with keeping relationships between such contraries natural, balanced, harmonious, and inoffensive.34 In the fashionable world of Pope’s poem, aesthetic judgment and social vigilance are one and the same. This is a world in which appearances are everything, where a thing out of place constitutes a personal flaw, a breach in propriety. The poem’s china jar objectifies the consequences of Belinda’s judgment as whole or flawed, elegant or grotesque. In doing so, it also dramatizes the relationship between a woman and her possessions. Even as it mocks Belinda’s social and aesthetic failures, the poem insists on this relationship’s real social and semantic importance. Although The Rape of the Lock does, to some extent, divide the arts of beautification into gendered spheres—the material world placed under women’s purview, poetry under men’s—these two spheres remain closely bound together as part of a universal aesthetic project. The well-dressed woman is ideally an ambassador of poetic order into the world of objects; in the mock-epic that was Pope’s first great commercial success, she is also the representative of material reality in the poem’s world of symbolic form.

SWIFT’S DEFILED CHINA

Following The Rape of the Lock there emerged a body of poetry representing the objects of the dressing room, and chinoiserie in particular, in a very different light. Once lauded as material ideals of beauty, both Chinese objects and the women associated with them increasingly appeared as targets for ridicule, an embarrassment to good taste rather than its embodiment.35 Pope himself offers a memorable instance of disgraced chinaware in The Dunciad (1728), which stages a literal pissing contest between booksellers into a “China-Jordan”; the winner takes home Eliza Haywood, and the runner-up gets the porcelain pissing pot.36 As a judgment on the “Chinese taste,” such satires may be read as part of a growing sinophobic strain in English culture in the mid-eighteenth century. William W. Appleton has documented this trend as a backlash against seventeenth-century Jesuit enthusiasm for Chinese culture.37 More recently, David Porter has shown

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that the Celestial Kingdom’s ability to inspire respect in the average Briton seems to have waned steadily during this period. Hailed in the seventeenth century as paragon of “linguistic legitimacy,” by the mid-eighteenth century China was more popularly associated with an “aesthetics of illegitimacy” that opposed Western rationalism, as well as with an archaic anticommercial stance that threatened British economic prosperity.38 Extending these observations, I wish to focus here on the mutual humiliations met by chinaware and the women who use it—The Dunciad’s porcelain pissing-pot is, after all, the poet’s way of taking down Haywood. This literary backlash against chinoiserie is, in addition to an expression of hostility against once-lauded visions of Cathay, a turn against a certain kind of female figure once considered ideal. The decorated woman’s fall from grace in English poetry marks a crucial moment in the history of the English subject’s relationship to the world of objects. As I have argued above, chinoiserie by the eighteenth century was not only an objectified fantasy of China, but a privileged and celebrated category of material things that participated actively in the poetic arrangement of the self. Writers such as Jonathan Swift, by attacking chinoiserie and the forms of subjectivity it fostered, not only alienated things Chinese from English self-conception but also enforced an absolute separation between the materials of the world and the materials of the self that disrupted the possibilities for agency through decorative and cosmetic work. Swift’s scatological poems focus on the spectacular failure of the processes of improvement signified by things Chinese in The Rape of the Lock, and they associate this failure with the insistent chaos of the modern city— chaos echoed in the very nature of the city’s denizens. With a satirist’s eye toward disrupting received meanings, Swift violently explodes the fusion of chinoiserie and ideal beauty achieved by Restoration practices of beautification. Robert Markley has argued that Swift was acutely aware of his culture’s obsession with the Far East and tapped into it to make his satire potent; Gulliver’s Travels, for example, deliberately places his protagonist in Japan to engage “the complexities of English abjection in the far western reaches of the Pacific.”39 In his dressing-room poems, Swift illuminates a similar level of abjection experienced by the English subject in the deep interior spaces of domestic life. These poems appropriate chinaware along with the rituals of the dressing and tea tables to reverse the mutually enhancing relationship between women and china evident in Pope’s poem. For Swift, woman and china are mutually degrading. His so-called excremental vision shows women and Chinese things combining in a grotesque synthesis, whereby subject and object dissolve rather than complete one another. Instead of counteracting the forces of social mixing, the female figures of Swift’s verse embody the principle of irregular and unnatural combination. These poems

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transform the notion of “Nature to Advantage drest” into a poor attempt to mask the disgusting realities of organic nature. To reveal the discrepancy between external appearance and internal reality, between the ideal and the visceral, Swift aims his satire at the rooms of the home where women practice cosmetic deception. “The Progress of Beauty” (1728) takes us into the dressing room to display the “Two brightest, brittlest, earthly Things, / A Lady’s Face, and China-ware.”40 Swift calls upon this familiar trope of female beauty only to desecrate it. As an object, the woman in his poem is never a finished product, because each night she dissolves into disorder. Her efforts to improve her appearance make her even more repulsive; each day she rises from bed “All reeking in a cloudy Steam; / Crack’d Lips, foul Teeth, and gummy Eyes”; her powders and face paints “form a frightful hideous Face” (14–15, 20). Her cosmetic labors yield only a disgusting synthesis of incompatible categories and heterogeneous parts that cannot make anything like a beautiful, coherent whole. Like “A Description of a City Shower” (1710), “The Progress of Beauty” and Swift’s other dressing-room poems engage what Laura Brown calls “the fable of the city sewer”: “The effect of the sewer’s mixing is to emphasize heterogeneity and diffuseness . . . Both the sewer and the female body, by mingling, mixing, or joining, generate indiscriminacy, level hierarchy, repudiate genealogy, or overturn order.”41 Where Pope saw the dressing room as an antidote to the perilous mixing of public space, Swift’s dressing room rivals the streets as the filthiest space in the city. “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732), for example, transforms the eponymous room from a scene of private elegance into a nauseating spectacle. In stark contrast to Belinda’s toilette, the dressing room from which Swift’s “haughty Celia” emerges is a veritable cesspool. There, the enamored Strephon encounters “a dirty Smock . . . Beneath the Armpits well besmear’d” (11–12); combs “Fill’d up with Dirt so closely fixt, / No Brush cou’d force a Way betwixt; / A Paste of Composition rare, / Sweat, Dandruff, Powder, Lead and Hair” (21–24); and so forth. The baubles and cosmetics on Celia’s dressing table are less the “glitt’ring Spoil” of a goddess than the spoiled garbage of the city streets. Celia treats her face with “Puppy-Water, Beauty’s Help” (31)42 and cosmetics that are virtually indistinguishable from the secretions they are supposed to mask: “Here Gally-pots and Vials plac’t, / Some fill’d with Washes, some with Paste; / Some with Pomatum, Paints and Slops, / And Ointments good for scabby Chops” (33–36). These various “Paste[s],” “Paints,” and “Slops” mix with the dregs of bodily waste in the “filthy Basin” (37) next to the dressing-table, the sewer of Celia’s personal beautifying rituals. While the well-appointed rooms of Pope’s poem were an expression of a woman’s judgment, the filth of Celia’s dressing room is an extension of the

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organic female body. Where good taste improved and beautified the objects it touched in Pope’s poem, in Swift’s the woman’s body defiles everything with which it comes in contact. Her towels are “Begumm’d, besmatter’d, and beslim’d; / With Dirt, and Sweat, and Ear-wax grim’d”; her handkerchiefs “varnish’d o’er with Snuff and Snot”; her stockings “Stain’d with the Moisture of her Toes” (44–52). Swift pits the aesthetic powers of the dressing room against the most extreme version of heterogeneity he can imagine—what Daniel Cottom identifies as the “bowels of Enlightenment,” or the figure of the visceral body. Like the sewer that collected the bodily wastes of the urban population, the body itself, according to Cottom, was often figured in the eighteenth century as an amorphous thing whose insides could overflow the limits of its skin and mix with the world in untoward ways.43 For Swift, neither beautiful objects nor forms of social decorum can stand up to the viscera of the body, whose traces befoul every object in Celia’s dressing room. This in turn produces a visceral response in Strephon—“But O! It turned poor Strephon’s Bowels” (42)—that violently disrupts his own external composure. Swift unleashes the power of human filth not only on Celia and the aesthetic ideal she represents, but against the very form of the poem itself. Poetic wit makes its entrance in the form of a decorative chest, a dreadful reprise of Pope’s “Nature to Advantage drest”: In vain the Workman shew’d his Wit With Rings and Hinges counterfeit To make it seem in this Disguise, A Cabinet to vulgar Eyes. (75–78)

This “vile Machine” (95) is, like Celia herself, a figure of deceit: the “commode,” a cabinet or chest, often japanned, with a false drawer that concealed a chamber pot. Because the smell of its contents infects every aspect of the dressing room, neither Strephon nor the poet is taken in by the piece’s ornamental façade. Woman and cabinet, as a result of their revoltingly intimate proximity, belie each other’s apparent beauty: So, Things which must not be exprest, When plumpt into the reeking Chest, Send up an excremental Smell To taint the Parts from whence they fell; The Pettycoats and Gown perfume, And waft a Stink round ev’ry Room. (109–14)

Where for Pope, wit was “What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest,” Swift associates it with the “counterfeit,” a “Disguise” for an especially

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repellent form of nature that “must not be exprest.” In defiling both Celia and her furniture, the poem effectively pries apart the lamination of aesthetic order on nature accomplished by Pope’s couplet. We discover Celia’s nature inside the cabinet, not on its surface. In Cottom’s words, “the true essence of woman is made to appear as the stinking waste in her chamber pot.”44 Swift’s verse thus reproduces the Popeian coupling of poetry with female beautification, but inverts their joint relationship to what is “natural,” redefining nature itself. “Wit” here conspires with feminine beauty to disguise the filth of nature. This indictment reflects humorously and cannily back on the poem itself, which, like The Rape of the Lock, comprises a series of perfectly rendered heroic couplets. Under Swift’s direction, poetic order manages paradoxically to yield the experience of disorder, exposing the “counterfeit” quality of its own metrical beauty with every nauseating line. Like Celia herself, Swift’s poem is a parody of “Nature to Advantage drest”: shit presented in a lovely container. Beautiful form henceforth implies the invisible presence of its opposite, filth. Chinaware, that durable symbol of the beautiful effects of aesthetic order, suffers particular humiliations as Swift systematically translates experiences of order and pleasure into ones of disorder and disgust. To expose women and their arts, Swift’s poems, like the city sewers, create channels of movement between areas of social life that women themselves are charged with keeping separate. “Strephon and Chloe” (1734) defiles the tea table and its equipage in order to dismantle the ideal of domestic aesthetic order—the belief that private domestic life, like the inner nature of a woman, is as elegant and harmonious as its appearance is beautiful. Initially, Chloe appears the ideal woman, lacking all traces of organic life: No Humours gross, or frowzy Steams, No noisom Whiffs, or sweaty Streams, Before, behind, above, below, Could from her taintless Body flow. (11–14)

After she downs twelve cups of tea, however, nature asserts itself. Chloe “brings a Vessel into Bed: / Fair Utensil, as smooth and white / As Chloe’s Skin, almost as bright” (172–74)—the china vessel in this case is a chamber pot. As Chloe parodies ideal beauty, the urinal overturns the aesthetic standard set by decorative porcelain to become a measure of human degradation. The true nature of both vessel and woman are exposed by their association with bodily fluids: Strephon who heard the fuming Rill As from a mossy Cliff distill;

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Cry’d out, ye Gods, what Sound is this? Can Chloe, heav’nly Chloe ——? (175–78)

Chloe’s transformation from perfect object to leaky body is reflected in the defilement of things Chinese: tea becomes urine and porcelain a receptacle for human waste. Chloe urinating into her “Fair Utensil” exactly inverts the aesthetics of the lady serving tea. As Swift rewrites the delicate steams of the tea table as the “frowzy Steams” of the female body, he exposes and undoes the woman’s performance of femininity, plunging her china into shared disgrace in an image that recalls the prostitute Corinna in Rochester’s “A Ramble in St. James’s Park” (1688): “A passive pot for fools to spend in.”45 Rochester’s poet laments “that such a thing admired by me / Should fall to so much infamy” (89–90). “Strephon and Chloe” describes a similar fall from grace, this time of china itself and the feminine ideal it objectified. Thus by means of the homology between women and china, Chloe herself becomes a “vile Machine”46 containing foul substance within a deceptively beautiful container. In appearance alone a perfectly composed and impermeable whole, she combines artifice and viscera in a way that exposes the contradiction they pose. Together, she and her porcelain pot serve as conduits from the outwardly polite world of the tea table to the city sewer that reduces social distinctions to their lowest common denominator. Both Pope and Swift look to women’s aesthetic work in the home to illustrate the consequences of certain boundary violations. Belinda represents the necessity of feminine artifice in converting foreign goods into signs of English social distinction. She also demonstrates that by leaving the private domain, a woman places herself in the public sphere, where men have rights over property, including her body and its attendant objects. In “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” Swift’s Strephon crosses this threshold in the opposite direction: by leaving the public domain, he abandons a world where surfaces are maintained and their contents are contained. Swift insists even more stringently than Pope on an absolute distinction between the public and the private. In his poems, the private realm—neither the rational interiority of the Enlightenment subject, nor yet the repository of authenticity that determines one’s identity in the nineteenth century—is filled with organic matter that threatens to overflow the social surface of the body. It is on the inside, for Swift, that the social self dissolves and identity collapses. The poetic rearrangement of personal boundaries from Pope to Swift also entails a change in the social life of china. For Pope, dressing-room china is a foreign object that can be assimilated by women into English culture. Chinaware sublimates the mercantile ambitions of a cosmopolitan early modernity into an aesthetic principle that allows the interior qualities of

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taste and judgment to be displayed on the surface, whether of a room or of a woman’s body. In reflecting personal taste, such a surface constitutes the intrinsic value of the individual it mirrors. Swift, in contrast, places surface and depth in decisive opposition. Rather than a central and organizing aspect of taste, china is mere decoration, whose superficiality accentuates its absolute difference from the person adorned. In this respect, however, Swift’s poems do not contradict Pope’s so much as they draw out the more negative connotations of china that Pope limited to the questionable space of the coffee table. With the “Vapours” of coffee, Pope introduces a figure of foreign infiltration capable of transforming the polite subject back into the old humoral body moved by the passions. Swift seizes on this figure, displacing the conflict of the coffee table to the tea table—indeed, to the inner chambers of the household itself. By doing so, he turns the dressing table from a trope of self-improvement into one of self-dissolution. The foreign substances required for cosmetic artistry do not just adorn but also permeate the self, corroding it by breaching its boundaries. This threat to English self-integrity posed by things Chinese reverberates throughout later eighteenth-century writing. David Porter has shown how, midway through the century, Jonas Hanway made just such an argument about the corruptive effects of drinking Chinese tea to argue for the immediate cessation of importing Chinese goods into England.47 Hanway’s Essay on Tea (1756), though generally about British foreign trade policy, is deliberately addressed to British women and the domestic choices they make (such as whether to serve tea in the home), identifying such household decisions as the root of national security.48 The vulnerability of the self in the Swiftian dressing room anticipates the fundamentally fragile boundaries of selfhood explored later in the British literature of empire. The collapse of women’s aesthetic agency—the repeal of their authorization to negotiate a mutually beneficial relationship between foreign objects and English subjectivity— leaves both the nation and the subject susceptible to invasion. As Swift’s poems depict the inadequacy of women’s aesthetic work to govern life in the city, they also sever woman as subject from woman as object, disturbing, more generally, the relationship between aesthetic and natural orders. Thus we might say that Swift’s urban nymphs represent a crisis in the eighteenth-century notion of the “natural,” which once found poetic expression through ritualized form. Chinoiserie’s waning power to represent an ideal form of Englishness is in this light as much an effect of formal developments in English culture as of political or psychological ones. Swift’s verses reveal the excessive cultural burden placed upon women, china, and poetry to naturalize ideal beauty. Like his mock-heroines, whose natural urges and desires directly counteract the forms of social propriety that uphold the traditional order, his verse ruptures under the pressure to yield

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classical ideals, unleashing instead scatological monsters. This disintegration of form is precisely where the eighteenth-century subject constituted from the outside gives way to the interiorized self of the sentimental tradition. This self abandons aesthetic improvement—what I have identified here as poetic self-management—for inward-looking forms of discipline. It is not until this moment that the negative connotations of chinoiserie begin to break away and overpower the positive association of women and china—a shift that marks the migration of subjectivity from the surface of things to the imagined depths of the modern individual.

5 How Chinese Things Became Oriental My dressing room in London is like the Temple of some Indian god . . . if I was remarkably short and I had a great head, I should be afraid people would think I meant myself Divine Honours . . . The very curtains are Chinese pictures painted on gauze, and the chairs the Indian fan sticks with cushions of Japan satin painted . . . the toilette you were so good as to paint is the only thing where nature triumphs. —Letter from Elizabeth Montagu to her sister (1750)1

In Hogarth’s China: Hogarth’s Paintings and 18th-Century Ceramics, art historian Lars Tharp describes a mid-eighteenth-century Chinese export punchbowl that features a reproduction of Hogarth’s “Midnight Modern Conversation” on one side and a contrasting Chinese scene on the other. “The contrast between the two scenes could hardly be greater,” he writes. “On one side intoxicated and unruly Westerners, each individual personifying a totally different state from that of his neighbour; on the other side a harmonious and sober Oriental gathering conveying calm and gentility, with tea being served” (see figures 5.1 and 5.2).2 Hogarth’s print, originally published in 1733, resembles Swift’s poetry in its satirical portrayal of modern social life: wigged men gather sloppily around a table, drinking, smoking, shouting, crying, falling over, and passing out. The clock reads 4:00. The centerpiece of the scene is a gigantic chinoiserie punchbowl in the middle of the table—on it, the outline of a figure with a Chinese umbrella is visible. The civilizing effects of chinoiserie, the print suggests, have limitations; past a certain point in the evening, polite conversation becomes drunken chaos (see figure 5.3). Tharp points out that “within a month of its publication, [the print] had been adapted into a ceramic context,” appearing on English and Dutch pottery and Meissen porcelain. Of this particular Chinese export punchbowl, Tharp notes that “in sending out Hogarth’s 147

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Figures 5.1 and 5.2 Chinese export porcelain punchbowl, ca. 1750. One side shows a reproduction of Hogarth’s A Midnight Modern Conversation; the other, a scene of Chinese gentlemen at a feast. Photo rights courtesy of Sotheby’s

print to be copied, the European client would almost certainly have stipulated [the] humorous juxtaposition” of the European scene with its more staid Chinese counterpart. The contrast of European intoxication with Chinese sobriety was a recurring trope in English culture of the early eighteenth century. In his poem Panacea: A Poem upon Tea (1700), Nahum Tate writes, To Bacchus when our Griefs repair for Ease, The Remedy proves worse than the Disease: Where Reason we must lose to keep the Round, And drinking Others Healths, our Own confound: Whilst TEA, our Sorrows safely to beguile, Sobriety and Mirth does reconcile: For to this Nectar we the Blessing owe, To grow more Wise, as we more chearful grow.3

The positive effects of tea on individual bodies and minds represent, for Tate, the general positive influence of Chinese culture on European. When the Greek god Palaemon made his own grand tour around the world, the poem tells us, “most strict Survey in every Realm he made / Of Men and Manners, Policy and Trade; / But none he found, his gentle Soul to please, / Like the Refin’d and Civiliz’d Chinese” (2). By placing Hogarth’s merry-makers in direct contrast to the “refined and civilized Chinese,” the export punchbowl explicitly raises the question of chinoiserie’s civilizing effects on the English subject. On the one hand, the two images form an allegorical narrative of transformation that suggests that the English are more likely to corrupt chinaware than chinaware is to reform the English. Yet, on the other, the history of the punchbowl’s production presents a counternarrative that shows how, under the direction of the English consumer’s imagination, chinaware

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Figure 5.3 William Hogarth, A Midnight Modern Conversation. © Trustees of the British Museum

comes to represent a whole range of potential effects, from “Chinese” sobriety to “European” excess. The supposed intemperance of English consumer tastes is belied by the precision of the fantasy commissioned in the form of this bowl. It is designed to present its owner with a choice of which kind of chinoiserie it will be. Owning a piece of china is not enough to transform vices into virtues, the bowl suggests, but it does represent the possibility of such a transformation, depending on the tastes and the inclinations of the owner. By importing the punchbowl, the consumer purchases not automatic self-improvement but a fantasy about potential self-improvement. The bowl advertises the possibilities of cosmopolitan consumption both positive and negative: the object might improve the subject, or the subject might debauch the object. The range of potential outcomes is marked by the poles of Europe and China, whose difference is negotiated simultaneously by the chinoiserie object—both by its global movement and by the aesthetic balance of its imagery—and by English taste, which appreciates the distinct design elements of the object as well as the meanings generated by their combination. The punchbowl thus articulates the idea I have pursued in the preceding chapters: that Chinese things served as the ideal medium of English taste, forming the site of the English subject’s mental exercise of recognizing and owning difference as part of an ever-improving self. At midcentury, chinoiserie objects like this bowl were reaching the height of their popularity in England. The East India Company continued to import unprecedented amounts of tea, porcelain, and textiles. After years of failed experimentation, English manufacturers were finally achieving some success producing their own hard-paste porcelain, and new print technologies

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enabled the rapid spread of chinoiserie designs in architecture, furniture, and landscaping. At the same time that the fashion spread, however, the conceptual balancing act that chinoiserie had performed since the late seventeenth century—specifically, maintaining the idea that English taste and Chinese things came together to produce a culture that was both quintessentially English and perfectly cosmopolitan—began to collapse. The success of the Chinese object in English culture from the late seventeenth century through the first half of the eighteenth rested on its ability to negotiate the yearnings of the individual imagination within an inherently rational cosmic order of things. From Addison’s Chinese garden, to Defoe’s trinkets, to Belinda’s toilette, chinoiserie marks the extent to which the mind’s creative powers may manipulate the material world without breaching natural law. At its best, English china gave visual form to the mental quality of taste, which Charles Rollin defined as “not so much the effect of genius as judgment . . . a kind of natural reason brought to perfection by study”: In composition it serves to guide and direct the Mind, using the Imagination without giving the reigns [sic] to it, but still retaining the superiority. It consults Nature in everything, following her step by step, and being a perfect representation of her. In the midst of riches and plenty, it is sober and reserved, dispensing duly and prudently all the beauties and graces of Discourse; never suffering itself to be dazzled by what is false, how glaring soever it may be. It is equally offended by saying too much, or too little, stopping exactly where it ought, and . . . cutting off, without pitty or reluctance, all that goes beyond what is beautiful and perfect.4

The Rape of the Lock offers a glimpse of what might happen were the moderating powers of taste to fail; Swift extends Pope’s image of “spleen” to transform the very concept of nature from cosmic order to visceral disorder. This redefinition of nature destabilizes the figure of china that had represented the perfect expression of natural order in aesthetic form. As illustrated by Elizabeth Montagu’s characterization of her Chinese dressing room in the epigraph to this chapter, in the second half of the eighteenth century, as “nature” is increasingly defined as that which is resistant to artifice, chinoiserie—nature’s preferred artificial form—becomes a form of nonsense. The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a series of literary debates over the place of chinoiserie in English culture. In contrast to the conversations of, for example, The Spectator and The Tatler, which demonstrated how a single subject in possession of good taste could distinguish good from bad china, the debates of the later eighteenth century tend to

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polemicize the question of chinoiserie; positions are taken for and against it as a whole. From both sides of these disputes emerges a growing consensus on the existence of a series of oppositional categories: English and Chinese, natural and artificial, reason and imagination, subject and object. Through their disagreements over whether tea was good or bad for the English constitution, or whether natural landscaping was an English or Chinese tradition, late eighteenth-century critics collectively disavowed mixed and heterogeneous forms of identity. One could take the position that the Chinese taste represented either a corruption of English life or a necessary departure from its restrictions, but it became increasingly impossible to claim that the Chinese taste was in fact perfectly English. This chapter shows how, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the negative implications of chinoiserie eclipsed its positive associations with English taste and came to indicate a self infiltrated by foreign substance—a self, in other words, that was not really English. This was not a complete transformation of chinoiserie’s cultural role, but rather the emergence of certain traits that from the Restoration to mid-century had remained recessive. The Spectator had warned repeatedly that the introduction of foreign objects into English spaces, when not managed by the power of taste, could produce disorder, and render both body and property grotesque. As the century advanced, the “touchstone” of chinoiserie more often than not revealed the failure of taste to reconcile fantasy and artifice—the “Chinese” part of English culture—to reason, moderation, and order. Once the mark of individual improvement, Chinese objects came to represent the internal instability of English identity, indicating that English subjectivity might contain something foreign to itself. Various literary efforts to pry apart the intimate relationship between Chinese things and English selves established by an earlier tradition of letters rewrote the ideal English subject from one who converts foreign things into cultural capital through the exercise of taste, to one who is naturally resistant to foreign influence and infiltration. Thus the foundation of modern orientalist thought that insists on an absolute difference between East and West was laid as part of a competition between varying definitions of English identity. By the end of the eighteenth century, cosmopolitan fantasies of cultivating one’s better “other” selves gave way to the conviction that what makes one who one is—and what makes the English English—must come from the inside rather than the outside. Identity was no longer something one could import. This orientalist logic emerges as part of a broad cultural effort to disavow residual traces of aristocratic power from modern commercial culture, an effort that produces not only the orientalist division between Chineseness and Englishness, but also the economy of modern sexuality that pits sensual fantasy and desire against rational self-moderation.

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A NATIONAL NIGHTMARE

Jonas Hanway, an active traveler, philanthropist, and all-around good citizen of eighteenth-century London, would probably be shocked to hear himself named a seminal figure of British orientalism; nevertheless, Hanway’s Essay on Tea (1756) marks a turning of cultural tides that, by the end of the eighteenth century, all but drowned cosmopolitan chinoiserie in the currents of Romantic orientalism. From its initial appearance, the Essay appears to have attracted different critical attention than its author anticipated. As Donald Greene notes, “Jonas Hanway was a good-hearted merchant and philanthropist, a benefactor of (among other institutions) the recently established Foundling Hospital for abandoned children. He wrote a silly book, however, and Samuel Johnson had fun taking it to pieces.”5 I want to suggest that, as outrageous as are many of its claims, Hanway’s Essay is far from silly—that, in fact, it is a prescient articulation of what will become a powerful strain of English thought in the late eighteenth century. Hanway argues that British women ought to cease serving tea in their homes because it is transforming Great Britain, once a “wise, active, and warlike nation,” into a population of idle, emasculated addicts who “act more wantonly and absurdly than the Chinese themselves”—“the most effeminate people on the face of the whole earth.”6 “Were they the sons of tea-sippers,” Hanway asks, “who won the fields of Cressy and Agincourt, or dyed the Danube’s streams with Gallic blood? What will be the end of such effeminate customs extended to those persons, who must get their bread by the labors of the field!” (245). Published the same year that the Seven Years’ War broke out, Hanway’s Essay gives voice to a growing anti-cosmopolitan strain in English culture, which Gerald Newman identifies as the root of modern English nationalism. The context of a sustained war with France and Austria, nations whose own aristocratic fashions had influenced English cosmopolitan taste, proved fertile ground for what Newman calls the “dream logic of belief ” in the modern national body: What we have here is a sort of symbolic logic, a chain of cultural-social-moral reasoning or rather association, which begins in the international sphere, ends in the national, and works through a vague notion of creeping contamination. At the heart of the nationalist protest may be discerned four interconnected ideas which together constituted its inner logic, a sort of dream logic, which was to serve it for many decades. To put these as plainly as possible: (1) the World are pervaded, even neutered or hermaphroditized, by foreign cultural influence; (2) this foreign cultural influence translates itself into ruinous

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moral influence; (3) it is a fact that ordinary, innocent Englishmen unthinkingly admire and follow the World’s lead—they are seduced by Quality; (4) hence alien cultural influence brings collective domestic moral ruin.7

The associational logic of nascent nationalism is fostered by its inherently defensive posture, its conviction that the nation is already imperiled by preexisting hostile forces. For Hanway, the nation only comes into focus as a coherent body through his mapping of the various organs infiltrated by Chinese tea. His objections to tea are myriad: in addition to depleting the army and the workforce, tea rots the teeth, sours the bowels, turns the brain, inflames the passions, increases “intemperance and debauchery” (233), weakens the nerves, fails to cure scurvy, encourages servants to think themselves better than their masters, ruins the economy, shortens lives, commits “offences against nature” (223), and directly contributes to epidemic proportions of baby-killing. Tea-drinking is an “epidemical disease” that promises to “engender an universal infection” across classes, from town to country, in man and woman, adult and child (244). It is thus a matter of national security, or in Hanway’s words, “the welfare of [the] country,” that the British sever their dependence on “the produce of so remote a country as china” (243). The nation emerges in Hanway’s Essay as the subject of a nightmare. “The present occasion awakens a thought which has often disturbed my dreams,” he writes. “If my present speculation is but a dream, I think it my happiness, that the subject of it is the love of my country” (204). Hanway’s dream of Englishness follows the contours of the “inner logic” described by Newman as “inherently anti-cosmopolitan, anti-aristocratic, and nativist . . . Although in fact it was not so much a logic as an illogical tribalistic jumble of beliefs and perceptions combining rude notions of national character, cultural invasion, moral pollution, social transmission, and collective spiritual disintegration, it nevertheless was the plastic material from which a great variety of protests were to be raised.”8 Tea is overdetermined by this dream-logic as a “seven-headed monster” (245), something that combines foreign qualities, aristocratic values, material obsession, and carnal desires to threaten the English subject with hideous mental and physical transformations. Hanway relies on the hyperbolic language and tendrilled imagery of dream visions to express the extent of the English national project—that project being to eliminate a multifaceted and ubiquitous foreign threat to English well-being. Only a dream enables the kind of perspective that can show his reader what such a national crisis looks like: Look into all the cellars in London, you will find men and women sipping their tea, in the morning or afternoon, and very often both morning and

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afternoon: those will have tea who have not bread. I once took a ramble in england for some months, far into the country, attended only by a servant: when I was tired of riding, I walk’d, and often stroll’d, with as much decency as I could, into little huts, to see how the people lived. I still found the same game was playing; and misery itself had no power to banish tea, which had frequently introduced that misery. What a wild infatuation! (245)

Hanway does not identify England with sites of commerce and exchange— the coffeehouse, the Royal Exchange, the playhouse, the court, or the dressing-room—but locates it instead in private “cellars” and “little huts,” places that can only be compiled into a collective whole through the work of the imagination. What links these spaces and the people who inhabit them is a common activity: the consumption of tea. Avoiding the reasonable deduction that tea-drinking thus defines England, Hanway draws the more convoluted conclusion that the English are defined by their collective need to stop drinking tea—that is, by their shared need of reform. The model of reform Hanway promotes is categorically different from the cultivation of good taste in the early eighteenth century. The Spectator instructed its readers to exercise good rather than bad forms of consumption; the Essay on Tea recommends avoiding consumption altogether. Addressed explicitly to two Englishwomen who had accompanied Hanway on a trip through the southern part of England, the Essay weaves a romance in which women are charged with protecting the boundaries of the nation by policing private spaces, including their own bodies: “Be assured, it is in your power to destroy this seven-headed monster, which devours so great a part of the best fruits of this land; and that the welfare of your country depends greatly on your virtue” (245). This fantasy rests on a feminized form of patriotism that performs and preserves Englishness through self-regulation: “Madam, you may . . . give substantial proof of your patriotism, if you endevor [sic] to promote the cause of virtue,” particularly “if you abstain from such customs as are injurious; and among the latter, remember the laborious lesson I have given you upon tea” (358). The lesson on tea represents a more general lesson about the importance of abstinence; like the nation, the integrity of the female subject depends on the strength of its defenses against foreign influence and infiltration. Hanway’s appeal to women follows the rhetoric of contemporaneous conduct manuals that, as Nancy Armstrong has argued, offered women “the power of self-transformation” that organized a specifically female form of subjectivity around practices of self-regulation.9 He promises women the power to be themselves—that is, to be their best English selves—by recognizing and upholding a distinction between themselves and the foreign things their bodies crave. Englishness, like women’s selfhood, is posited as

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an effect of the individual’s resistance to the external world, not of the quality of her interaction with it. The Spectator focused on positive modes of consumption because it subscribed to a model of subjectivity based on accumulation. The metaphysical subject of empiricism, though defined by capacity of mind rather than the embodied qualities of blood, was nevertheless a material being whose ideas served as evidence of an intimate and productive relationship between the sensual subject and the external world of objects. One only became oneself through various forms of sensory and imaginative traffic across the boundaries of the self. Hanway’s ideal English subject, imagined specifically as female, is produced in contrast by the abjection of imported material. This form of subjectivity lives not in a well-furnished but an unfurnished space—a space to which material things are inherently foreign. Hanway promises that if women will refashion themselves along these lines, reforming by extension the English nation as a whole, he will commemorate them with a monument bearing the following inscription: To the remembrance of the fair guardian spirits of BRITAIN, Whose influence and example abolished the use of a chinese drug called TEA: the infusion of which had been for many years drank in these realms and dominions, injuring the health, obstructing the industry, wasting the fortunes, and exporting the riches, of his majesty’s liege subjects: &c. &c.10

Graphically, the inscription captures the paradox of Hanway’s understanding of Englishness, which is not a quality that resists infiltration by foreign things so much as it is the effect of emptying the self of things deemed foreign. The monument, like the form of identity it represents, is organized around what it rejects: “TEA.” It celebrates an imaginary future when England will have become more English by eliminating the thing currently residing in its core. The powers of distinction that once governed the flow of materials into the national body are now tasked with driving the flow of impurities out. Much

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as Englishness is produced as the effect of this purge of un-English things, the Chineseness of tea is produced by its abjection from English life. It is not bad for England because it is Chinese; it is Chinese because it is bad for England. It is not difficult for anyone who has read this bizarre diatribe to imagine the “fun” Johnson had “taking it to pieces.” In the second of three separate reviews he wrote of the Essay on Tea, Johnson admits that Hanway can expect “little justice from the author of this extract, a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant, whose kettle has scarcely time to cool, who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnights, and, with tea, welcomes the morning” (509). Johnson has good reason to believe that most English readers will agree that Hanway’s position is absurd. By the mid-eighteenth century, tea was more than a fashionable habit; it was a fixture of English culture, taken at all times of day by both men and women, by the working classes as well as the nobility.11 Hanway’s attack runs counter to more than fifty years of highly successful cultural work assimilating tea to English daily life. Placing himself in the tradition of Addison’s man of taste, Johnson offers himself as evidence of the total compatibility of tea and the English constitution: “the effects of tea upon the health of the drinker . . . I think, [Hanway] has aggravated in the vehemence of his zeal,” he observes, for “after soliciting them by this watery luxury, year after year, I have not yet felt [them]” (505). The pernicious effects of Hanway’s “Chinese drug” must be the figment of an over-zealous imagination, for tea is as English as Dr. Johnson himself. While Johnson appeals to his readers’ faith in his own good taste to defend the drinking of tea, he does not go so far as to resuscitate the cosmopolitan logic of tea’s place in English culture. His rhetoric, rather than invoking Tate’s “panacea” or Addison’s cornucopia of foreign goods, suggests that tea is, to the rational Englishman, a rather unremarkable thing. In response to Hanway’s objections to his review, Johnson continues to frame the entire dispute as a matter of common sense, or lack thereof: Of tea, what have I said? That I have drank it twenty years, without hurt, and therefore, believe it not to be poison. That, if it dries the fibres, it cannot soften them, that, if it constringes, it cannot relax. I have modestly doubted whether it has diminished the strength of our men, or the beauty of our women, and whether it much hinders the progress of our woollen or iron manufactures; but I allowed it to be a barren superfluidity, neither medicinal nor nutritious, that neither supplied strength nor cheerfulness, neither relieved weariness, nor exhilarated sorrow. (518)

The real problem with Hanway’s position, Johnson maintains, is not that he hates tea, but that he thinks any material substance could exercise so much

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power over English subjects. Tea has no special qualities, positive or negative, that affect the people who drink it; to believe that it does is to subscribe to the magical thinking of dreams rather than the calm reason of reality. “I know not of what power or greatness he may dream,” Johnson concludes. “The love of our country, when it rises to enthusiasm, is an ambiguous and uncertain virtue: when a man is enthusiastic he ceases to be reasonable; and, when once he departs from reason, what will he do but drink sour tea?” (520). Ironically, Johnson succeeds in figuring a form of Englishness that has already realized Hanway’s dream of purity, one organized around a nothingness—a “barren superfluidity”—where there was once a Chinese object of high significance. In this dialogue, Hanway and Johnson represent two different ways of reimagining the Chinese object during the second half of the eighteenth century. Hanway’s concern about the influence of foreign things on English sensibility introduces a growing suspicion that these things are simply not assimilable to the culture. Johnson, in contrast, fixes tea firmly within English culture and testifies to its everyday status, as common and basic to English life as air or water, as innocuous as it is unremarkable. From their opposing positions, each in his own way concedes that things Chinese, once so important to the definition of taste, have begun to sit uneasily in English culture. Neither Hanway nor Johnson approaches the issue of taste or its power to negotiate a relationship between foreign things and English subjects. The positions they carve out on subject-object relations are absolute: either things are bad for people—i.e., foreign to the subject—and must be resisted, or things are harmless to people and have no bearing on subjectivity whatsoever. What has been written out of existence is the Chinese object of taste, the material thing that positively transforms the subject who interacts with it. During the second half of the century, things Chinese thus presented a new set of problems and possibilities. They would have to be either fully assimilated or radically estranged and purged. In fact, English culture would do both. Although readers were, like Johnson, generally unsympathetic to Hanway’s attack on tea, by the end of the century Hanway’s invective against the addictive and debilitating effects of the “Chinese drug” found new life in the English discourse on opium. While tea was a (formerly) Chinese object now totally assimilated to English life (the Chinese origin now barely haunts what we think of as “English tea”), opium represented the failure of such assimilation, the reification of the Chinese object’s negative qualities in an orientalized menace to the English social body. By consigning Hanway’s Essay to the vaults of eighteenth-century eccentricity, Johnson’s rebuke effectively disavowed the work of the imagination and the objects it engaged in constituting rational English subjects. In

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chapter 6 I examine in more detail how this move engendered a new way of thinking about reason and realism that found its perfect expression in the late eighteenth-century novel. For now, I want to emphasize how Johnson’s ritual humiliation of Hanway’s fantasy about tea has obscured how effectively the Essay translates hegemonic theories of taste into the dream logic of orientalism. This peculiar diatribe marks a pivotal moment in eighteenthcentury thought about England’s relationship to foreign things and influences, and, more broadly, the relationship between English subjects and the object world in general. Hanway’s take on tea marks a departure from the Lockean tradition that carries chinoiserie from Addison to Johnson as a component of English taste. His persistent use of terms of addiction, infection, pollution, and transformation to describe the power of tea over the individual weds the Chinese commodity to traditional figures of oriental menace, such as the opium-smoking Turk (“habit reconciles us to the use of tea,” he writes, “as it does turks to opium” [222]) and the sinister Jew (three years earlier, Hanway had argued vehemently against the Jewish Naturalization Act, also in the name of British national security). Integrated into this tradition, things Chinese were no longer objects in the Lockean sense, implicitly under the control of subjective reason. Rather, they could permeate and alter the subject, or foster foreign elements within the bounds of the familiar, undermining the faculty of reason.

THE PERVERSION OF TASTE

Hanway’s aversion to Chinese influences within English culture can be read as part of a broader midcentury reaction to the cosmopolitan ideals of the early part of the century. William W. Appleton, in his survey of the “Chinese vogue in England,” notes that “by 1750 China was no longer generally esteemed among English intellectuals either for its antiquity or learning . . . its preeminence in the sciences had been generally discredited, and praise of its antiquity had declined.”12 Yet, precisely as China’s reputation was waning among English intellectuals as a global standard of cultural quality, the fashion for chinoiserie seemed to flourish most visibly. In Appleton’s words, “by the mid-eighteenth century the Chinese rage had infected England . . . completely” (90). David Porter points out that this seeming contradiction in fact belongs to a single cultural logic, namely “the propensity of the English to flatten the . . . idea of Chineseness into a merely aesthetic arena for the surface play of insubstantial signs.”13 Chinoiserie design, in other words, represents the “Chinese” as superficial, insubstantial, alluring but ultimately meaningless, reinforcing the rejection of Chinese authority over matters intellectual

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and moral even as it spreads as an aesthetic phenomenon. Sustaining Porter’s focus on this strange midcentury moment, I suggest that the simultaneous emergence of enthusiasm for chinoiserie and suspicion of Chinese influence reveals not only an “aesthetic” reaction to Enlightenment thought, but an assault on the relationship between aesthetics and ideas that had characterized predominant theories of taste in the early eighteenth century. From the 1750s onward, the “aesthetic” qualities of objects—those sensible qualities that communicated directly with the imagination—seemed to subvert reason rather than supplement it. As chinoiserie was increasingly celebrated and sought out for its “fantastic” qualities, it came to embody the “otherness” of objects per se to rational subjectivity. In this capacity, it posed a constant threat to the integrity of English selfhood. The startling xenophobia of a text like Hanway’s Essay on Tea is evidence that the cosmopolitanism that underwrote early eighteenth-century chinoiserie’s place in English culture is undergoing a transformation. The privileging of internal difference and “order in variety” is giving way to the orientalist model of mutually exclusive entities whose interaction manifests as pollution, corruption, and infection. The orientalism that appears in the mid-eighteenth century emerges, however, not out of a sudden realization that there are non-negotiable differences between China and England, but rather as part of a broad strategy for purging all traces of aristocratic values from modern English culture once and for all. While chinoiserie had played an important role in the Lockean overturning of aristocratic ideals, replacing inherited property with acquired things as the most significant markers of identity, it had also borne into the modern world traces of aristocratic culture, specifically its porous relationship between subjects and objects. The increased expression of suspicion and hostility toward things Chinese in the late eighteenth century is largely aimed at eradicating this old-fashioned intimacy between persons and things from normative English identity. The orientalization of chinoiserie was a way of disavowing the Restoration’s illicit desires and “unnatural” object relations. It rewrites aristocratic tradition, particularly the admiration of certain kinds of bodies as beautiful objects, as a perverse sexual obsession that generates pleasure through the willful confusion of persons and things. As chinoiserie is increasingly consigned to narratives of aristocratic excess and perversion, new standards of virtue— specifically female sexual virtue—are called upon to resist its allure. As I argued in chapter 2, since the Restoration period English writers had recognized Chinese objects as a site of epistemological foment, where various ways of knowing and perceiving the world were tested and reflected. While a writer like Wycherley gleefully threw china and all its attendant meanings into free commerce in the space of the playhouse, others were more insistent on preserving the forms of knowledge embodied in chinoiserie as property

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of the aristocracy. One remarkable example is Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688), a tragic romance focused on the inability of the noble body to survive in the “New World” and its topsy-turvy social order. As Chi-ming Yang has pointed out, Behn orientalizes Oroonoko both by framing the first part of the narrative, set in Africa, as a traditional oriental tale, and by likening the African prince and his beloved Imoinda to japanned objects.14 Even the plantation-owners in Surinam could tell the quality of the enslaved couple simply by looking at them, the narrator explains, because “those who are nobly born of that country are so delicately cut and raced all over the fore part of the trunk of their bodies that it looks as if it were japanned; the works being raised like high point round the edges of the flowers.”15 Thus, even before Imoinda’s identity as princess is revealed, “from her being carved in fine flowers and birds all over her body, we took her to be of quality before” (48). Yang’s reading calls attention to japanning as “a technology of preserving the lives of objects as well as cultures according to Eastern knowledge,” a technology that Behn mimics with her “‘Female Pen,’ an instrument both of writing and of varnishing” (Yang 241). To this reading I would add that Oroonoko “japans” the African prince and princess in order to narrate the tragic fate of noble bodies caught in the traffic of global trade. By representing the “noble slaves” as chinoiserie, Behn illustrates how beautiful objects are drained of political power as they are transformed into commodities. From the beginning, Oroonoko is identified as a specimen of perfect nobility—a born warrior, a bred cosmopolitan, and most of all a beautiful object: “he was adorned with a native beauty so transcending all those of his gloomy race that he struck an awe and reverence, even in those that knew not his quality” (13). While the story remains in Africa, Oroonoko’s physical appearance universally communicates his royal quality. He possesses “that real greatness of soul, those refined notions of true honour, that absolute generosity, and that softness that was capable of the highest passions of love and gallantry” that belong only to princes, and that allow him to transcend his Africanness and be recognized among the cosmopolitan elite. He “had heard of and admired the Romans,” he was appropriately appalled at “the late Civil Wars in England and the deplorable death of our great monarch,” and “he had nothing of barbarity in his nature, but in all points addressed himself as if his education had been in some European court” (14–15). For Behn, Oroonoko serves as evidence that English aristocratic power is underwritten by a cosmic order; he globalizes, and thus naturalizes, the traits that organize traditional European social and political hierarchies. And, like a European king, his power is confirmed through spectacle. His quality is embodied, and his body is designed to be looked at: “He was pretty tall, but of a shape the most exact that can be fancied; the most famous statuary could not form

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the figure of a man more admirably turned from head to foot . . . The whole proportion and air of his face was so noble and exactly formed that, bating his colour, there could be nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable and handsome. There was no one grace wanting that bears the standard of true beauty” (15). The narrator’s objectification of Oroonoko as an aesthetic object still belongs more to the aristocratic culture of admiration than to the modern culture of commodification and consumption; she gazes on her protagonist as subject to sovereign: “This prince, such as I have described him,” possessed both a “soul and body . . . admirably adorned” (15–16). The one aspect of Oroonoko’s appearance that is not accommodated by his universal nobility is his “colour.” This feature alone compels the narrator to turn to a commercial vocabulary to communicate its beauty: “His face was not of that brown, rusty black which most of that nation are, but a perfect ebony or polished jet” (15). This slip from the discourse of proportion and shape to that of fashionable ornamental commodities—ebony in particular was shipped, like other coveted forms of hardwood, from both the East and West Indies to Europe—presages Oroonoko’s own shift in status from African royalty to New World slave.16 In Surinam, his quality remains apparent to those colonists, like the narrator, loyal to traditional social order and the aristocratic ideologies that uphold them, but the context of his physical beauty has been altered by his cultural and geographical relocation. He is now best understood, even by the narrator, as a piece of chinoiserie—a beautiful object whose origins and innate qualities are subordinated to how he is perceived by others in a foreign context. The second half of Behn’s narrative, set in Surinam, is indeed sustained by the tension between the various ways English colonists perceive the royal African body. Loyalists fall into a natural admiration of him without understanding why. Trefry, the man who purchases Oroonoko, “no sooner came into the boat, but he fixed his eyes on him; and finding something so extraordinary in his face, his shape and mien, a greatness of look, and haughtiness in his air, and finding he spoke English, had a great mind to be enquiring into his quality and fortune” (41–42). Although Oroonoko refuses to state his status, his body betrays him to those who see him properly. The humble clothes he wears as he enters the colony “could not conceal the graces of his looks and mien; and he had no less admirers than when he had his dazzling habit on. The royal youth appeared in spite of the slave, and people could not help treating him after a different manner without designing it; as soon as they approached him, they venerated and esteemed him” (43). As word of his appearance spreads, the narrator reports, “if the king himself (God bless him) had come ashore, there could not have been greater expectations by all the whole plantation, and those neighbouring ones, than was on ours at that time; and he was received more like a governor than a slave” (44).

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Like Wycherley’s china, Oroonoko serves as a kind of touchstone for the colonists of Surinam. His appearance tests the ability of the English diaspora to respond and adhere to traditional forms of power; through him, Behn poses the question of whether the power embodied in a monarch might be packaged and shipped to other parts of the globe in new forms. As a Restoration royalist, Behn would have been particularly interested in the possibilities of reinforcing and disseminating royal power through global traffic and expansion. But, writing this fiction just as William and Mary were seizing the English throne from James II, and after the English experiment in Surinam had been given up, the colony traded to the Dutch, Behn ultimately represents the New World and its commercial economy as inhospitable to traditional values. When a faction of colonists refuses to recognize Oroonoko’s body as anything more than an object of trade and an instrument of labor, the untenability of his status—a stand-in for the status of “the king himself ”—is realized in the violent dismantling of his body. Just as Olivia’s impure imagination is reflected in her shattered chinaware in Wycherley’s The Plain-Dealer, the disloyalties and wayward ambitions of the colonists are manifested in Oroonoko’s dismembered corpse. Rejecting its beauty as an expression of power, they transform the prince’s body into a grotesque spectacle that echoes the execution of Charles I. The narrative directly attributes Oroonoko’s death to the disloyalty of colonists who fail to recognize the reach of royal authority to the West Indies. When the deputy-governor Byam pursues Oroonoko to hang him for insubordination, Trefry argues unsuccessfully that Byam’s command did not extend to his lord’s plantation, and that Parham was as much exempt from the law as Whitehall; and that they ought no more to touch the servants of the Lord—(who there represented the king’s person) than they could those about the king himself; and that Parham was a sanctuary, and though his lord were absent in person, his power was still in being there, which he had entrusted with him, as far as the dominions of his particular plantations reached, and all that belonged to it; the rest of the country, as Byam was lieutenant to his lord, he might exercise his tyranny upon. (70)

His friends’ inability to save Oroonoko from the governor’s attack frames Surinam as a rogue colony that refuses to accept authority in abstracted forms—for example, the king’s power in the form of his servants abroad, or that same power instilled in the lord’s property “though his lord were absent in person.” But Oroonoko’s tragic fate is actually sealed long before the story brings him to Surinam, by the context of global commerce and cosmopolitan materialism that pressures the narrator to translate him from a prince into a commodity as she presents him to an English audience. Mimicking

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the progress of chinoiserie as a category in English culture, Oroonoko is originally identified as beautiful because of his inherited elite status, but once sent into circulation his beauty increasingly operates independently of his political power, until his power is siphoned off completely. When the narrator and her friends admire Oroonoko and Imoinda as japanned objects, they unwittingly participate in the wresting of beautiful objects from the matrix of aristocratic power—they respond to a superficial form of beauty, which, relocated to the New World, is connected to no network of noble privilege. The narrative’s tragic conclusion thus reflects the author’s general pessimism about the survival of embodied power in a diasporic culture that relies on abstract forms of authority. Behn’s romance offers us a way of considering chinoiserie itself as a diasporic category of objects defined by a migration—not, as one might think, a geographical movement from East to West, but rather a cultural displacement from aristocratic property to a commercial order of things. Removed from their original role as a form of tribute among the European elite, things Chinese are drained of their ability to signify aristocratic power as they are dispersed by modern commerce into “everyday” English life. This shift, treated as tragedy by Behn, was precisely what writers like Addison and Steele found so attractive about chinoiserie: the way it transferred the power in the subject-object relationship from the object of the gaze to the subject. The Spectator’s connoisseurs pursue rituals of looking at beautiful objects derived from the culture of aristocratic admiration, but they rewrite these acts of seeing as demonstrations of the viewer’s authority over the object rather than the other way around. Chinaware’s infamous fragility, long understood as a metaphor for the tenuousness of female virtue, might also be understood as a reflection of the power it bequeaths to the spectating subject. I only make you who you are, the object seems to say, by empowering you to make me what I am. The Spectator’s agents of taste are not subjects of the admired object; they exercise their subjectivity through it. But as the site of these shifts and translations, chinoiserie remained a kind of conduit to the older models of power and identity it helped to displace. The equivocal quality of the Chinese object called upon the regulatory powers of good taste precisely because there seemed to be something in the object that required discipline. This something is the residual aristocratic power in the object. It invites the modern subject to defuse it through the exercise of taste, performing the triumph of the modern mind over the privileged body, but it simultaneously threatens to overpower the mind of the individual, to override her rational autonomy and unleash latent passions and appetites. When taste fails, in other words, as in the cases of china-crazed women detailed in The Spectator, individuals revert to an older form of communion with objects, becoming enthralled with them, powerless to resist their sensual

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appeals. Because these objects are no longer proper embodiments of aristocratic power—they are not the bodies of kings and princes—the desire they inspire is recast from political loyalty to perverse attachment. Restoration culture famously played for laughs the slippage between political admiration, consumer desire, and sexual obsession. Around the same time he mocked the popularity of the Italian aristocrat “Signior Dildo” among the ladies of England, the Earl of Rochester penned his infamous sexual satire of Charles II: “Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such, / And love he loves, for he loves fucking much. / Nor are his high desires above his strength, / His sceptre and his prick are of a length.”17 The sexual connotations of chinoiserie’s popularity in particular, deployed so well by Wycherley on the Restoration stage, were woven into social satires of commercial culture as well as the erotic landscapes of amatory fiction. The Female Tatler 67 (December 7–9, 1709) questions both the taste and the virtue of women who pass through an “India store” on a typical day. “Lady Praise-All surveyed the nick-nackatory, with an amazement, as if she had received a new sense”; “Mrs Trifleton came so full of commissions from ladies in the country that we thought she would have emptied the warehouse, and stared at the handsome ’prentice as if she expected to have him into the bargain”; and the entrance of “Colonel Sturdy, one of the greatest rakes that ever kept basset bank or carried a doxy,” inspires a jealous competition between sisters Susanna and Rachel: “the sanctified sisters quarrelled so about a libertine, whom even loose women that sin with some restraint abominate for his inconstancy, that ’twas with no small struggling they concealed their enmity from the servants, and went home together in the same coach.”18 In Spectator 336 (March 26, 1712), Addison revisited this scenario of women behaving badly in the china shop, dubbing them a “Club of Female Rakes.”19 Delarivier Manley, one of the authors of The Female Tatler, exploited the erotics of chinoiserie to furnish one of the most memorable scenes of seduction in her political satire Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality (1720): The Duchess went to the Count’s the next Day, immediately after she had Din’d, she scarce allow’d her self time to eat, so much more valuable in her Sense were the Pleasures of Love . . . the Duchess softly enter’d that little Chamber of Repose, the Weather violently hot the Umbrelloes were let down from behind the Windows, the Sashes open, and the Jessamine that cover’d up blew in with a gentle Fragrancy; Tuberoses set in pretty Gilt and China Posts, were placed advantageously upon Stands, the Curtains of the Bed drawn back to the Canopy, made of yellow Velvet embroider’d with white Bugles, the Panels of the Chamber Looking-Glass, upon the Bed were strow’d with

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a lavish Profuseness, plenty of Orange and Lemon Flowers, and to compleat the Scene, the young Germanicus in a dress and posture not very decent to describe; it was he that was newly risen from the Bath, and in a lose Gown of Carnation Taffety, stain’d with Indian Figures, his beautiful long, flowing Hair, for then ’twas the Custom to wear their own tied back with a Ribbon of the same Colour, he had thrown himself upon the Bed, Pretending to Sleep, with nothing on but his Shirt and Night-Gown, which he had so indecently dispos’d, that slumbring as he appear’d, his whole Person stood confess’d to the Eyes of the Amorous Duchess, his Limbs were exactly form’d, his Skin shiningly white, and the Pleasure the Ladies graceful entrance gave him, diffus’d Joy and Desire throughout all his Form.20

Here, the power of the cosmopolitan aristocratic male body is translated from political power to sexual power as the young Germanicus is integrated into a chinoiserie fantasy. Manley presents his body as the erotic centerpiece of an arrangement of exotic sensual delights. Like the Royalist colonists in Oroonoko in the presence of the “royal slave,” the Duchess responds “naturally” to the spectacle of his body, called by something more passionate than reasonable. But where Behn’s text frames this response as “natural” because it corresponds to a universal social and political order, Manley aligns nature and passion with sexual desires that displace and disrupt political authority rather than confirming it. Her exposé of the sexual exploits of the European elite, like Rochester’s satire of Charles, was designed to suggest that very different kinds of “private affairs” were being carried out in the chambers of the upper classes than political negotiations. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault identifies this shift in the category of “nature” with regard to human sexual behavior as part of the eighteenth-century emergence of modern sexuality itself. Prior to this moment, he notes, “Prohibitions bearing on sex were essentially of a juridical nature. The ‘nature’ on which they were based was still a kind of law.”21 He offers the example of hermaphrodites, who under the regime of “natural law” were considered criminal “since their anatomical disposition, their very being, confounded the law that distinguished the sexes and prescribed their union” (38). Both the law that is broken and the nature that is violated are the cosmic order of things that manifests in the perfection, or imperfection, of material forms. But the “discursive explosion” of sex that, according to Foucault, constitutes modern sexuality turned scrutiny away from the normative sexual lives of married couples and toward a new proliferation of irregular sexualities—“Whence,” he writes, “the setting apart of the ‘unnatural’ as a specific dimension in the field of sexuality” (39). This shift had enormous consequences in particular for the figure of the “libertine” whose sexual promiscuity, formerly seen as disrespectful of

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sexual propriety but hardly unnatural for an upper-class male, was suddenly framed as dually “abnormal”: in the civil order, the confused category of “debauchery,” which for more than a century had been one of the most frequent reasons for administrative confinement, came apart. From the debris, there appeared on the one hand infractions against the legislation (or morality) pertaining to marriage and the family, and on the other, offenses against the regularity of a natural function (offenses which, it must be added, the law was apt to punish). Here we have a likely reason, among others, for the prestige of Don Juan, which three centuries have not erased. Underneath the great violator of the rules of marriage—stealer of wives, seducer of virgins, the shame of families, and an insult to husbands and fathers—another personage can be glimpsed: the individual driven, in spite of himself, by the somber madness of sex. Underneath the libertine, a pervert. He deliberately breaks the law, but at the same time, something like nature gone awry transports him far from all nature. (39)

The “nature gone awry” that, from the modern perspective, drives the libertine’s compulsive behavior is, in the eighteenth century, in direct competition with the natural order of cosmic hierarchies and formal beauty. Aesthetic nature expresses ideals dictated from above and beyond individual subjects; sexual nature erupts from within. What Swift does with the material body— granting it a life of its own that acts out against the rational self, such that body and person seem to be different creatures tragicomically intertwined— modern sexual discourse does to desire itself, ascribing to it an “other” nature that transgresses social boundaries and engenders disorder. In short, what defines modern sexuality is its insistence that there is something in the subject but not identical to the subject that acts through the pursuit of desire. Manley’s text, as Barbara Benedict has argued, conflates illicit sexual desire with the act of reading about illicit sex; the “lust of the eyes” that infects the Duchess when she sees Germanicus compels the reader to keep her eyes on the spectacle as well.22 Thus the text represents both sex and reading about sex as perversions of empirical inquiry, a satisfaction of “curiosities” aroused not by the rational mind but by the desiring body. In the words of the Count who has orchestrated the entire encounter between the Duchess and Germanicus: “tho’ we surely know we shall be Sated, we can’t help desiring to eat, ’tis the Law of Nature, and the pursuit is pleasing, and a Man owes himself the Satisfaction of gratifying those Desires that are importunate, and important to him.”23 The Count’s defense of carnal pursuit deliberately echoes the terminology Addison uses to describe the “pleasures of the imagination.” Addison insists on the “pleasure” and “gratification” brought on by seeing things, and

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registered in the imagination, in order to emphasize the way nature itself drives us to pursue knowledge. “Our Sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our Senses. It fills the Mind with the largest Variety of Ideas, converses with its Objects at the greatest Distance, and continues the longest in Action without being tired or satiated with its proper Enjoyments,” he writes. “Every thing that is new or uncommon raises a Pleasure in the Imagination, because it fills the Soul with an agreeable Surprize, gratifies its Curiosity, and gives it an Idea of which it was not before possest.”24 But when the very “nature” to which pleasure answers is called into question—when natural order is in conflict with natural desire—the imagination, the mind’s erogenous zone, is recast from the faculty that channels sensual experience toward rational knowledge, to the faculty most likely to stimulate desires that disrupt reason. For Addison, it is self-evident that acquiring “an Idea of which [one] was not before possest” improves the individual, but scandalous literature like Manley’s puts this tenet of empiricism under pressure, suggesting that not only are there some ideas which one should not possess, but that these ideas are the ones we most desire to possess. Benedict demonstrates how the gendering of curiosity, transferring it from the male Royal Society member to the female rumor-monger, perverts empiricism by eroticizing it. By invoking the traditional figures of Pandora and Eve, who both “[look] on the forbidden and [bring] grief and corruption into the world,” eighteenth-century literature introduces its most powerful counterargument to the empiricist logic of improvement by acquisition: the problem of female desire.25 As a category of objects defined by the possibility of their subjection to good taste—that is, their possible integration into the well-ordered mind of the modern English subject through the mental processes described by Addison—chinoiserie also represented the possibility that these processes might fail. Secret Memoirs illustrates one of the consequences of the failure of taste: that the appeal of things Chinese will inspire that “other nature” that dwells in the imagination, mobilizing the passions rather than quelling them. Chinoiserie’s centrality to the discourse of taste ultimately located it firmly within the emergent discourse of sexuality and its radical rewriting and relocation of nature; by midcentury the question of whether chinoiserie is beautiful or grotesque is less a question of good or bad taste than of whether one understands the object world in terms of a natural order or a natural disorder. The perversion of curiosity undermines entirely the mutually beneficial relationship between subject and object established by the exercise of taste, transforming it into one of mutual corruption. In contrast to Swift’s scatological vision of this corruption, which operates through disgust, erotic literature implicates chinoiserie, and readers, in an economy of deviant desires between people and things. Aristocratic admiration

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and cosmopolitan wonder are rewritten by such narratives as examples of perverse enthrallment, where foreign things exercise an unnatural power over individuals by awakening latent desires incompatible with rational subjectivity. In 1740 and 1741, two versions of a “Chinese Tale” were published in London that invoked chinoiserie and the fascination it engendered in subjects to satirize upper-class sexuality. William Hatchett, the lover of Eliza Haywood, is credited with authoring A Chinese Tale: Written originally by that prior of China the facetious Sou ma Quang, a Celebrated Mandarine of Letters; under the title of Chamyam Tcho Chang, or, Chamyam with her leg upon a table (1740), a satiric poem about a Chinese nobleman who spies on a maiden in her dressing room while she examines her own genitals in a mirror. A year later, the printer Joseph Pierce published a prose fiction based on A Chinese Tale, containing a reproduction of most of the poem, entitled A Court Lady’s Curiosity; or, the virgin undress’d. Curiously surveying herself in her glass, with one leg upon her toilet: a Chinese novel (1741). Both texts boasted a “curious frontispiece” depicting the central scene of double voyeurism. According to the title page of A Chinese Tale, the illustration is “taken from a large China Punch-Bowl . . . Design’d and Engrav’d by Mess. Gravelot and Scotin” and could be purchased as a print for one shilling. It shows a semi-nude woman in her dressing room—furnished with a japanned cabinet, books, and a large china jar in which hides the spying mandarin—staring ahead at the mirror reflection of her spread legs. While the man hidden in the china jar shares her view of the mirror, the reader is shown the scene from the side, such that the pornographic image inhabits the left margin of the image while the various gazes it commands are centrally displayed. This illustration collaborates with the poem to transform the lady’s dressing room into a privatized, sexualized space—not, as in The Rape of the Lock, the site of woman’s transformation into an object of public display, but, more like the Swiftian vision of The Lady’s Dressing Room, the place where a woman’s public self comes undone and her “natural secrets” are revealed. A Chinese Tale describes the dressing room as a kind of shrine to women’s genitalia, a place where they can be put on display surrounded by a complementary array of chinoiserie ornament and classical erotica: Behold the Tyle-resplendent Wing! That holds the vain, the wanton Thing. Ye British nymphs! Which of you, say, Can greater Elegance display? Shew Furniture that’s more polite, Tho’ France and Italy unite?

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Dragons the Cieling does unfold, Japann’d and carv’d with Flowers of Gold. The Wainscot of an Emerald-green; Pictures of modern Taste are seen. The Catalogue is very curious; Originals—Not one is spurious; Besides Antiques excessive rare, And to be sure excessive dear. A Priapus—and next to that, Another, covered with a Hat. Diana bathing; and a Helen, Whom Paris is all over smelling.26

The poem reduces the twin pillars of early eighteenth-century taste—neoclassicism and cosmopolitan chinoiserie—to pornographic playthings for a wanton aristocracy. Peeking into the dressing room, we discover the true “secret” of aristocratic taste: that it is nothing more than base lust. A Chinese Tale’s erotic humor mocks the very concept of modern taste through the logic of the double entendre, transforming every artifact of lively imagination and good judgment into a vehicle for illicit pleasure. It rewrites in particular the idea suggested by Stalker and Parker’s Treatise on Japaning—that the loveliness of a woman’s mind, in addition to expressing itself in her person, can be literally reflected in the japanned surfaces of the well-furnished household. “What can be more surprising,” the Treatise asks, “than to have our Chambers overlaid with Varnish more glossy and reflecting than polisht Marble? No amorous Nymph need entertain a Dialogue with her Glass, or Narcissus retire to a Fountain, to survey his charming countenance, when the whole house is one entire Speculum.”27 The authors appeal to the authority of classical myth to promote a narcissistic relationship between a woman and her furniture that carries no moral censure. This intimate relationship between a woman’s image and the surface of her things is the basis of a decorative ideal, in which the interior of the house is a continuous reflective as well as decorated surface, so that one can literally see oneself, and thereby recognize one’s mental virtues, in one’s things. Hatchett parodies this logic by reducing the woman to one particular “thing”—“the vain, the wanton Thing”—that, when reflected in her furniture, transforms the room into a pornographic theater. Aesthetic self-fashioning is rewritten as erotic self-gratification. Attacking the principle of good taste negotiated in and through foreign objects, A Chinese Tale targets chinoiserie as a medium of illicit pleasure that collapses the distinction between subject and object. Some of the most scandalous erotic prints hanging in Chamyam’s dressing room depict

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women receiving sexual pleasure from things Chinese. The sight of “Queen Joan upon her Back, just falling, / Thrusting the golden skipping Ball in” is explained by a footnote: the “golden skipping Ball” is “a leud Contrivance used by Chinese ladies, containing a certain Portion of Quicksilver, which the Heat of the Parts causes to vibrate, and give extraordinary Titillation” (14). There is also “Sapho contracting her wide Thing, / And Phaon arm’d with Chinese Ring” (15), a couplet that aligns Sappho’s “wide Thing” with the “Chinese ring” with which her lover pleasures her. The intimacy between women and chinoiserie, far from a mental relationship moderated by good taste, is a carnal one that gives things an uncanny erotic life (the skipping balls heating up and “vibrating” when inserted into a woman’s body) and reduces women to the sexual mechanics of their “things.” The comic thrust of A Chinese Tale, nicely captured in the title of its adaptation The Court Lady’s Curiosity, aims to reframe traditional aristocratic rituals of display as perversely self-interested forms of exposure. The idea of a “court lady” displaying herself only becomes illicit when she is removed from the context of the court and its public spectacles and situated instead in the privatized space of the home. The figure of the masturbating woman riveted to the sight of her own “thing,” by rendering the very notion of female self-display as pornographic, undermines the epistemological framework that organized the well-furnished “Chinese” interior of the early eighteenth century. As I argued in chapter 1, chinoiserie decoration translated aristocratic privilege into a mental faculty exercised through tasteful consumption. Like the aristocratic power it challenged, modern taste relied on spectacle and display; the Chinese room was designed to be seen, much like the lavishly decorated reception rooms of European ministers of state, and as the Treatise on Japaning makes plain, when visitors were invited to admire the chinoiserie they were implicitly invited to admire the person who displayed it. By attacking the propriety of such rituals of admiration in the private spaces of the home, satires like A Chinese Tale inscribe an absolute distinction between public and private life that cuts off imagined traffic between “the world” and the individual—the very traffic to which chinoiserie gave material form. As artifacts of a culture that willfully confused public and private life, interiors furnished in the Chinese style themselves become objects of “curiosity,” evidence of Restoration-era excesses in violation of modern domestic norms. In 1742, George Bickham published Deliciæ Britannicæ; or, The Curiosities of Hampton-Court and Windsor-Castle Delineated. Ostensibly a guide to help the reader develop good taste by examining print reproductions of the culture’s finest paintings, the book leads the “curious” reader on a virtual guided tour of the Royal Palaces, offering a glimpse of their extraordinary decoration to those who have never seen anything like it.

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Paradoxically, it is the fact that the palaces’ rooms are designed to be seen— their spectacular quality—that is presented as a “curiosity,” that is, as something previously unseen, hidden away from this particular readership by the palace walls until print culture provided virtual access. In the drawing-room of Windsor Castle, one finds On the Ceiling is beautifully represented his late Majesty King Charles the IId, riding in a triumphant Car, and trampling under his Feet the Figures of Envy and Ignorance. Over the Chimney is the Portrait of a celebrated Philosopher, in a Chinese Dress, with a Crucifix in one Hand, painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller. On one Side is a Magdalen, in a fine Taste; and on the other Venus and Adonis, by Rubens. Over the door is the Head of John the Baptist, in a Charger.28

The “fine Taste” of the Restoration court, combining chinoiserie, neoclassicism, and icons of European Catholic power, was designed to impress visitors to the court of the cosmopolitan prestige of England’s royalty. Kneller’s painting, The Chinese Convert (1687), commissioned by James II shortly before he was driven by the Glorious Revolution to France, commemorated the visit to Europe of Shen Fuzong, whose conversion to Christianity confirmed that the cultural traffic between the European and Chinese elite was in fact a two-way exchange.29 As part of the palace’s chinoiserie, the portrait declares that things Chinese in English spaces refer to a universal “order in variety” authored by a Christian—indeed, a Catholic—God. Translated in print into an object of curiosity for a non-aristocratic readership, however, the spectacle is wrested from its original political logic and is reframed for the moral scrutiny of later generations. The grandiosity of the room’s symbolism seems at best quaint, evidence of the misguided hubris that led to a regime’s exile, and at worst gruesome, the severed head of St. John the Baptist capturing the grotesque materialism associated with Catholicism and aristocracy both, and possibly reminding readers of the fate of Charles I and his “unnatural” leadership. A Chinese Tale and A Court Lady’s Curiosity strategically reduce the entire palace interior to the lady’s dressing room, one of the first spaces in the upper-class household to become designated as “private.”30 The erotica that adorns Chamyam’s dressing room seems to combine the decor of the king’s and queen’s personal chambers as described in Deliciæ Britannicæ. According to Bickham, the king’s chambers are, like the drawing room, an homage to Charles II: the bedchamber contains a ceiling portrait of Charles on the throne receiving the supplications of a humble France; the ceiling of the dressing-room shows “the Fabulous History of Jupiter, descending in the Lap of the beauteous Danae, in a Golden Shower”; and the ceiling of the closet represents “Jupiter’s Amour with Leda, under the Transformation

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of a Swan.” The doorways are embellished with similar classical themes: “a naked Venus, by Rubens”; “a gay Bacchanal”; “a Magdalen”; “a sleeping Cupid, by Titian”; and “Psyche, the young and beauteous Mistress of Cupid” (183–84). The references of the queen’s personal chambers are decidedly less erotic: the ceiling of her bedchamber portrays “Morpheus, the God of Sleep, indulging himself in Indolence and Ease”; over the chimney is a painting of “the Holy Family, by Raphael.” The queen’s own “indolence and ease” is ensured by a luxurious combination of English velvet and Chinese silk covering the bed, windows, screens, chairs, and stools. Her “beauty room” is “furnish’d with fourteen several Portraits of the reigning Beauties,” images of court’s most celebrated noblewomen designed both to represent the ladies’ service to the court and to inspire the queen’s preparation of her own appearance (185–87). By offering the “curious” reader a peek at the royal chambers, Bickham participates in subordinating the political resonance of the rooms’ decoration to the spectacular effect of exposing secret treasures. A Chinese Tale takes this project even further. It fully dismantles the symbolic economies that spread across the surfaces of the king and queen’s network of personal rooms—cultural resonances inherited from the Restoration—by leveling classical allusion, erotic mythology, Chinese luxury, and displays of female beauty into a single aesthetic of material excess in Chamyang’s dressing room. This room, the poem assures us, contains a plethora of pictures, “by prime Hands all, / Enough to stock twice Windsor-Hall” (15). The private status of the room makes the spectacular quality of the decor perversely reflexive. The image of Chamyang’s body, reflected in the furniture and framed by its magnificence, serves no political purpose; it enflames dormant passions divorced from any allegiance. Unable to act politically, such passions inevitably erupt sexually—which is to say, as “nature gone awry,” violating boundaries and engendering social disorder. Once emissaries of cultural authority from an entitled aristocracy to an emergent class of tasteful thinkers, Chinese objects are reinvented in these mid-eighteenth-century texts as artifacts of less regulated times, things that smuggle “unnatural” desires into modernity’s privatized spaces. In this vein, the oversized china jar in A Chinese Tale doesn’t totter and break like Belinda’s china, but instead hides a libertine who, hijacking Chamyam’s self-admiration and arousal, ultimately leaps out to deflower her. Her china functions as her double insofar as both woman and jar are beautiful objects secretly housing the perverse desires of a wanton aristocracy, but it is also cast as her antagonist, a deceptive object that conspires with libertine desire to ruin her. Chamyang’s ruin is further assisted by yet another treacherous object that emerges from the chinoiserie of her room—her own “thing,”

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her body reduced to genitalia, that forms the aesthetic centerpiece of the room: That Master-piece! That Source of Passion! That Thing! that’s never out of Fashion. (23)

“That Thing,” like the china jar, represents the material part of the female person as it turns traitor to her own subjectivity. Both her china and her body serve their own agenda, indulging “passions” and “fashions” inherited from an earlier version of English culture. The poem thus attributes sexual misbehavior to the pernicious effect of aristocratic object relations—their rituals of self-objectification, admiration, and enthrallment. Wrested from their political context and privatized as part of modern femininity, these residual elements of the ancien régime, having no “natural” object or universal purpose, become grotesquely self-satisfying. Modern sexuality is, in this way, the perverse reincarnation of the materials of a disavowed culture.

THE UNNATURAL BIRTH OF ORIENTALISM

Chinoiserie’s changing relationship to the English subject in mideighteenth-century literature is part of a broader cultural shift that has been well mapped in studies of fiction, particularly of the novel. G. J. Barker-Benfield identifies this movement as a “culture of sensibility”; Nancy Armstrong describes it as “the domestication of culture,” and Michael McKeon, “the gendering of ideology.”31 Although interpretations of the novel’s cultural role and relationship to modernity remain diverse and contested, there seems to be a general consensus that eighteenth-century writing, which introduced the new form we call the novel, replaced networks of upper-class political power with standards of individual behavior and morality as the foundation of social order. These new standards of behavior were specifically focused on women’s ability to participate in modern consumerism, especially modern reading practices, without compromising their subjectivity. Female sexuality becomes the preferred discourse of general cultural assessment; in McKeon’s words, “virtue in the guise of female chastity becomes powerfully normative in progressive narrative, emblematic of the honor that has been alienated from, and is yet pursued by, a corrupt male aristocracy.”32 Armstrong emphasizes that “what began chiefly as writing that situated the individual between the poles of nature and culture, self and society, sex and sexuality only later became a psychological reality, and not the other way around,”33 while William B. Warner and J. Paul Hunter,

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among others, have opened this category of writing that seems to have found its ideal form in the novel to include multiple types of print literature that flourished in the eighteenth century but failed to follow the novel’s path to hegemonic literary dominance.34 Studies of the novel since Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel first attributed the genre’s success to the triumph of middle-class values35 have illuminated how literacy emerged in the eighteenth century as a skill aimed at negotiating the commercialization of literary production and the privatization of reading practices—in other words, of ensuring that the “reading public” comprised private individuals. A domesticating practice that transformed public forms of print into privatized knowledge, reading itself was integrated into a sexual economy of reform and self-regulation. As I have argued in this chapter, material objects other than print fiction were also ushered into this new economy and subjected to new regimes of discipline. The consequences of this shift for chinoiserie are particularly interesting because they illuminate how national cultures and identities can be generated by the reorganization of individual subjectivities rather than the other way around. In this section, I show how the seemingly contradictory responses of the English public to chinoiserie in architecture and landscape design—on the one hand, increased consumer enthusiasm, and, on the other, increased critical opposition to its proliferation—are actually both consistent with a broader literary rewriting of the English subject as an inhabitant of fantasy or reality, imagination or reason, China or England, but never both at the same time. The privatization of English selfhood in the name of modernity produced these generic distinctions as matters of ontological difference. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the satirical association of chinoiserie with “unnatural” desires evident in Hatchett’s Chinese Tale developed into a full-blown discourse. Social and cultural historians have long noted that Great Britain witnessed a critical backlash against the popular Chinese taste in the late eighteenth century, but they have been unable to explain why this nationalist resistance to the exotic emerged when it did. In fact, upon scrutiny, many of the anti-chinoiserie stances of the later eighteenth century seem rather bizarre. As David Porter has demonstrated, two of the most famous enemies of chinoiserie, William Hogarth and Horace Walpole, actually promoted aesthetic styles quite similar in principle to English chinoiserie, such that their objections seem to be aimed at the idea of an affiliation with China rather than toward the aesthetics themselves.36 Nor was the turn against the Chinese taste reflected in either aristocratic taste or popular fashion; consumption of chinoiserie porcelains, textiles, and home furnishings continued to increase until well into the nineteenth century. Following the example of prominent midcentury arbiters of taste like Mary Delany and Elizabeth Montagu, women of fortune continued

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to compete to display the most magnificent Chinese rooms; in the 1770s, David Garrick and his wife commissioned Thomas Chippendale, whose name had become associated with the “Chinese taste,” to design their chinoiserie bedroom. Meanwhile, as English manufacturers began to produce chinoiserie of all qualities domestically and in increasing quantities, it also became commonplace in houses of lesser quality; as Hugh Honour notes, by the end of the eighteenth century, “chinoiserie rooms were . . . to be found in houses of all types.”37 But even champions of the style acknowledged that there was something “unnatural,” excessive, and decidedly un-English about chinoiserie, which represents a significant ideological departure from how the style was described by early enthusiasts such as Sir William Temple and Joseph Addison. Montagu’s self-mockery in the epigraph to this chapter captures the attitude of the canniest chinoiserie enthusiasts of the second half of the century. Fully aware that her Chinese room tests boundaries of English propriety, she jokes about the danger of turning both un-English and self-admiring in her quip that others might think she fancies herself a Buddha. Her indulgence in chinoiserie is thus justified not by the quality of her taste so much as by the moderating force of her sense of humor, which directly undermines any intimacy between the Chinese room and Montagu’s rational self. Not every proponent of chinoiserie endorsed the style tongue-in-cheek. Some, like the Scottish architect and royal favorite Sir William Chambers, embraced chinoiserie explicitly as a way of escaping the limits of propriety imposed even on upper-class subjects by emergent middle-class standards of English taste.38 Chambers’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772) railed against the “naturalism” of English landscaping epitomized by Lancelot “Capability” Brown, noting with “indignation” that the English public had come to expect no more from their finest gardens than “a little grass, and a few American weeds.”39 Chambers characterizes Brown and his followers as “kitchen gardeners, well skilled in the culture of sallads, but little acquainted with the principles of Ornamental Gardening,” drawing a distinction between commoners who have a pragmatic attachment to nature and an elite who are at liberty to pursue aesthetic accomplishment: “It cannot be expected that men uneducated, and doomed by their condition to waste the vigor of life in hard labour, should ever go far in so refined, so difficult a pursuit” (iii). Committed to an aesthetic of material privilege, Chambers promotes a “Chinese” or “oriental” style of gardening as a way of indulging in luxuries English nature alone cannot afford. “Poets and painters soar above the pitch of nature, when they would give energy to their compositions,” he writes. “The same privilege, therefore, should be allowed to Gardeners; inanimate, simple nature, is too insipid for our purposes” (19). He imagines supplementing the English landscape with pagodas and bridges;

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exotic beasts, trees, and flowers; and elaborate walks through hidden copses, discreet grottos, and a series of “pleasure-houses” containing concubines ready to entertain gentleman visitors. Chinoiserie is, for Chambers, a way of restoring Restoration-era material indulgence to the English upper classes. His fantasies are fuelled by a randy nostalgia for aristocratic magnificence and the pleasures and privileges associated with it. Lacking any contemporary English examples of such power embodied in an aesthetic, Chambers imagines the forms must be imported from China. “Nothing is too great for Eastern magnificence to attempt,” he explains, “and there can be few impossibilities, where treasures are inexhaustible, where power is unlimited, where munificence knows no bounds” (105). Chambers’s China—a land of infinite possibility and resources, “where munificence knows no bounds”—bears less resemblance to the wealthy, ancient, and enlightened civilization represented by early modern Jesuits than to the explicitly fantastical setting of “The Story of Aladdin; or The Wonderful Lamp” in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1706).40 The Dissertation appeals to Chinese authority not as a manifestation of universal truth but as an enabling fiction, a mythology that provides an aesthetic vocabulary in excess of the categories of nature. Chambers’s version of the Chinese style of gardening, too, departs significantly from that of earlier proponents of AngloChinese landscaping. The early eighteenth-century interpretation of Chinese gardening was summarized by Joseph Addison, who declared in 1712 that “our British gardeners . . . instead of humouring Nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible,” and that they had much to learn from the Chinese, “who shew a Genius in Works of this Nature, and therefore always conceal the Art by which they direct themselves.”41 All gardening is artifice, according to Addison, but the Chinese garden displays an ideal artifice that is indistinguishable from the natural. Chambers defends the Chinese taste by reversing this formulation. “In England,” he writes, where, in opposition to the rest of Europe, a new manner is universally adopted, in which no appearance of art is tolerated, our gardens differ very little from common fields, so closely is common nature copied in most of them; there is generally so little variety in the objects, such a poverty of imagination in the contrivance, and art in the arrangement, that these compositions rather appear the offspring of chance than design; and a stranger is often at a loss to know whether he be walking in a meadow, or a pleasure ground, made and kept at a very considerable expence: he sees nothing to amuse him, nothing to excite his curiosity, nor any thing to keep up his attention. (v)

Chinese gardeners, in contrast, though they “have nature for their general model, yet they are not so attached to her as to exclude all appearance of

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art; on the contrary, they think it, on many occasions, necessary to make an ostentatious shew of their labour” (14). As an aesthetic term, “Chinese” meant to Addison a disappearance of the marks of labor, a receding of the processes of art into its “natural” effects. To Chambers it means precisely the opposite: the visibility of artifice as such, signaling the prerogative of the educated elite to transgress bounds of reason and propriety—indeed, of nature itself. Chambers’s Dissertation was the object of a highly publicized attack by William Mason, a member of Horace Walpole’s Whig circle. A vicious satire of Chambers’s Tory affiliations, Scottishness, and concomitant excesses of taste, Mason’s “An Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers” (1773) provides an instructive example of how the materials of orientalist discourse might be seen as a by-product of late eighteenth-century arguments over art, nature, and English taste. Though little known today, the “Heroic Epistle” was at the time of its publication quite popular. When John Almon collected Mason’s poems in an 1805 edition, he declared in the introduction that “it may, without impropriety, be observed that the Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers, and Mr. Gray’s Elegy in a Country Church-Yard, were the two most popular short Poems published in the last century.”42 Indeed, within five years of its first appearance, the “Heroic Epistle” had been issued in fourteen editions, while Chambers’s Dissertation itself never went beyond two.43 It was Walpole who encouraged Mason to publish the “Epistle”;44 his enthusiasm for the poem’s attack on Chambers is consistent with his own writings on English gardening. As several critics have noted, despite some laudatory remarks on Chinese design in his early writings, Walpole turned vehemently against the Chinese taste later in his career.45 In the 1782 edition of his “History of the Modern Taste in Gardening,” he protested that “the French have of late years adopted our style in gardens, but chusing to be fundamentally obliged to more remote rivals, they deny us half the merit, or rather the originality of the invention, by ascribing the discovery to the Chinese, and by calling our taste in gardening Le Gout Anglo-Chinois. I think I have shewn that this is a blunder.”46 In a 1775 letter to Mason, Walpole accused Chambers of abetting this cultural perjury, writing “that by the help of Sir William Chambers’s lunettes [the French] have detected us for having stolen our gardens from the Chinese.” His indignation at the Anglo-Chinois association also appears in his notes to Mason’s collected satires, where he insists that “the imitation of Nature in Gardens . . . is Original, & indisputably English.”47 David Porter, echoing Arthur Lovejoy, points out that Walpole was simply wrong on this point—that the Chinese influence on “natural” English gardening was thoroughly acknowledged and well documented by such influential writers as Sir William Temple, Joseph Addison, and Alexander

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Pope. The common explanation for Walpole’s short-sightedness on this topic—since no one can accuse Walpole of being poorly read—is that he was blinded by patriotic zeal and cultural conservatism in his later years. Porter adds to this observation the irony that Walpole’s Gothic sensibility is remarkably similar in both style and spirit to Chambers’s take on chinoiserie, suggesting that Walpole’s particular ire toward Chambers derives from the Dissertation’s reminder that not only is English gardening indebted to the Chinese, but so too is the Walpolian Gothic.48 But the success of Mason’s “Epistle” suggests that the resistance to Chambers’s “oriental garden” was much broader than Walpole’s personal idiosyncrasy. An articulation of the Whigs’ general hostility to aristocratic values and the cosmopolitan chinoiserie associated with it, the poem reveals a nascent orientalist logic in the response of Walpole’s circle to Chambers—an orientalism that is, in an echo of Hanway, concerned with the infiltration of English culture by a foreign element, but which identifies that foreignness not as Chinese but Scottish. A Scot born in Sweden, educated in continental Europe, and trained professionally in China as an employee of the Swedish East India Company, Chambers was eventually appointed tutor to the future George III. A favorite of the Hanover court, he made his name as an architect by fulfilling a commission from the Dowager Princess of Wales to design buildings for the gardens at Kew. These included the famous Chinese Pagoda which remains to this day, as well as “several smaller classical temples, . . . an ‘Allhambra,’ a mosque, and the ruins of a Roman triumphal arch.”49 As Kew illustrates, Chambers’s style was not limited to chinoiserie but combined elements of Chinese, Continental, and British neoclassical architectural traditions. In other words, he promoted the kind of “mixed” aesthetic associated with upper-class cosmopolitanism (see figure 5.4). His motley vision became a staple of Georgian architecture: he remained in the king’s employ for the rest of his career, eventually becoming Surveyor-General of the King’s Works and a founding member of the Royal Academy, and following his death in 1796, his influence on royal taste could be seen in the Prince of Wales’s conspicuous chinoiserie installations at Brighton and Carlton House.50 Chambers’s professional success represented several things to Walpole, Mason, and other outspoken opponents of Tory privilege.51 For one, Chambers stood for a now aging model of the English gentleman defined by mercantilist cosmopolitanism; his affinity for the “Chinese taste” operated as a traditional signifier of his international training and hybrid aesthetic preferences. But perhaps more importantly, he represented the inheritance of this particular model of upper-class English masculinity, in the image of Sir William Temple and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, by a new generation of Scots. Although the remarkable surge of intellectual energy out of Edinburgh and Glasgow in the decades following the 1745 Jacobite rebellion began to

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Figure 5.4 “A View of the Wilderness with the Alhambra, the Pagoda and the Mosque,” from William Chambers’s Plans, Elevations, Sections and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew . . . , 1763. © Trustees of the British Museum

efface years of popular anti-Scottish sentiment in London and throughout England, a certain class of England’s native sons was not eager to see their cultural inheritance so readily shared with their recently maligned northern neighbors, especially when the bequest took the form of political favor to Tories. Sir William Chambers, in other words, represented to Mason and his supporters the continued infiltration of the English government by Scottish conservatives. In a nationalist sleight of hand consistent with the confused “dream logic” identified by Newman, Mason conflates this political encroachment from the north with an aesthetic pollution from the east. In the preface to the “Heroic Epistle,” Mason reminds his readers, tongue in cheek, that it is [Chambers’s] professed aim in extolling the taste of the Chinese, to condemn that mean and paltry manner which Kent introduced, which Southcote, Hamilton, and Brown followed, and which, to our national disgrace, is called the English style of gardening. He shews the poverty of this taste, by aptly comparing it to a dinner, which consisted of three gross pieces, three times repeated; and proves to a demonstration, that Nature herself is incapable of pleasing, without the assistance of Art, and that too of the most luxuriant kind. In short, such art as is displayed in the Emperor’s garden of Yuan-MingYuan, near Pekin; where fine lizards, and fine women, human giants, and giant baboons, make but a small part of the superb scenery.52

Mason’s hyperbolically exotic representation of Yuan-Ming-Yuan, or the Chinese emperor’s Old Summer Palace, is ironic considering the fact that the Palace complex was globally renowned for its integration of European design

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and architecture, which indicated to European rulers that after centuries of effort, Europe had finally made a significant impression on the taste of the Chinese elite. Although it is possible that Mason’s attack on Yuan-Ming-Yuan betrays an ignorance of the actual design of the Chinese palace complex and its international reputation, it is more likely a deliberate disavowal of the very concept of a European-Chinese hybrid tradition, a sentiment echoed in Walpole’s and Gray’s refusal to acknowledge long-accepted Chinese influences in English culture. For Mason, the grotesque quality of the “oriental garden,” whether in England or in China, is a result of its “unnatural” combination of different cultural traditions, an intermixing parodied by the fantastic couplings of “fine lizards” and “fine women,” or “human giants” and “giant baboons”—pairs that seem superficially to share common qualities, but that actually represent boundary-crossings that violate natural order. For all their mutual hostility, Chambers and Mason unwittingly collaborate in consolidating a series of binary oppositions that structure English aesthetic and political discourse alike. They agree that nature and artifice are distinct, and they assign Englishness to nature and Chineseness to art. In this, they both depart from the Chinese taste as understood by its earlier proponents—as art’s expression of nature, where artifice and nature, like Englishness and Chineseness, improve each other in harmonious combination. Their disagreement is suspended by a common commitment to taking sides for or against “simple nature.”53 Indeed, when Mason quips in his appeal to Chambers, “Teach [the Muse], like thee, to gild her splendid song, / With scenes of Yuan-Ming, and sayings of Li-Tsong; / Like thee to scorn Dame Nature’s simple sense; / Leap each Ha Ha of truth and common sense,”54 he cannot be said to exaggerate or distort Chambers’s own language, only to disapprove of Chambers’s professed aim to flee “insipid” nature. In his attempt to undermine Chambers’s authority, Mason actually succeeds in rooting the fundamental part of Chambers’s argument—its rewriting of the categories of “nature” and “English” as antithetical to “art” and “Chinese”—in popular discourse. The “Heroic Epistle” confirms the orientalist logic of Chambers’s vision by successfully using it to convey current political grievances—in this case, against the Scottish influence in English culture and politics. It thus sheds some light on the curious case of Walpole’s anti-Chinese turn, suggesting that Walpole’s position, too, is a rhetorical stance in favor of a model of Englishness allergic to foreign— read Scottish—influence. Recognizing the local concerns of such eruptions of orientalism reveals how solipsistic the discourse is and has been from its first articulation. While the rhetoric quickly found a career independent of, say, Whig oppositional politics, coming to bear powerfully on material relations between Great Britain and its Eastern neighbors, rivals, and colonies throughout the years of empire and into the present, it is clear in examples

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like this one that orientalism is fundamentally a mode of self-scrutiny, one concerned with abjecting those parts of the self that have become strange and incompatible with current narratives of improvement.

BUSINESS AND AMUSEMENT

I have argued in this chapter that the emergent perception of chinoiserie as somehow perverse and unnatural is an effect of its continued associations with archaic forms of aristocratic power—material and embodied signs of social quality and political power that rely on putting things and bodies on display. Returning to the Chinese export punchbowl decorated in imitation of Hogarth, however, we are reminded that the changing status of things Chinese in the English imagination was also the effect of their association with a different order of things, namely mass print, a form of media that proliferated in Britain following midcentury technical press innovations.55 While sexual satires refashioned aristocratic passions into torrents of desire threatening to erupt from within the individual, modern print technology made it possible for design to proliferate in England on a scale yet unseen. Together, these two cultural shifts—one ideological, one technological—animated two parts of the aesthetic experience of taste against a third: as the passionate imagination and the material object took on apparent lives of their own, they threatened to conspire against the integrity of the rational subject. As cheap printed materials increased, so too did English Chinese design. The 1750s saw the publication of William Halfpenny’s New Designs for Chinese Temples; Edwards and Darly’s New Book of Chinese Designs; Thomas Chippendale’s Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, which introduced the signature “Chinese Chippendale” style; and William Chambers’s Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils, to name only a few.56 These collections of design prints set the stage for Robert Sayer’s The Ladies Amusement; or, Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy, published in 1760. The first edition sold out almost immediately; new editions appeared in 1762 and 1769. Most of the designs in Sayer’s book were drawn by Jean Pillement, one of the most prolific European chinoiserie designers of the mid- to late eighteenth century. One biographer notes that in the six years between his arrival in London and the appearance of the Ladies Amusement, at least fifteen distinct books and folios of Pillement’s chinoiserie designs were published in London.57 Thus while the sheer quantity of printed design sheets in circulation—and, accordingly, the number of material objects fashioned after these designs—increased, the aesthetic quality of the designs themselves was becoming homogeneous as a single artist’s vision, through

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the technology of mass production, quickly became the standard for the entire market in chinoiserie. The editors of a 1959 edition of the Ladies Amusement note that this was “the most important Design Book and Practical Guide used by the ArtistDesigners and skilled Craftsmen of the later Georgian period, for the ornamentation not only of Japanned Wares but even more extensively for Enamels, Ceramics, Furniture, Textiles, Tapestries, Carpets and Silver . . . many of its attractive designs have been identified on lacquered furniture, silver tea-caddies, enamels, textiles, Pontypool japanned wares and a variety of English ceramics. It was used at the manufactories of Worcester, Bow and Chelsea, probably by Josiah Wedgwood, and also by Sadler and Green of Liverpool for their tiles.”58 In the 1760s, a process was developed for printing on textiles, allowing manufacturers to reproduce engraved designs directly onto fabrics for clothing and decoration; a similar process spread throughout English porcelain factories in the 1760s and 70s, flooding the market with transferprinted pottery (see figure 5.5).59 Josiah Wedgwood, one of the most prominent entrepreneurs of new decorative technologies, introduced London shoppers to the “showroom,” a vast commercial space furnished like a private household, designed to show consumers how to integrate Wedgwood china into their own homes. In a letter to a friend, Wedgwood explained that in the showroom, “business, & amusement can be made to go hand in hand.”60 These rapid changes in the manufacture and marketing of chinoiserie from the 1750s onward were embraced by producers and consumers alike as the long-awaited arrival of a distinctly British industry in chinaware. Chinoiserie objects, from this point forward, could be considered evidence of English

Figure 5.5 Porcelain bowl with transfer-printed design after Jean Pillement, manufactured at the Worcester Porcelain Factory, ca. 1756–58. © Trustees of the British Museum

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industrial ingenuity, rather than signs of England’s participation in sinocentric global trade. As Cyril Williams-Wood notes, “The marriage of printing and ceramics occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century, and has always been considered a British achievement.”61 The Englishness of chinoiserie in the second half of the eighteenth century was increasingly attributed to its mode of production rather than its modes of consumption. Texts like The Court Lady’s Curiosity and Chambers’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening figure amusement as a wanton form of aristocratic leisure—admiration, we might say, leached of its political significance and infused with sexual interest. By linking amusement to business, chinoiserie prints and printed objects combined the perverse delights of the style with the pervasive quality of mass media. Generating signs of high luxury through industrial technologies of mechanical reproduction, the material conditions of Chinese design’s proliferation in the late eighteenth century mimicked the “grotesque” quality of designs by Pillement and his imitators. Robert Sayer writes in the introduction to the Ladies Amusement, “The Grotesque is a Taste which at present much prevails and seems particularly calculated for this Work, which consists in a wild Connection of Beasts and Flowers, and Shells with Birds, &c.”62 Such “wild Connection[s],” he points out, are one of the prerogatives of chinoiserie. “If the Scene be European,” he instructs, “in the Body of your Design place no exotic or preposterous Object, but carefully observing to keep the small and faintest Hills, Trees, Figures, &c. at the greatest Distance, ever placing on the Bottom or Front Ground, some grand or striking Feature.” But “with Indian and Chinese Subjects greater Liberties may be taken, because Luxuriance of Fancy recommends their Productions more than Propriety, for in them is often seen a Butterfly supporting an Elephant, or Things equally absurd; yet from their gay Colouring and airy Disposition seldom fail to please” (4). In contrast to earlier manuals like Stalker and Parker’s Treatise on Japaning, which treated chinoiserie as an occasion to bring fancy into compliance with rational order, the Ladies Amusement presents chinoiserie as an opportunity to abandon order in pursuit of pleasures divorced from reason. The proponents of mass-produced chinoiserie design celebrated the possibility of liberating “fancy” and “pleasure” from the bounds of good judgment. In doing so, they rewrote the principle of the Chinese taste. Where once it had exercised the pleasures of the imagination in service to a natural order, now it licensed forms of imagination and pleasure that were anathema to order, indeed, to the laws of empirical reality itself. Once representative of the world’s universal “order in variety,” the Chinese taste now indicated a world apart—a separate realm where novel and curious ideas established an alternative unreality. Chinoiserie could thus continue to proliferate in England but remain exotic to the rational subjectivity of the people who

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owned it. One of the most striking tendencies of Chinese grotesques after Pillement’s style is the embellishment of lines, frames, and motifs with Lilliputian figures who seem to be living inside the designs (see figure 5.6). While static “scenes of life” had been part of chinoiserie design since the late seventeenth century, late-eighteenth-century Chinese figures are not only part of the decoration but presented as living in and interacting with the decoration, frequently hopping out of the frame. Edwards and Darly’s A New Book of Chinese Designs, for example, features several whimsical drawings of candlesticks and other decorative objects literally inhabited by tiny Chinese men (see figure 5.7). One design for a candlestick shows a man sitting on the support, which another man threatens to cut with an axe—these characters appropriate the candlestick to their own fanciful world, which has little to do with the object’s household function as candlestick (see figure 5.8). Generated in mass quantities through print reproduction to grace decorative prints, wallpaper, drapery, china sets, chairs, tables, and wardrobes, these miniature Chinese creatures seem to be infiltrating English life, living a magical parallel existence that operates by different laws of propriety, proportion, and movement than those of the “real” English world. The “speculum” of the japanned household described by the 1688 Treatise on Japaning, which allowed the English individual to admire the beauty of his or her own ingenuity in reflective Chinese surfaces, has, a century later,

Figure 5.6 Title page of Jean Pillement’s A New Book of Chinese Ornaments, 1755. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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Figure 5.7 Plate 27 from Edwards and Darly’s A New Book of Chinese Designs, 1754. © Trustees of the British Museum

Figure 5.8 Plate 62 from Edwards and Darly’s A New Book of Chinese Designs, 1754. © Trustees of the British Museum

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been transformed. Technologies of mechanical reproduction have loosened design from subjective taste, so that it seems to proliferate with a grotesque life of its own. Looking into the chinoiserie mirrors of the late eighteenth century, the individual transports her own image into a fantastic scene governed not only by her own fancy but by the whims of a motley collective taste inspired by aristocratic nostalgia and generated by modern industry (see figure 5.9). Chinoiserie thus served as a reminder of larger forces compromising the integrity of bourgeois, self-regulated taste and reason—on the one hand, the lingering appeal of aristocratic regimes of spectacle and enthrallment, drained of political import but charged with a distinctly modern sexual energy, and on the other, the mechanical drive of modern media, which relocated the work of imagination from the individual mind to a self-replicating fashion marketplace that supplies the materials of English

Figure 5.9 Chinoiserie mirror, made in London ca. 1760. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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fantasy. These transformations both material and conceptual in the category of chinoiserie compelled new literary strategies of negotiating the relationship between English subjects and their Chinese things in the late eighteenth century. Aristocratic taste could no longer be relied upon to civilize modes of consumption, now that it was considered a perversion of rational judgment, and yet the unremitting floods of cheap chinaware required some framework for defining the kind of “amusement” material objects should afford, as well as the limits of such amusement. As I argue in the next chapter, these cultural tasks fell to the emergent body of prose writing we now call the novel.

6 Disenchanting China Orientalism and the English Novel There were still some subjects indeed, under which she believed [her spirits] must always tremble;—the mention of a chest or a cabinet, for instance—and she did not love the sight of japan in any shape: but even she could allow, that an occasional memento of past folly, however painful, might not be without use. —Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818)1

In the preceding chapters of this book, I have offered a narrative of chinoiserie’s role in eighteenth-century English culture, specifically its relationship to the English subject, as negotiated by literature. This narrative is also a prehistory of orientalism, I argue, that accounts for the emergence in the second half of the century of a logic of absolute separation between the categories of “English” and “Chinese.” This binary organization of cultural difference, the scaffolding of the discourse of orientalism identified by Edward Said, is in direct conflict with the early modern philosophy of cosmopolitan “order in variety” with which this book began, and which governed the English understanding of things Chinese until the middle of the eighteenth century. Far from an instinctive, xenophobic aversion to the unfamiliar, orientalism in eighteenth-century English culture was a counterintuitive rejection of a deeply rooted aristocratic paradigm, namely the fluidity of cultural identities in a cosmopolitan world. In order for orientalism to become, by the nineteenth century, the dominant paradigm informing England’s self-definition in relation to the rest of the globe, an enormous cultural effort had to be invested in redefining the terms and materials of English selfhood, displacing remaining traces of aristocratic authority over what counts as “English” once and for all. In this chapter, I argue that much of this work was performed by the genre

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of fiction we now call the novel. In its commitment to rendering a new form of English life purified of aristocratic inflections, the novel was successful in carving out alternative cultural spaces—such as the gothic, the romance, and the oriental—to store ways of thinking incompatible with its own rational empiricism. It appropriated these categories from forms of fiction that had proliferated in English since the seventeenth century, systematically distinguishing their representations of English character and experience from its own. Srinivas Aravamudan argues that fictional genres distinguished from “novels” as “romance” since Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785) provide a way of thinking about English literary culture in a more cosmopolitan framework than that allowed by the nationalist project of the novel since the late eighteenth century. Genres such as the oriental tale, the travel adventure, the spy tale, and other popular forms of romance “can be placed within the context of a horizontally integrative ‘geography’ of transnational influence and exchange, rather than the more familiar vertical and genealogical ‘history’ of the national model. The latter was itself a product of later eighteenth-century and Romanticist models of national culture that retroactively synthesized ‘the novel’ as a particularity arising from a range of disparate genres and modes.”2 Here, I examine how late eighteenth-century fiction and criticism pursue precisely this agenda of overwriting cosmopolitan models of Englishness with more modern nationalist models by legitimizing certain kinds of subject-object relations and dismissing others as incompatible with “reality.” The novel genre’s successful monopolizing of fictional representations of English reality was instrumental in redefining what kinds of object relations could be considered “really English.” Chinoiserie appears regularly in English novels of the late eighteenth century, just as it appeared perpetually in English life, but it is transformed as it is made to comply with the laws of the novelistic universe. These dictate that no object may behave unnaturally or unrealistically—which is to say, exhibit agency or power over a subject—except in the delusions of a confused mind. In the novel, then, chinoiserie is compelled to give up the very quality that once set it apart from other objects: its special ability both to captivate the individual imagination and to objectify the mind’s work in material form. Things Chinese, under the English novel’s regime of representation, are just things. Ironically, as it displaces chinoiserie from its privileged relationship to the subjective imagination by insisting on a strict logic that things are things, and people are people, the novel quietly and effectively installs itself in china’s place, as the one kind of material object that exhibits the best form of English thought.

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DISENCHANTMENT OF THE OBJECT WORLD

In The Rambler 4 (March 31, 1750), Samuel Johnson prescribes a distinctly modern form of English prose fiction he calls “the comedy of romance,” and which we now call the novel: “works of fiction with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted” because they “exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind.”3 Modern readers, Johnson argues, are no longer enthralled by the magical objects and fantastical plots of heroic romance; as this older form of storytelling loses its power to persuade, a new kind of narrative satisfies the reader’s need for more rational fare by “bring[ing] about natural events by easy means, and . . . keep[ing] up curiosity without the help of wonder” (175). Rambler 4 thus plots English fiction’s entrance into the modern world Max Weber identified as a state of “disenchantment,” where icons once infused with supernatural, divine meaning are systematically demystified and revealed as mere objects.4 According to Weber, rational empiricism succeeded in displacing centuries of religious ideology by establishing a monopoly on the interpretation of material things: “For where the world is considered through the empirical . . . there develops in principle the rejection of every form of consideration that searches out the ‘meaning’ of innerworldly occurrences” (238). Johnson’s essay, by proscribing the narrative iconography of heroic romance, performs a similar rejection of traditional authority in the realm of fiction, liberating the material world from the thrall of aristocratic imagination. During the late eighteenth century, any number of novels heeded Johnson’s call for fiction to “exhibit life in its true state” by banishing the “wild strain of imagination” (175) that filled such archaic prose genres as the chivalric romance and the oriental tale with magical objects and impossible events. In furnishing English life with what might be called purely material objects—things that contained nothing inaccessible to empirical observation and so exercised no mystical powers over living subjects—the novel took responsibility for producing and policing the line between fantasy and reality. But exactly where and how does the novel draw this line? Johnson suggests that the entrance of specific “machines and expedients of heroic romance” clearly indicate that we are looking at something unreal: “giants to snatch a lady from the nuptial rites,” “knights to bring her back from captivity,” “deserts” and “imaginary castles” that conveniently restrict characters’ movements and prevent them from acting with common sense. Johnson’s friend Charlotte Lennox employs precisely such exaggerated devices in her novel The Female Quixote (1752) to demonstrate that her heroine is living

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out a delusion removed from “life in its true state”; the madness of Arabella’s quixotism lies not merely in her mistaking common objects for knights and castles, but in her belief that such knights and castles exist at all. Fantasy trespasses on reality well before the point of madness, however, and novels of the late eighteenth century developed a more nuanced vocabulary of objects and object relations to distinguish a rational world order from an irrational one, a vocabulary they developed by having ordinary objects misread as extraordinary in mundane yet significant ways. Novels turned in particular to the material culture of chinoiserie to perform its disenchantments of the object world. By midcentury, things Chinese were firmly associated with the transition from a traditional, aristocratic order of things (in which objects expressed the social quality of their owners) to an emergent mercantile one (in which commercial objects reflected the varying and not always consistent purchasing power and taste of their owners). Common commodities with an aristocratic lineage, things Chinese provided the novelist with a wide range of commercial objects already infused with an obsolete aura; these things were valued for the power they held over the imagination. By stripping such ornamental objects of aesthetic value and reducing them to their material qualities and economic worth, the novel proposed that reading the world “without the help of wonder” was the only method of reading that was both modern and mature. Novelistic chinoiserie can be considered an exemplary instance of Naomi Schor’s model of the “detail” as a textual object that illuminates “a larger semantic network, bounded on one side by the ornamental, with its traditional connotations of effeminacy and decadence, and on the other, by the everyday, whose ‘prosiness’ is rooted in the domestic sphere of social life presided over by women.”5 Indeed, the most widely read novels of the second half of the century, including those of Richardson, Fielding, and Austen, render the aesthetic of aristocratic decoration—an aesthetic with the Chinese inflection of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism—incompatible with English life as they relocate that life to prosaic domestic spaces. The Chinese object moves between these aesthetic regimes, passing from decadent ornament to everyday thing. What its liminal position suggests depends entirely on what powers are ascribed to objects in general within the fiction. From a romantic perspective, which allows objects to bear meanings independent of subjective interpretation, chinoiserie is potentially a vehicle of contamination communicating aristocratic excess into domestic life. In contrast, from an empirical perspective, which allows no object to bear special meaning beyond its material qualities, things Chinese are just things. Demystified, they mark the outer limit of the real; their ordinariness confirms the impossibility of aristocratic fantasy encroaching on reality.

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The novels I examine below dramatize this struggle between fantasy and empiricism for authority over the object world. As they attempt to refashion “old-fashioned,” romantic narrative forms to satisfy the mature reader and promote a rational approach to life, popular texts like The Female Quixote and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey generate distinctly unnovelistic categories of fiction to house things in the process of disenchantment. At the limits of the novel’s realism, these disavowed modes of thought and excessively meaningful objects converge to form a distinctly “irrational” literature that we now recognize as the gothic. A repository of archaic and orientalized plots and objects, the gothic offers the childish pleasures that the novel renounces in the name of modernity. This purpose is perhaps most explicitly realized in Northanger Abbey, where the gothic serves as a way of consolidating archaic object relations that the novel outgrows along with the heroine. By situating Austen’s work as part of the late eighteenth-century shift away from the ornamental and toward prosaic realism, we can observe how the novel modernizes the relationship between subjects and objects. Austen’s treatment of things Chinese is paradigmatic of a much larger process that lays the ground for nineteenth-century materialism. Northanger Abbey turns the chinoiserie of the English household into a contested site where rationalism and common sense struggle with gothic romance; at stake is a new kind of happiness that desires reality over fantasy. As the novel humiliates its protagonist for misreading household Chinese objects, it wrests those objects from the grip of irrational thought and restores to them their sensory qualities. Austen’s novels make a point of preserving such demystified objects as signs of the triumph of good judgment in the modern world. In this way, I suggest, Austen’s disenchanted china signifies a new order of things as well as the novel’s particular power to represent that order.

THE MONSTROSITY OF CHARM

Johnson’s criticism of “wonder” as a literary device is part of a more general effort in mid-eighteenth-century British writing to reassess the iconic power that objects exercise over individuals. Rambler 4 represents a growing sense that rational empiricism is categorically incompatible with the work of the imagination, an idea that revisited the theory of epistemology presented in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke proposed that the mind acquired knowledge by culling sensory information from the object world to furnish the “empty cabinet” of the mind.6 Early eighteenth-century theories of a polite or tasteful imagination allowed certain minds to take aesthetic pleasure in the world of objects as well. Joseph Addison drew on

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Locke explicitly to define these secondary “pleasures of the imagination,” arguing that the same mind that collected the information that forms the basis of knowledge and judgment possessed the power to enjoy the process of sensory acquisition, to revel in the experience of wonder, surprise, and curiosity that attends the mind’s encounter with new objects.7 For Addison, the imagination’s gathering of sensory information differed from the furnishing of the understanding only in that it bypassed the faculty of reason to stimulate the center of mental activity known as the fancy: “The Colours paint themselves on the Fancy, with very little Attention of Thought or Application of Mind in the Beholder. We are struck, we know not how . . . and immediately assent to the Beauty of an Object, without enquiring into the particular Causes and Occasions of it” (3:538). This momentary suspension of reason opens a different line of communication between the object and the subject that transmits the object’s “Beauty” directly to the “Soul”: there is nothing that makes its way more directly to the Soul than Beauty, which immediately diffuses a secret Satisfaction and Complacency thro’ the Imagination, and gives a Finishing to any thing that is Great or Uncommon. The very first Discovery of it strikes the mind with an inward Joy, and spreads a Chearfulness and Delight through all its Faculties. (3:542)

Though not a quality that speaks to reason, beauty is an indispensable property of the object; its stimulation of the imagination constitutes the “Finishing” or completion of the object as a mental acquisition. Indeed, Addison suggests, the pleasures of the imagination are what inspire the rational mind to pursue new objects of knowledge. While unfamiliar things confound the understanding, [God] has annexed a secret Pleasure to the Idea of any thing that is new or uncommon, that he might encourage us in the Pursuit after Knowledge, and engage us to search into the Wonders of his Creation. . . . Every thing that is new or uncommon raises a Pleasure in the Imagination, because it fills the Soul with an agreeable Surprise [and] gratifies its Curiosity. (3:545)

This pleasure explains the mind’s attraction to what it does not yet understand—or, in Addison’s words, “[i]t is this that bestows Charms on a Monster” (3:541). For Addison, then, the “Charms” bestowed by an active imagination, the stimulation of wonder instead of reason, give rise to the curiosity so essential to Locke’s model of understanding. When Johnson attempts four decades later to identify a kind of writing that can “keep up curiosity without the help

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of wonder,” he is challenging not only the kinship of fiction and romance but also the close relationship of imagination to understanding established by Enlightenment epistemology. Johnson’s essay gives a new edge to Lockean rationality by putting it on the defense against imagination’s tendency to undermine judgment. By so redefining as dangerous the faculty that transmits the power of an object’s beauty immediately to the innermost life of the subject, Johnson brings aesthetics in line with an absolute distinction between subjects and objects as the basis of a rational world order. In doing so, he turns wonder into the residue of an older intimacy between subject and object, which has no positive role to play once empiricism recognizes no direct line from the object world to the soul. Reading Rambler 4 as a disavowal of Addisonian taste, we can appreciate the degree to which Johnson saw realism as the means to neutralize the iconicity of aristocratic culture. Johnson’s distrust of “the machines and expedients of the heroic romance,” which resort to “easy means” of persuading a reader at the expense of the “exhibit[ion of] life in its true state” (175), recalls Locke’s own attack on figurative language as the enemy of empirical reason. Locke claimed that “all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment.”8 Johnson’s endorsement of realistic fiction was also an endorsement of a purely empirical relationship between individuals and things. This relationship was endangered by the examples posed by the archaic devices of romance and the whole category of ornamental objects that came to stand for an older elite culture, objects whose aesthetic qualities were presumed to reflect the noble blood of their owners. While for Addison a rational object was incomplete without that aesthetic “finishing” discovered to and by the imagination, Locke and Johnson saw any object that claimed to possess something more than the sum of its material parts as an agent of deception. Such objects, like the aristocratic body, seemed to contain a meaning beyond the sum of their sensible qualities and so defy the principle of rational analysis. Rambler 4 charged the novel with reproducing a world free from the deceptions of older genres of literature and the object relations they represented. Chinoiserie, which had so captivated the polite imagination of the early eighteenth century, proved an efficient way for the novel to neutralize the iconic power inhering in certain objects. In the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), Fielding uses china to ridicule an irrational domestic economy that grants decorative effect priority over the well-being of the household: “Surely he hath a very ill-framed Mind, who can look on Ugliness, Infirmity, or Poverty, as ridiculous in themselves . . . but should we discover [in a poor house] . . . empty Plate or China Dishes on the Side-board, or any other Affectation of Riches and Finery either on their Persons or in their

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Furniture; we might then indeed be excused, for ridiculing so fantastical an Appearance.”9 Though it is not “unreal” in the same way a giant is, or an imaginary castle, Fielding nevertheless uses chinaware to create the same problem Johnson identifies with heroic romance—the intrusion of fantasy into everyday life—exploiting the seeming absurdity of china’s appearance in this context to call upon the reader to deny such objects a place in common domestic economy. Richardson extends this logic to the management of upper-class households as well, seizing on china in Pamela (1740–41) to turn excessive attachment to material things into a sign of domestic neglect. Mr. B advises Pamela, as his wife, not to become one of those irrational women who are disturbed to distraction by the loss of their chinaware. “I shall never forget the discomposure that Mrs Arthur gave herself on one of her footmen’s happening to stumble, and let fall a fine China dish,” he says; “and she was so sincere in it, that she suffered it to spread all round the table, and not one of the company, myself excepted, but either became her consoler, or fell into stories of the like misfortunes; and, for the rest of the evening, we were turned into blundering footmen, and careless servants.”10 The social advances Pamela has made as a result of her “virtue,” in other words, might be reversed by the contagious social effects of china-obsession, which turn the upper-class household into a carnivalesque space where people of quality are transformed into “servants.” Richardson similarly associates a taste for chinoiserie with the corrosion of aristocratic integrity in The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), in which Lady G complains of her husband’s “gew-gaw japan-china taste”:11 “If my Lord could just be cured of his taste for trifles and nick-knacks, I should, possibly, be induced to consider him a man of better understanding . . . But who can forbear, sometimes, to think slightly of a man, who, by effeminacies, and a Shell and China taste, undervalues himself? I hope I shall cure him of those foibles.”12 By setting things Chinese so aggressively at odds with the image of orderly English life, these novels systematically invoke chinoiserie to authorize acceptable object relations by disavowing the kinds of aesthetic—which is to say, unempirical—attachments that once defined china’s privileged role in the well-appointed household. The repetition of this particular use of china by eighteenth-century novels makes clear that much more is at stake in these object relations than upperclass foibles. When fantasy and imagination override rational judgment, these fictions suggest, there erupt real-life forms of monstrosity. Bad dinner parties may fall at the more benign end of the spectrum of effects, but at the other end lie poverty, delusion, and unconscionable cruelty. Fantasy and enthrallment with objects, the novel wants us to understand, are profoundly anti-social tendencies. Jane Collier ties excessive attachment to china to the abuse of children in An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753),

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advising the aspiring tormentor “never to strike or whip a child, but when you are angry, and in a violent passion with that child; nor ever let this correction come for lying, obstinacy, or disobedience, in the child, but for having torn or dirted her white frock, if it be a girl; or for having accidentally broke a china cup at play; or any such trifling offence.”13 Sarah Fielding repeats this figure in The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754), which recounts an episode in which a crowd of people (“the Cry”), who one day denounce a mother for (justly, in the author’s view) disciplining her child, the next respond with violence to the child’s accidentally “dashing to pieces a fine set of china”: Now all the compassion which late had seized the minds of the Cry for the poor dear little innocent vanished at once; and each separately fixing her thoughts on some favourite piece of china, some shell, or some other brittle ware of her own private property, screamed out; “An odious little careless brat, had she been mine I would certainly have flead her alive.”14

In their focus on the consequences of domestic mismanagement by deranged people, midcentury novels intersect with the concerns of social critics like Jonas Hanway. Indeed, Hanway’s attribution of a whole range of social ills, including poverty and infanticide, to the drinking of Chinese tea seems itself slightly less deranged in the context of the pervasive novelistic trope linking an attachment to chinaware to bad housekeeping.15 As the English household is increasingly figured not as a site of social display but as one of domestic management and self-discipline, good judgment shifts from an aesthetic faculty to a self-regulatory one. The exercise of excellent taste is less important in the novel’s domestic economy than the systematic restraint of passion and imagination in the interest of reproducing well-disciplined, self-governing social subjects. The potentially monstrous effects of failed domesticity are made clear, again with reference to chinoiserie, in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), when the young prostitute Emily opens the narrative of her fallen life with an account of fallen china: [My parents’] barbarity to me . . . had a thousand times determined me to fly their house, and throw myself on the wide world; but at length an accident forced me on this desperate step, at the age of fifteen. I had broken a Chinabowl, the pride and idol of both their hearts, and as an unmerciful beating was the least I had to depend on at their hands . . . I left the house, and at all adventures took the road to London.16

The differences between Emily’s broken china and Belinda’s from The Rape of the Lock are instructive. As I argued in chapter 4, the integrity of Belinda’s

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“person”—including but not limited to her virginity—is articulated by the condition of her china jar; when it “totters,” we know her reputation, and consequently her social position, is precarious. The china bowl in Memoirs, in contrast, illustrates an extension of the argument vainly forwarded by Clarissa in canto 5 of The Rape of the Lock, that material things, even chinaware, need not be so intimately linked with subjectivity that their fall equates our own. English hearts, Cleland’s story suggests, should be attached to children, not china. The destruction of Emily’s virtue is a consequence of her parents’ overvaluation of their chinoiserie, “the pride and idol of their hearts,” not a reflection of the ruined china itself. The china bowl appears in this passage precisely to announce its own innocence of meaning—it is those who invest it with imaginary meaning who cause social harm. As fiction made chinoiserie a figure for the disruptive and destructive powers of the imagination in the English household, it also produced a form of orientalism that would mark the boundary of English realism throughout the nineteenth century. Chinoiserie lent itself to orientalism not, as we might assume, because it referred aesthetically to the East, but because it harked back to the European ancien régime and rendered that culture foreign to modern domestic norms. The novel’s rejection of chinoiserie as foreign to English sense and sensibility, in other words, had less to do with such objects’ relationship, either real or imagined, to China than with their relationship to a model of English taste that was dismissed as archaic and irrational. Orientalism was a novelistic means of exposing old-fashioned “pleasures of the imagination” as the work of enchantment rather than taste, and the objects that provided such pleasures as antithetical to rather than constitutive of the English mind and household.

TEMPLES OF COLD RECEPTION

Lennox’s The Female Quixote was one of the earliest texts to render romance utterly foreign to the English sensibility by orientalizing its characteristic tropes. The chaos that ensues when Lennox’s protagonist Arabella takes Johnson’s definition of romance as her example of appropriate social conduct redefines romance as an outdated literary genre that offers a flawed model for interpreting everyday life. The setting of Arabella’s childhood sets her up for social failure. Her father, we are informed, removed himself years ago from the corruption at court and retreated to a castle “in the Neighbourhood of a small Village, and several Miles distant from any Town.”17 The grounds and house appropriately display the family’s aristocratic wealth and status: “The vast Extent of Ground which surrounded this noble Building, he had

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caused to be laid out in a Manner peculiar to his Taste: The most laborious Endeavors of Art had been used to make it appear like the beautiful Product of wild, uncultivated Nature,” while “the Inside of the Castle was adorned with a Magnificence suitable to the Dignity and immense Riches of the Owner” (6). By early eighteenth-century standards, Arabella appears to be just the woman to inhabit such a setting; her “native Charms were improved with all the Heightenings of Art; her Dress was perfectly magnificent” (7). But the novel insists there is something curious about all this “magnificence”: the landscaping is “peculiar,” and the estate is not a hub of English social life but “wholly secluded from the World” (6, 7). True to Johnson’s principle, the modern novel cannot “lodge [characters] in imaginary castles” and expect readers to believe that what they are reading has anything to do with English life “in its true state.”18 The novel attributes its heroine’s strangeness to the fact that her “Ideas, from the Manner of her Life, and the Objects around her, had taken a romantic Turn” (7). It represents Arabella’s quixotic turn away from a rational relationship to the world and toward fantastic delusions as not only “romantic” but oriental: the heroic romances responsible for Arabella’s flawed understanding of the world are tales of Eastern princesses. Even if such stories once represented the world, the novel suggests, it was a world far removed from modern England in time and geography. And “what was still more unfortunate,” the narrator maintains, these romances were “not in the original French, but very bad Translations” (7). Untrue even to their own (French) origins, these stories embody the absolute corruption of realistic representation; they cannot even render fantasy faithfully, much less truth. The Orient in whose image Arabella fashions herself—an amalgam of mythologized Eastern settings, including Persia, Scythia, Ethiopia, and Egypt—refers to nothing else but fictionality itself, specifically fiction’s lack of real-world referent. Such stories provide exceptionally misleading reading material to a woman who has grown up in the midst of aristocratic splendor, an aesthetic designed to stimulate rather than moderate the imagination. In the novel, materials that once distinguished persons of refined sensibility—including the landscaping of the Marquis’s estate,19 the magnificent decor of the house, and Arabella’s own dress and deportment—collude with French romances to turn the English mind away from truth and undermine the faculty of judgment, which depends on empirical information. Living among these objects, Arabella is trapped in her own “oriental” romance and consequently fails to acquire anything like the rational understanding of the world that Locke and Johnson equate with maturity. Divorced from the sensations produced by “actual” objects—objects that do not conspire, to borrow Fielding’s phrase, to produce “so fantastical an Appearance”—her ideas can have no

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relation to things as they really are and people as they really behave. Without such grounding in the world, she cannot develop the kind of self-reflection that comes from seeing oneself as if through the eyes of others. Thus she fails to heed her cousin’s warning that “to be always talking of Queens and Princesses, as if I thought none but such great People were worthy my Notice . . . looks so affected, I should imagine every one laughed at me, that heard me” (184). In fact, everyone does laugh at Arabella’s “affected” manner, including (the novel hopes) the reader. But the corrective impetus of the novel’s ridicule dissolves in the face of her inability to feel the humiliation we feel in her place. Her shamelessness is the measure of the power of her delusion. In its use of orientalism to demarcate a way of thinking entirely out of touch with English life and sociability, The Female Quixote puts its heroine under the spell of an aesthetic more often reserved for villains and other characters who cannot be included within the novel’s ethos. The orientalization of material culture, specifically chinoiserie, while it may begin as a kind of satire, repeatedly pushes its objects of ridicule to a point beyond laughter where their hostility to English life becomes sinister. The villain of Francis Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bilduph (1761) inhabits a “fairy palace” of a home decorated in the Chinese taste, the “bedchambers . . . furnished with fine chints,” the “drawing-room with the prettiest Indian sattin,” and an expensive “little temple” in the garden.20 The putative author immediately recognizes the threat posed by a character who offers “entertainment . . . splendid almost to profusion”: “I told her,” Sidney states, that “if she always gave such dinners, it would frighten me away from her” (112). Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) presents a more satirical version of bad taste in the character of Madame Duval, whose “chief business of . . . life” is “the labour of the toilette” and who values nothing—not even her own health—so much as her “Lyon’s silk,” a figure whose conflation of oriental and French associations seems to pose a double threat to English sensibility.21 Even she stops being funny, however, as her deviant notion of reality begins to threaten Evelina’s well-being. Vain, affected, and materialistic, Madame Duval has a tendency to put the heroine in impolite company that creates mortifying and potentially socially destructive situations.22 In response to Madame Duval’s behavior, Evelina proves her own maturity by reacting not with laughter but with “disgust” (192). The full range of chinoiserie’s negative implications is spelled out in Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), in a letter from Matt Bramble to Dr. Lewis that details the disintegration of a man’s happiness and friendships with other men under the reign of a china-obsessed wife. Bramble describes how, at the sight of the house of his old friend Baynard, “I felt my self very sensibly affected by the idea of our past intimacy, as we

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approached the place where we had spent so many happy days together; but when we arrived at the house, I could not recognize any one of those objects, which had been so deeply impressed upon my remembrance.”23 Baynard’s house has been transformed by the “improvements” inflicted by his wife: the noble oaks along the avenue have been cut down; the once “venerable” front has been covered “with a screen of modern architecture; so that all without is Grecian, and all within Gothic”; and the garden, “which was well stocked with the best fruit which England could produce,” has been reduced to “a naked circus of loose sand, with a dry basin and a leaden triton in the middle” (318). The woman responsible for these changes carries the threat of poor judgment in her very genealogy. Having squandered his father’s fortune, Baynard married this Miss Thompson, Bramble tells us, to relieve his debts: “She was the daughter of a citizen, who had failed in trade; but her fortune came by an uncle, who died in the East-Indies—Her own parents being dead, she lived with a maiden aunt, who had superintended her education; and, in all appearance, was well enough qualified for the usual purposes of the married state” (318). This appearance proves deceptive. Her fortune—amassed by an uncle in Asia, and substituted for the total lack of wealth achieved by her trader father in the same business—enters the Bramble household as a kind of ominously enchanted object. This is no mere sum of money, but one that remains haunted by a history of cashing in on modern fashions and marketplace desires, a business whose monstrous successes (the uncle) are always mirrored by disastrous failures (the father). Miss Thompson’s fortune is thus very much a “trinket” in the sense I discuss in chapter 3: in contrast to the “real” fortune of a British estate, one built on a firm ground of landed property and inborn social quality, her family’s wealth is marked as a product of ingenuity, generated in response to commercial desire. The apparent social quality that attends the possession of such a fortune is also “trinketed”—an artifice expressed on the surface, in “appearances,” but that, like a romantic fiction, has no referent in depth of character or judgment. In Bramble’s words, “She excelled in nothing. Her conversation was flat, her stile mean, and her expression embarrassed—In a word, her character was totally insipid . . . she was so ill qualified to do the honours of the house, that when she sat at the head of the table, one was always looking for the mistress of the family in some other place” (318–19). Miss Thompson, having become Mrs. Baynard, illustrates the dangers to domestic order posed by a woman who insists on living out a fantasy that does not correspond with material reality. She enters the marriage in a state of quixotic ignorance of upper-class domestic mores, “as ignorant as a new-born babe of everything that related to the conduct of a family; and she had no idea of a country-life. Her understanding did not reach so far as to comprehend the first principles of discretion . . . She had not taste

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enough to relish any rational enjoyment; but her ruling passion was vanity” (319). Rather than allowing her fortune to salvage her husband’s status, she co-opts what remains of his wealth to furnish her own distorted simulation of an upper-class lifestyle, so that both husband and wife “continued to be sucked deeper and deeper into the vortex of extravagance and dissipation, leading what is called a fashionable life in town” (320). When she is taken to his country estate, she proceeds to gut the material signs of family status, replacing them with “fashionable” objects that turn the house into a grotesque parody of itself: “The family plate was sold for old silver, and a new service procured; fashionable furniture was provided, and the whole house turned topsy turvy” (321). Bramble bears witness to how his friend’s house is transformed into a middle-class fantasy of upper-class life, one that razes any remaining traces of actual elite status. Baynard’s own powers of reason, and thus his patriarchal authority over his own household, have been overwhelmed by his wife’s ferocious fantasy life: “neither his own good sense, nor the dread of indigence, nor the consideration of his children, has been of force sufficient to stimulate him into the resolution of breaking at once the shameful spell by which he seems enchanted” (322). Indeed, Bramble’s description of Baynard’s life, drawing on a trope familiar to the oriental tale, makes it sound like nothing so much as a bad dream from which he cannot wake: With a taste capable of the most refined enjoyment, a heart glowing with all the warmth of friendship and humanity, and a disposition strongly turned to the more rational pleasures of a retired and country life, he is hurried about in a perpetual tumult, amidst a mob of beings pleased with rattles, baubles, and gewgaws, so void of sense and distinction, that even the most acute philosopher would find it a very hard task to discover for what wise purpose of providence they were created—Friendship is not to be found; nor can the amusements for which he sighs be enjoyed within the rotation of absurdity, to which he is doomed for life. (322)

The “rotation of absurdity” to which Baynard is “doomed” illustrates why female quixotism is not to be tolerated in English life: a man who marries into a woman’s fantasy is wrested from a life of “sense and distinction,” severed from the friendships and rational amusements that constitute a meaningful life. It is for this very reason that Lennox does not permit Arabella to marry until she has been cured of her delusions: marriage is less likely to cure fantasy than fantasy is to infect a marriage. Mrs. Baynard exerts an “absurd tyranny” (326) over her husband and every person who enters their house. She subsumes all cultural influence to her own grotesque performance of quality. When Baynard sends her on a European tour to try

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to acquaint her with aristocratic social norms, she returns “more expensive and fantastic than ever” and sets about uprooting the landscaping and architecture installed by her husband’s ancestors in order to remake the estate in her own affected taste (324–25). Living under her rule, Baynard is trapped in “a thraldom, equally shameful and pernicious” (326). As a visitor to the house, Bramble himself is made to participate in the farce of the Baynards’ life. He is introduced into a parlor decorated to the specifications of the fashionable Chinese room, “so very fine and delicate, that in all appearance it was designed to be seen only, not inhabited. The chairs and couches were carved, gilt, and covered with rich damask, so smooth and slick, that they looked as if they had never been sat upon” (323). The aesthetic here recalls the excess of Elizabeth Montagu’s Chinese dressing room, which she described, tongue-in-cheek, as “like the Temple of some Indian god.”24 The decoration of Baynard’s home has the same effect on Bramble, minus Montagu’s sense of humor: “we had remained above half an hour sacrificing to the inhospitable powers in the temple of cold reception” (323). The same inhospitality, punctuated by Mrs. Baynard’s chinoiserie, governs the entire evening. In “a large old Gothic parlour, which was formerly the hall,” Bramble is served a meal “made up of a parcel of kickshaws, contrived by a French cook, without one substantial article adapted to the satisfaction of an English appetite,” but attended by “a parade of plate and china” (328). Smollett renders the upper-class house ridiculous by the same device Fielding used to ridicule affectation among the poor: the juxtaposition of china and hunger, which exposes fantasy’s infection of material life to the detriment of English lives. Once an essential element of the well-furnished home, chinoiserie here contributes to the orientalizing of the estate, which alienates its British visitors. The mistress of the house “received us with a coldness of reserve sufficient to freeze the very soul of hospitality,” and “in short, every thing was cold, comfortless, and disgusting” under Mrs. Baynard’s spell (328). Smollett’s example questions the possibility that female quixotism, consistently imagined by the novel as an irrational attachment to the chinoiserie aesthetic,25 can ever be remedied. Lennox ultimately allows Arabella to be saved from delusion, rendering her fit to be mistress of an English home, by simply tearing the veil of fantasy from her eyes. What finally snaps her out of her delusion is the Doctor’s insistence that the archaic, oriental world of heroic romance is cruel and barbaric even beyond the powers of Arabella’s imagination: [These books] teach Women to exact Vengeance, and Men to execute it; teach Women to expect not only worship, but the dreadful Worship of human Sacrifices. Every Page of these Volumes is filled with such extravagancies of Praise, as expressions of Obedience as one human Being ought not to hear

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from another; or with Accounts of Battles, in which thousands are slaughtered for no other purpose than to gain a Smile from the haughty Beauty, who sits a calm Spectatress of the Ruin and Desolation, Bloodshed and Misery, incited by herself. (380–81)

This portrait of the upper-class woman as “calm Spectatress” of barbarism is the logical extension of English culture’s prying apart of the Chinese taste and the category of nature. Elizabeth Montagu quipped that her Chinese dressing room was so extravagant that “if I was remarkably short and I had a great head, I should be afraid people would think I meant myself Divine Honours”;26 Lennox, in turn, imagines the horrifying social implications of aristocratic self-regard turned individual self-worship. A culture that allows objects to live like subjects, she suggests, engenders a world where subjects are in turn reduced to objects; by misreading their own subjectivity as dwelling in things, human beings sacrifice their very humanity. “I tremble indeed,” declares Arabella at the moment of revelation, “to think how nearly I have approached the Brink of Murder, when I thought myself only consulting my own Glory” (381). Thus the novel rejects an entire literary tradition and the enchanted relationship it established between subjects and objects, echoing Johnson’s suggestion that this tradition represents a world anathema to real English life. What The Female Quixote cannot account for, however, is the continued presence of romance in English life, without England’s purportedly inevitable metamorphosis into a barbarous wasteland. For it is clear, from a survey of English literature of the late eighteenth century, that romantic, gothic, and oriental fiction continued to flourish alongside the realistic novel, and even within the novel.27 Though expunged from the novel’s modern order of things, tropes of romance and icons of taste remained necessary to represent the limits of that order. To see how the individual learns to recognize and respect this boundary, we must turn to the novels of Jane Austen.

MEMENTOS OF PAST FOLLY

The Female Quixote spells out what will become the novel’s signature trope: to offer itself as the corrective to earlier romances that misrepresent the external world to the modern reader. But it is Austen’s rewriting of The Female Quixote that finally enables the novel to incorporate romance in a narrative of development staged for the purposes of authorizing modern truth claims. Northanger Abbey reframes the movement from enchantment to disenchantment as a journey from childhood to maturity, redefining

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what the novel deems foreign and archaic as part of the magical thinking of childhood. In so doing, it nests the orientalized genre of romance—and the cultural materials consigned to it—within a developmental narrative that credits iconic objects with blurring the distinction between subject and object worlds. It redefined the lack of this distinction as characteristic of an infantile stage of thought that could eventually be governed by reason. Building on Lennox’s notion that subjects are inscribed early on with old ideas that obstruct reason and responsibility, Austen shows that such “turned” ideas should not be swept away so much as modified; mature understanding results not from self-production but from self-correction. Thus Austen inscribes her heroine with and within a world order where objects speak to people as icons with their own mysterious histories less for the satiric spectacle of quixotism than for the purposes of narrating her escape from that world as a tale of personal development. In contrast to Lennox, Austen shows that the delusion that comes from reading romance is necessary to eventual understanding. Northanger Abbey is as much about the maturation of a particular form of fiction as it is about the maturation of its protagonist. It introduces Catherine Morland as she embarks on the process of becoming a socialized individual: her “heart was affectionate, her disposition cheerful and open, without conceit or affection of any kind,” but “her mind about as ignorant and uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is” (5). Like Arabella, Catherine initiates her own education in a way that is misleading rather than edifying. At Bath, her ignorance makes her vulnerable to the false friendships of fashionable circles, and draws her with childish enthusiasm to the novels that constitute fashionable reading: gothic romances. The narrator comments on Catherine’s taste for these “novels” in a passage often read as Austen’s own earnest defense of the genre in which she wrote: Yes, novels;—for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding. . . . “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. —“It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;” or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. (21–22)

The narrator’s suggestion that there is no “shame” in novel-reading because novels—including the romantic fictions to which Catherine is drawn—teach

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us about the world seems directly to contradict the final lesson of The Female Quixote, which is that one should be deeply ashamed of being taken in by unrealistic fictions. In addition, the claim here that such fictions display “the greatest powers of the mind” and “the most thorough knowledge of human nature” is richly ironic. For one thing, it is not true of Northanger Abbey itself, a novel that focuses on displaying a mind at its most foolish and features a heroine with little or no knowledge of human nature. And while we may allow that non-romantic novels like Cecilia, Camilla, and Belinda “convey” valuable knowledge to their reader, these are pointedly not the books that Catherine reads at Bath; she prefers gothic fantasies such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797).28 Northanger Abbey ultimately differentiates itself from these gothic fictions (and aligns itself with the works of Burney and Edgeworth) as its protagonist moves from childhood to adulthood in terms of her progress as a reader. To make this passage, Catherine does not have to give up gothic novels, but must learn to read them in the manner of a modern heroine, “with the greatest powers of [her] mind displayed.” At this moment in the story, she has not yet developed this skill. Her enthrallment with Radcliffe’s stories weakens her ability to think rationally: under their influence, she mistakes fiction for reality and reality for fiction. A mature reader like Henry Tilney reads gothic stories differently—as fiction, in contradistinction to reality. Northanger Abbey proceeds to demonstrate that while the rational reader need feel no shame in her preference for novels, immature readers like Catherine, who have not yet learned to say, “it is only a novel”—that is, it is only fiction, and so not reality—must experience “momentary shame” if they are to grow up. It is only by experiencing rather acute humiliation for confusing fiction with life that Catherine becomes a responsible member of polite society, the heroine of a modern novel, and a model female subject. The primary distinction between the gothic and the modern novel rests on the kind of relationship that each establishes between subjects and the material object world. Aware of Catherine’s immaturity as a reader, Henry Tilney predicts that she will experience the Abbey much as she does her favorite novels, as filled with enchanted things: How fearfully will you examine the furniture of your apartment!—And what will you discern?—Not tables, toilettes, wardrobes, or drawers, but on one side perhaps the remains of a broken lute, on the other a ponderous chest which no efforts can open, and over the fire-place the portrait of some handsome warrior, whose features will so incomprehensibly strike you, that you will not be able to withdraw your eyes from it . . . [and] a large, old-fashioned cabinet of ebony and gold, which, though narrowly examining the furniture before, you had passed unnoticed. (125–26)

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Catherine proves her readiness to read objects in precisely this way: “Oh! Mr. Tilney, how frightful!—This is just like a book!” she exclaims (125). Ironically, the Abbey of Austen’s novel contains nothing fit to appear in “a book,” at least not one by Radcliffe. In contrast to gothic fiction, Northanger Abbey contains only objects more appropriate to everyday life than to fantasy—in Henry’s words, mere “tables, toilettes, wardrobes, and drawers.” On entering the Abbey, Catherine is disappointed to find that the “furniture was in all the profusion and elegance of modern taste. The fire-place, where she had expected the ample width and ponderous carving of former times, was contracted to a Rumford, with slabs of plain though handsome marble, and ornaments over it of the prettiest English china” (128). In the context of the Tilneys’ home, even chinaware resists being co-opted by fantasy. The family’s “prettiest English china” is akin to the Abbey’s Gothic windows: “To be sure, the pointed arch was preserved—the form of them was Gothic—they might even be casements—but every pane was so large, so clear, so light! To an imagination that had hoped for the smallest divisions, and the heaviest stone-work, for painted glass, dirt and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing” (128). The categories of Chinese and Gothic things, this passage shows, can be integrated into the English home as forms, where form specifies their mere material qualities. General Tilney explains the “simplicity of the furniture, where every thing being for daily use, pretended only to comfort” (128): in this room, Chinese and Gothic aesthetics, with their attendant affects of wonder and curiosity, have been sublimated to an English domestic regime of plainness, usefulness, and comfort. As part of this order, these objects refuse to participate in Catherine’s fantasy life—refuse, that is, to act like objects “in a book” by acting instead like objects in the world. To recognize the boundaries between fact and fiction is, fundamentally, to recognize the difference between two different cultures, both of which pervade the world Catherine encounters. Though Catherine comes to the Abbey not an empty slate but with a head full of fiction, the education Austen has in store for her heroine nevertheless fulfills the logic of Lockean epistemology. In a chapter of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that looks ahead to Freud’s concept of reality testing,29 Locke argued that ideas in and of themselves cannot be true or false, because they are images that have no existence outside of one’s mind. Such ideas become true or false only when one “supposes any Idea [the mind] has in it self, to be conformable to some real Existence.”30 The faculty of judgment is what guides our ability to test our ideas against the external world of objects. One judges falsely, for example, when, “having a complex Idea made up of such a Collection of simple ones, as Nature never really puts together, [one] judges it to agree to a Species of Creatures really existing; as when it joins the weight of Tin to the colour, fusibility, and fixedness of Gold” (392). To develop the faculty

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of judgment, one must learn to distinguish the alchemical capacity of the mind from real possibilities. We must, in other words, learn to distinguish ourselves as subjects from the world of objects, and negotiate that difference with the kind of judgment that can eventually close the gap without violating the boundary. To illustrate how one develops such judgment, Austen subjects her protagonist to a humiliating lesson in how to (and how not to) read chinoiserie. Catherine focuses on a japanned cabinet that calls to her mind the “old-fashioned cabinet of ebony and gold” that Henry knew would stimulate her imagination (133). With the willfulness that produces false judgment, Catherine appropriates this object for a gothic narrative: “It was not absolutely ebony and gold; but it was Japan, black and yellow Japan of the handsomest kind; and as she held her candle, the yellow had very much the effect of gold” (133). Her compulsion to misread the cabinet, to insist upon the “effect of gold” when confronted with varnished wood, constitutes what Locke suggests is a breach of natural order; by insisting that it is more than her senses indicate, Catherine projects a creature of her imagination onto the external object. Given a foothold in the material world, false judgment runs amok as Catherine proceeds from embellishing the cabinet’s surface to convincing herself, “with a cheek flushed by hope, and an eye straining with curiosity,” that it conceals a hidden manuscript containing clues to a mystery that inhabits the household and inflects all of its objects with esoteric meaning (134). While her overactive imagination distorts empirical evidence and converts the cabinet into something quite different from the material object that she confronts, the novel ultimately refuses to legitimate her magical narrative. By daylight, she puts this reading to the test and finds that the Japan cabinet contains nothing more exotic than a laundry list. One of Northanger Abbey’s innovations is, paradoxically, to make the novel itself resist fictionalization. Catherine is, after all, a character in a fiction, but that fiction rejects her attempts to behave like a fictional character, and to read its fictional objects as fictional objects. It does so by withholding the gratifications of romance and subjecting her instead to repeated humiliation. Like Arabella, she is eventually mortified into recognizing herself as someone given over to childish ideas, someone consequently unfit to assume the position of wife and domestic manager. This epiphanic moment arrives when Henry’s patience with her wayward fantasies gives out, and his amusement in her foibles gives way to anger. Upon discovering that she suspects his father of murder, he famously responds, Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians.

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Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you . . . Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting? (159)

The gravity of Henry’s rebuke indicates the danger that Catherine has courted by imposing her fantasies on the world. The Japan chest is not the threat in this world, in which objects have no power. Catherine herself is the threat; her errant thinking with regard to the household objects has “admitted” ideas incompatible with English life into Henry’s home. Henry’s insistence that she “remember that we are English, that we are Christians” implies that the set of ideas that have informed Catherine’s judgment—namely her own fantasies—constitute an archaic and foreign realm that Catherine herself must be responsible for policing. He does not order her to eliminate her fantasies, only to mind the Lockean imperative to keep them on the inside and not admit them into English social life. This injunction breaks the spell cast by Radcliffe and sends Catherine running “with tears of shame . . . off to her own room” (159). There Austen ends the chapter. The next begins by announcing both Catherine’s and the novel’s emergence as participants in a distinctively modern venture: “The visions of romance were over” (159). There is a subtle but important difference in the way Austen uses humiliation as a pedagogical tool compared to Lennox. Arabella is, in a moment, ridiculed into immediate and total self-correction,31 but shame is the instrument of Catherine’s transformation: shame in the form of the sustained memory of her transgression, which enables her socialization. Austen, by not stopping at ridicule but detailing a subsequent economy of shame as part of her character’s maturity, insists that the modern subject must be able to convert humiliation into an internal faculty comparable to judgment. Integrated into the economy of mature subjectivity, shame serves as the means of perpetual self-criticism and -correction. By learning that false judgment—the confusion of real and imaginary objects—produces the pain of humiliation rather than childish pleasure, Catherine acquires the ability to rein in her imagination. Her acquisition of judgment and the novel’s disenchantment of a world mediated by romance are one and the same. Stripped of its mystery, the Japan cabinet no longer represents for her the possibility of fantastic events in real life, but the embarrassing potential of wayward object relations. As such, the cabinet becomes a corrective piece of Catherine’s mental furniture: [S]ooner than she could have supposed it possible in the beginning of her distress, her spirits became absolutely comfortable, and capable, as heretofore, of continual improvement by any thing [Henry] said. There were still some subjects indeed, under which she believed they must always tremble;—the

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mention of a chest or a cabinet, for instance—and she did not love the sight of japan in any shape: but even she could allow, that an occasional memento of past folly, however painful, might not be without use. (161)

This passage converts the Chinese object into a “memento of past folly” that marks the boundary between fact and fiction. Like the Tilneys’ chinaware, this ornament of an earlier aesthetic regime has been appropriated to the prosaic world, redefined by its “usefulness” as a point of self-discipline. In the course of Catherine’s progress to adulthood, the novel domesticates romance. A mature reader can read virtually anything, the novel suggests, because she can read objects for what they are rather than what she wants them to be. When Catherine first entered the Abbey, Radcliffe’s novels encouraged her to produce extravagant misreadings that in turn led to serious breaches of decorum. But by the novel’s end, this material, rather than being eliminated, has been reclassified and contained within the disenchanted category of the gothic, where it no longer claims to represent the world and therefore poses no challenge to the novel’s “own” representations. Just as an individual learns, through embarrassment, to put aside childish ways of thinking, Northanger Abbey puts aside fantasy and offers itself as an example of better judgment. The gothic thus serves as the modern novel’s own disenchanted china, its “memento of past folly,” that acts as what Freud later called a “reality indicator” by marking the difference between past fantasy and present reality.32 Austen’s use of childhood to domesticate ways of thinking she characterized as pre-modern was so persuasive that Sir Walter Scott extended her model of reading into a developmental theory of the novel genre as a whole. Scott’s review of Emma characterizes Austen’s novels as “a class of fictions which has arisen almost in our own times, and which draws the characters and incidents introduced more immediately from the current of ordinary life than was permitted by the former rules of the novel.”33 Taking up Johnson’s argument, Scott argues that while, in the past, the romance relied on fantastic and supernatural devices to entertain readers, the modern novel addresses a readership that requires a representation of “ordinary life.” In his 1827 essay “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” Scott attributes this change to the maturing tastes of British readers in general. Over time, he argues, “inclination to believe in the marvelous gradually weakens. Men cannot but remark that . . . the belief in prodigies and supernatural events has gradually declined in proportion to the advancement of human knowledge” (313). The romantic stories that “had been held in honour by [the present generation’s] fathers during youth, manhood, and old age” are now considered “simple and gross fables to which the present generation would only listen in childhood” (314). Scott thus consigns romance to two different

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childhoods: that of “man” categorically and that of the modern individual who must read as a child before entering his own “manhood.”34 In his review of Austen, Scott also gives modern fiction a childhood, declaring, “In its first appearance, the novel was the legitimate child of the romance” (227). Much like an infant, the early novel could not figure out how to stand on its own: while the first novelists endeavored to represent the modern world, they “remained fettered by many peculiarities derived from the original style of romantic fiction” (227). Only recently, along with the emergence of a “better instructed class” of readers, [a] style of novel has arisen . . . neither alarming our credulity nor amusing our imagination by wild variety of incident, or by those pictures of romantic affection and sensibility. . . . The substitute for these excitements . . . was the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him. (230)

Like the modern individual, the modern novel has an infancy, which it has incorporated as a memory and overcome. At this point, however, Scott reveals the paradox at the heart of all such developmental narratives: while the novel was once “the legitimate child of the romance,” in its maturity it replaces the parent by assuming a custodial relationship to romance’s infantile fantasies, which it disciplines in the interests of an enlightened society.

THE TRIUMPH OF ENGLISH CHINA

In a journal entry of March 14, 1826, Scott wrote that what sets Austen apart from her predecessors and contemporaries was “the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and sentiment.”35 If Austen’s writing disenchanted the objects that were identified with the taste of an older generation and different social order, then it also re-enchanted the “ordinary” objects that defined the realism of an emergent ruling class. In performing both moves, Austen’s novels completed a cultural shift initiated half a century earlier by Johnson. Where Johnson rendered the marvelous events and magnificent objects of aristocratic fiction dull and uninteresting, Austen ushered in a new set of novelistic conventions that made the ordinary interesting. In the mundane world represented in her novels, objects are not only disenchanted, but also re-enchanted with a new bourgeois class ethos.

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The ostentatious displays of chinoiserie associated with the social ambitions of past generations were rendered archaic or foolish, to be sure, but the category of Chinese things continued to furnish the novel with unambiguously ordinary—that is to say, perfectly English—objects. I have already noted that Northanger Abbey, whose “furniture was in all the profusion and elegance of modern taste,” contains not only the Japan cabinet but also “ornaments . . . of the prettiest English china” (128). Similarly, in Pride and Prejudice (1813), when the Bennett sisters find themselves trapped by one of Mr. Collins’s eulogizing speeches about the house of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, they have “nothing to do but . . . examine their own indifferent imitations of china on the mantelpiece.”36 The plainness of the girls’ “imitations of china” serves as an antidote to the grandiosity of Lady Catherine’s estate. In these scenes, Austen appropriates things Chinese to the mundane world of ordinary objects and common sense, where they comment unambiguously on those individuals who own and interact with them. In these examples, English china, like other furniture handed down from generation to generation, serves to distinguish the taste of the local gentry both from the excesses of the aristocracy and from the flights of fancy that characterize those who follow fashion rather than good judgment. Austenian homes, which become the model space of domestic life for an emergent middle class, reject the aesthetics of cosmopolitan “magnificence” and develop a counter-aesthetic of the everyday. As part of this regime, their chinoiserie no longer belongs to the category of imported and exotic goods that filled the “Chinese rooms” of prosperous English homes during the eighteenth century. Chinese objects were instead integrated into unique fields of personal property that included furniture handed down through the family line as well as “sentimental” objects enchanted, but not mystified, by their association with friends and family members. Austen offers a detailed portrait of this new kind of well-furnished household in Sense and Sensibility (1811). On moving from Norland into the more humble Barton Cottage, Mrs. Dashwood’s first thoughts are of certain “improvements” to recreate “her former style of life.”37 But she no longer has the financial means to live as before, and she and her daughters must be satisfied with less: [T]hey were wise enough to be contented with that house as it was; and each of them was busy in arranging their particular concerns, and endeavoring, by placing around them their books and other possessions, to form themselves a home. Marianne’s pianoforte was unpacked and properly disposed of; and Elinor’s drawings were affixed to the walls of their sitting room. (61)

The “other possessions” essential to their humble home include “household linen, plate, [and] china” (58). Like the pianoforte and drawings that

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demonstrate the sisters’ feminine accomplishments and the books that indicate their literacy, their china distinguishes the Dashwoods as participants in the ethnic rites and rituals of the country gentry despite their near poverty. Mrs. John Dashwood, whose lack of judgment and compassion has placed the Dashwood girls in their financial predicament, fails to understand the significance of china within this aesthetic order when she protests that “the set of breakfast china is twice as handsome as what belongs to [Norland]. A great deal too handsome, in my opinion, for any place they can afford to live in” (44). What she does not understand is that the Dashwoods’ china occupies its place at Barton Cottage not because it is handsome or expensive (although it is both) but because, like the family’s books, pianoforte, and drawings, it is privileged as a sign of personal quality that transcends social status. It thus allows the Dashwoods to carry on their lives as a respectable family despite their small house and lack of money. Their china is defined not by its exchange value, but by the particular kind of use value that Annette Weiner ascribes to “inalienable possessions,” those things you cannot give away without giving away your very identity. “The loss of such an inalienable possession,” Weiner writes, “diminishes the self and by extension, the group to which the person belongs.”38 That the Dashwoods not only understand polite living but also manage to hang on to the bare minimum when they must give everything else away elevates them above those who can afford to confuse the essentials with the superfluous because they have so much— perhaps, Austen suggests, too much. Each of Austen’s novels is to some extent concerned with the preservation of a local object world and the community associated with it against the emergent trends of “improvement” and social mobility.39 While Austen obviously delights in satirizing the aristocracy through characters like Lady Middleton and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, she verges on the sadistic in her caricatures of those from the middling classes—Mrs. John Dashwood and Mrs. Elton, for example—who try to emulate the aristocracy. These women, the very type to transform their homes into “temples of cold reception,” would sacrifice the well-being of the community on the altar of their own selfish desires. They disrupt the community by denying certain of its members their legacies and the material comfort that ought to be guaranteed, if not by their station, then by the compassion and good judgment of those above them. In response to the threat posed by a new cosmopolitan commercial class to the local community and its rituals, personal histories, and object environment, Austen turns to a specific set of objects, stripped of romance and infused instead with an eloquent mundanity. As her novels deprive the aesthetic objects of the eighteenth century of their ability to distinguish the higher tastes and imaginations of the cosmopolitan subject, they simultaneously endow “ordinary commonplace objects” with a combination of material and

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sentimental value that identifies those individuals we now recognize as the middle class. When Austen made ordinary objects interesting, she made them visible—and, in doing so, she made the people associated with them visible as well. Austen’s china is resolutely English; it stands for the triumph of the ordinary over the oriental and the local over the foreign in the world of the novel.

Afterword Rethinking Modern Taste ‘Vulgar’ works, as the words used to describe them indicate—‘facile’ or ‘light,’ of course, but also ‘frivolous,’ ‘futile,’ ‘shallow,’ ‘superficial,’ ‘showy,’ ‘flashy,’ ‘meretricious,’ or, in the register of oral satisfactions, ‘syrupy,’ ‘sugary,’ ‘rose-water,’ ‘schmaltzy,’ ‘cloying’—are not only a sort of insult to refinement, a slap in the face to a ‘demanding’ (difficile) audience which will not stand for ‘facile’ offerings . . . they arouse distaste and disgust by the methods of seduction, usually denounced as ‘low,’ ‘degrading,’ ‘demeaning,’ which they try to use. —Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste1

In the conclusion of his seminal analysis of the role of “good taste” in the generation of cultural capital, Pierre Bourdieu observes that “‘[p]ure’ taste and the aesthetics which provides its theory are founded on a refusal of ‘impure’ taste and of aisthesis (sensation), the simple, primitive form of pleasure reduced to a pleasure of the senses” (486). The concept of the facile, he argues, combines the wide range of sensual effects disavowed by bourgeois tastefulness to give “the spectator the sense of being treated like any Tom, Dick or Harry who can be seduced by tawdry charms which invite him to regress to the most primitive and elementary forms of pleasure, whether they be the passive satisfactions of the infantile taste for sweet liquids (‘syrupy’) or the quasi-animal gratifications of sexual desire” (486). The genealogy I have offered in this book, which shows how early eighteenth-century epistemologies and object relations yield a modern economy of subjectivity that rewrites older forms of desire as simultaneously infantile and excessively sexual, helps to explain the affective efficiency of the logic Bourdieu describes here. The exceedingly overwrought category of the “facile” continues to operate smoothly in middle-class culture according to the immediacy of subjective judgment, specifically its revulsion for certain forms: one 214

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knows “trash” when one sees it. Objects that seem to call to be consumed in ways that belie the intellectual agency of the subject are held accountable for the persistence of modes of consumption that violate the boundaries of good taste. “Thus,” Bourdieu writes, “a critic denounces the ‘vulgar sensuality’ or ‘Casbah orientalism’ which reduces one interpretation of the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ in Strauss’s Salome to ‘cabaret music’” (486). The orientalism that reduces opera to “cabaret music” is part of the legacy of novelistic orientalism—the novel’s strategy, that is, of accumulating under the sign of “oriental” all those elements of cosmopolitan English culture that challenged the emergent autonomy of the middle-class subject. Srinivas Aravamudan has reintroduced a number of these disavowed elements of eighteenth-century literature (what he calls Enlightenment Orientalism) in order to question the apparent autonomy of the novel genre itself as it “rises” into prominence along the tides of modernity. “So subversive a position did Enlightenment Orientalism have,” he writes, “that I believe no one writing, reading, or criticizing novels could do so without taking account of the limitations and opportunities for form and content imposed by it. In brief, because of Enlightenment Orientalism the novel was not (and is not) a free genre of autochthonous modernity.”2 The kinds of desires and pleasures that novelistic subjects refuse as “primitive,” “childish,” and “perverse”—in a word, “tasteless”—haunt the periphery of English “realistic fiction” and sovereign individualism alike. “Periphery” is actually not quite the right term. A territorial metaphor, it belongs to the spatial logic of English self-sovereignty turned empire, naming the liminal space or “contact zone”3 where self meets non-self. While the contact zone is itself characterized by instability—what Homi Bhabha has described as “ambivalence”4—the spatial conceit of the “zone,” especially one on an imaginary frontier, serves to quarantine this instability, displacing it from the “center” of English selfhood. But the literature I have read in this study, even as it grows increasingly conservative in its figuration of the English self, tends not to think in terms of centers and peripheries. On the contrary, these literary struggles to map Englishness onto the eclectic materials offered by eighteenth-century culture locate the negotiation of self in the very spaces the self claims to occupy: the household, the closet or cabinet, the body, the mind. Austen’s Catherine Morland may persuade herself and readers that she has put wayward, irrational thinking “behind her” in the space of childhood, but the installation in her psyche of imaginary pieces of “japan” to serve as “mementos of past folly” guarding against the repetition of childish behavior—what the narrative of progress calls a “regression” even as the subject continues to move forward in time—indicates that the potential for transgression lies not behind, beside, or beyond her but rather inside her.

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The orientalism that is generated by the novel’s reorganization of the self gestures toward an imaginary “periphery” or “outside” to what can be called English, but it lives in the form of Englishness that disavows it. A reading of the integration of “China” into English culture and selfhood in the eighteenth century helps to explain just how it got there. Before “taste” became the defensive instrument of a ruling middle class as theorized by Bourdieu, it signified the possibility of recruiting new materials of selfhood from emergent archives. Before “facility” became a sign of worthlessness in the economy of bourgeois cultural value, it indicated the openness of a certain kind of subjectivity to objects of novelty, wonder, and incomprehensible beauty. “The Pleasures of the Imagination have this Advantage, above those of the Understanding,” writes Addison, “that they are more obvious, and more easie to be acquired. It is but opening the Eye, and the Scene enters.”5 To be sure, taste was for a writer like Addison a form of power, one that granted particular subjects epistemological mastery over the world of objects. But it also allowed the subject—as one of the conditions of his mastery—to suspend the understanding in favor of submitting to forms of alterity that promised to improve the self from the outside. Through the operation of the imagination, Addison insists, “We are struck, we know not how . . . and immediately assent to the Beauty of an Object, without enquiring into the particular Causes and Occasions of it.”6 The ability to be struck, to assent, to suspend inquiry: although these were essential to the initial authorizing of nonaristocratic subjects of taste in cosmopolitan England, eventually they are rewritten as antithetical to a “rational” response to foreign objects. When a writer like Jonas Hanway proposes to expunge foreign materials from the self, what he actually does is abject a version of the self that recognizes alterity as part of its constitution. This abjected model of selfhood that is at ease being (to borrow from Julia Kristeva) “strange to itself ”7 refuses to vacate narratives of English identity hostile to it, refuses even to be marginalized within them. Instead, the literature suggests, it requires that as the self becomes “modern,” which is to say more rational and less vulnerable to external objects, it also become deeper, containing interior realms well-insulated from social self-presentation to house one’s other, or othered, selves. Just as the modern realistic novel must incorporate the gothic to contain the materials it disowns, the modern novelistic subject is defined by a psychological interiority that resembles not the Lockean cabinet but the convoluted spaces of gothic castles. This modern psyche is rife with hidden passageways and secret chambers holding things not immediately recognizable as part of the self that contains them. In nineteenth-century texts, the early eighteenth-century taste for Chinese things resurfaces from these mystified interiors in uncanny forms. “I am not conscious of a time when china jars and saucers were introduced into my imagination,” Charles

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Lamb’s Elia confesses regarding his inexplicable, “almost feminine partiality for old china.”8 Thomas De Quincey’s famous opium-induced dreams, reprising Pope’s Cave of Spleen, call from the depths of his imagination sinister, living chinoiserie forms: “I . . . found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sophas, &c. soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions: and I stood, loathing and fascinated.”9 The desire to “assent” to things Chinese remains, but is reframed in nineteenth-century literature from a refined pursuit of cosmopolitan pleasures to a perverse compulsion that asserts itself from within the subject against its better (which is to say rational, masculine, English) judgment. Modern subjectivity is thus generated by a paradoxical process: by refusing versions of the self that are “strange,” it produces—and compulsively reproduces—estranged versions of itself. The figure of China, too, becomes a paradox. By the nineteenth century, China has become what Elizabeth Hope Chang calls “the familiar exotic” in British culture: “a paradoxical category” that “conveys a sense of unbridgeable cultural and aesthetic difference that is amplified, not diffused, by increased circulation and reproduction.”10 As chinoiserie objects and literary representations alike are circulated and reproduced in England with new vigor through emergent commercial technologies from the late eighteenth century onward, things Chinese indeed become simultaneously more “familiar” and more “exotic.” The defensive posture of certain literature against the foreignness of things Chinese, which insists on China’s being incompatible with or dangerous to the English self, is, I would argue, actually a reaction to the strange familiarity of things Chinese at the end of the eighteenth century—in Chang’s words, the “paradoxical sense of everyday foreignness.”11 The successful diffusion of Chineseness in English culture through the commodification of chinoiserie ultimately sets these objects at odds with privileged forms of English cultural capital: they are aggressively estranged from the cultural standard precisely because they are too common and too familiar. As the economic capital generated by the continued circulation of “exotic” commodities underwrote British imperial expansion and middle-class prosperity in the nineteenth century, the concept of taste was revised to convert material wealth into immaterial forms of cultural capital.12 In the context of commercial imperialism, things Chinese split along the divide of “high” and “low” culture: as artifacts prized for their rarity and antiquity, on the one hand, and as cheap trifles saturating consumer markets on the other. At both of these extremes, the Chineseness of things is emphasized to signify modes of interaction between subject and object that exceed the boundaries of propriety set by bourgeois taste, while, somewhere in between, the Chineseness of middle-class ritual objects (the family china, the afternoon

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tea) diminishes. Things Chinese thus reveal that certain kinds of consumption may be “too high” as well as “too low” in relation to a middle-class norm: while the fanatic consumer amasses excessive quantities of things that are, as an effect of their mass quantity, devalued, the expert collector exercises an esoteric knowledge of things in order to obtain objects that are excessively valuable by market standards but undervalued as objects of sentiment. In both cases, the value of things remains stubbornly wedded to material economy; it signifies only the purchasing power of its owner and has no connection to the immaterial “life” of the subject who possesses it. If the subject imagines such a connection, it takes the delusional form of fetishism in either the Marxian or Freudian sense, where the subject projects meanings onto the object that obscure reality—hence the aura of enchantment that attends both rarity and trinket. The case is different with subject-object relations negotiated by taste, which dictates that as long as the subject is not overly invested in an object either financially or affectively, the object may reflect a transcendent form of value that is understood to originate in the subject, not in the thing itself. Such is the case with, say, the family china, which is so thoroughly domesticated by its appropriation to the English subject that its “Chineseness” recedes, even disappears altogether.13 While a new standard of tasteful consumption thus distinguished a new kind of subject defined by her ontological resistance to objects, literature continued to register the wide range of contradictions and paradoxes that underwrite that subject’s emergence. Studies of nineteenth-century British literature that attend to the central role of material things in the way Britons conceive and experience their own subjectivity suggest that subjects continue to live in and through things even as they claim not to. “We resolve the subject-object uncertainty by asserting that as long as people nominally own themselves they are fully human. They are not objects,” writes Elaine Freedgood. “Thus, the hybrid subject-object conditions in which we dwell are obscured by the ‘purification’ subjectivity has undergone in what we like to think of as modernity.”14 The genealogy of English subject-object relations I have offered helps to bring these conditions into view. By looking to a moment before “what we think of as modernity” has overwritten other ways of conceiving selfhood, we might broaden our own cultural inheritance. The aim here is not to identify a better culture than our own, but to show how our culture contains more possibilities for self-definition than we might have thought. One of the defining claims of modernity, writes Bruno Latour, is that “the past was the confusion of things and men; the future is what will no longer confuse them.”15 Rather than pursuing the less confused future promised by modernity, we might look to past and present confusions as a source of diversified understanding—of the world, our part in it, and its part in us.

NOTES

Introduction 1. See, for example, Kenneth Pomeranz’s assertion that “it is China, more than any other place, that has served as the ‘other’ for the modern West’s stories about itself.” The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 25. 2. For more on the retheorization of area and comparative literature studies along these lines, see Rey Chow, Ethics After Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), esp. 1–13; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 3. As I discuss in more detail in chapter 1, these terms and the theoretical framework they generate are currently being reconsidered within the field of art history. See in particular Vimalin Rujivacharakul, “China and china: An Introduction to Materiality and a History of Collecting,” in Collecting China: The World, China, and a Short History of Collecting, ed. Vimalin Rujivacharakul (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 15–28. 4. See James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 215–51. 5. Felicity Nussbaum, ed., The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 1. 6. Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965–93); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. 7. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 111. 8. Frank, ReOrient, 5.

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9. David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 10. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1861), 144. 11. David Porter, “Sinicizing Early Modernity: The Imperatives of Historical Cosmopolitanism,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, no. 3 (2010): 305. For more on cosmopolitanism in eighteenth-century European culture, see Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), and Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); James Watt, “Goldsmith’s Cosmopolitanism,” Eighteenth Century Life 30, no. 1 (2006): 56–75; and Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25, no. 1 (2012), special issue on “Exoticism and Cosmopolitanism,” ed. Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins. 12. For an analysis of how cosmopolitanism underwrites modern British masculinity in the eighteenth century, see Jason Solinger, Becoming the Gentleman: British Literature and the Invention of Modern Masculinity, 1660–1815 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 13. For a discussion of the persistent function of “China” as an “ethnic supplement” in Western thought, see Rey Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” in Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory, ed. Rey Chow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 1–25. 14. Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao, “Sinographies: An Introduction,” in Sinographies: Writing China, ed. Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), vii–xxi. 15. John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty” and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 72. 16. See Porter, “Sinicizing Early Modernity,” Ideographia, and The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Chi-ming Yang, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 17. Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, chapters 5 and 6. The archive of the “Far East” as a component of the English imagination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is suggestively vast in Markley’s study: “The two hundred or so primary sources that I cite in this study represent a small fraction of the texts on the Far East available to eighteenth-century readers” (3). 18. Yang, Performing China, 25. 19. Ibid., 26–27. 20. Several recent studies focusing on the place of “China” in English cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries begin their accounts with examples from the

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eighteenth century, suggesting that this is the crucial moment when a modern notion of Chineseness emerges out of a collection of early modern materials. See Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); and Anne Veronica Witchard, Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009). 21. See, for example, Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg, Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us About the European and American Past (New York: Routledge, 2007); Alden Cavanaugh and Michael E. Yonan, The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010); Vimalin Rujivacharakul, ed., Collecting China: The World, China, and a Short History of Collecting (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011); and Stacey Sloboda, “Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness, and Taste in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, ed. John Potvin and Alla Myzelev (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 19–36; “Displaying Materials: Porcelain and Natural History in the Duchess of Portland’s Museum,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, no. 4 (2010): 455–72; and “Fashioning Bluestocking Conversation: Elizabeth Montagu’s Chinese Room,” in Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors, ed. Meredith S. Martin and Denise Amy Baxter (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 129–48. 22. See, for example, Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22; Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Cynthia Sundberg Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Lewisberg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007); Julie Park, The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); and Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 23. Brown, A Sense of Things, 18. 24. Barbara M. Benedict, “The Spirit of Things,” in The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, 19–42. 25. Park, The Self and It, xx. 26. For illuminating projects of this kind, see Yu Liu, Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008); and Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England. Both books suggest that serious inquiry into eighteenth-century England’s “taste for China” reveals, first, a deep ambivalence in aesthetic theories of the period, where attraction to qualities of novelty, hybridity, and sensuality run up against principles of order, hierarchy,

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and hegemonic notions of gender and nation; and second, a clear and successful campaign on the part of mid-eighteenth-century arbiters of taste, notably Hogarth and Walpole, to disavow the “Chinese” component of eighteenth-century English culture, even when they promote ideas and styles associated with chinoiserie. Porter argues that chinoiserie represents an “alternative” but not lesser aesthetic sensibility and subjectivity in eighteenth-century culture, one that, contrary to the tradition of aesthetic theory developed from Shaftesbury to Kant, embraces qualities of superficiality, sensuality, hybridity, and cultural otherness rather than dismissing them as “impure” forms of taste (30). His readings explore “the possibility of reconstructing those illicit forms of aesthetic agency and sensibility that were elided or marginalized in the ongoing debates over taste and beauty of the early eighteenth century” (19). While Porter illuminates a “Chinese” alternative to the history of English ideas leading to Kantian aesthetics, Liu shows how the pre-Kantian tradition in England is itself infused with and indebted to “Chinese” ideas by tracing Chinese cultural influences that were, he argues, deliberately occluded by Walpole. 27. Yang’s study attends in particular to the ways “China” lays the theoretical groundwork for eighteenth-century English writing to consider the “broader Orient” as well as, by contrast, “depictions of Africa or the Americas” (24, 20). Where other studies of China’s place in English thought have exempted China from postcolonial inquiry due to the fact that, at least until the nineteenth century, it did not strictly fall under the purview of British colonial conquest, Yang suggests that the trope of China mediates the British conception of geographical and cultural otherness in general, and is thus a central component of early orientalist and imperialist discourse. See Yang, Performing China, 20–26. 28. Suvir Kaul, Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 2–3. 29. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, introduction to The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 23. 30. Edward Said, Orientalism, rev.ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 2. 31. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel, 8. 32. Chi-ming Yang uses the lowercased orientalism “to signify the particular, fluid logic at work in the eighteenth century,” in contrast to the capitalized Orientalism, which indicates the binary mode of thought identified by Said. Yang, Performing China, 25, 202n60. I take a different semantic approach, using the lowercased orientalism to indicate the way the term has been generalized since Said’s critique, but using it to refer primarily to the emergent trend of imagining East and West in binary opposition since the mid-eighteenth century. 33. “Where the soul pretends unification or the self fabricates a coherent identity, the genealogist sets out to study the beginning—numberless beginnings whose faint traces and hints of color are readily seen by the historic eye. The analysis of descent permits the

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dissociation of the self, its recognition and displacement as an empty synthesis, in liberating a profusion of lost events . . . The search for descent is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself.” Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 145–47. 34. Ibid., 151, 150. 35. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 54. 36. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), xi.

Chapter 1 1. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:292–93. All references to The Spectator are to this edition. 2. Pope, Windsor-Forest, lines 356–84. In The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963). All references to Pope are to line numbers from this edition. 3. The Manchu Kangxi Emperor had opened the port to European traders in 1685, allowing them unprecedented access to Chinese merchants, but the Dutch—because they controlled most of the indirect trade of Chinese goods through Asian ports such as Batavia—did not take advantage of the opportunity for direct trade until 1729, at which point the British were already firmly in control of the trade in tea and other Chinese goods. See Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 125–27. For more on the rivalry between the Dutch and English East India Companies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint Stock Company, 1600–1640 (London: Routledge, 2000); Niels Steensgaard, “The Growth and Composition of the Long-Distance Trade of England and the Dutch Republic before 1750,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, ed. James D. Tracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 102–52; and Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, A Century of Advance, Vol. III of Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 4. See Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 1–5, for his argument against Eurocentric theories of “world economy”: “If any regions were predominant in the world economy before 1800, they were in Asia. If any economy had a ‘central’ position and role in the

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world economy and its possible hierarchies of ‘centers,’ it was China” (5). In The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), Kenneth Pomeranz offers a more tempered revision of Western economic history that explains early modern economic development in terms of “global conjectures” within a “polycentric world with no dominant center” (4). His argument for parallel and interconnected development between Europe and Asia before 1800 also supports the point that there is little historical evidence to support British claims of exceptionalism until the second half of the eighteenth century, at the earliest. For an overview of these challenges to Eurocentric narratives of economic development as well as their implications for early modern English cultural studies, see Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1–29. 5. Furber, Rival Empires of Trade, 146. In The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitanism in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Alison Games argues that it was in Mediterranean trade networks that the English honed the cosmopolitan skills and strategies that enabled their later success in Asia: “England’s efforts to gain power in Europe and to engage in commerce around the world hinged on successful intervention closer to home in the Mediterranean, and the English accomplished this difficult task over the course of the seventeenth century. It was in the Mediterranean that the English acquired their first significant experience with large-scale, long-distance trade in an alien and inhospitable environment. The crucial skills learned there anchored and shaped subsequent enterprises around the world” (47). 6. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Colley argues that British identity was consolidated in the eighteenth century in opposition to the French “other”: “Once confronted with an obviously alien ‘Them,’ an otherwise diverse community can become a reassuring or merely desperate ‘Us.’ This was how it was with the British after 1707. They came to define themselves as a single people not because of any political or cultural consensus at home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond their shores” (6). 7. Gerald G. Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740– 1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). Newman locates the emergence of a specifically English national identity in the mid-eighteenth century, as a reaction against the aristocratic cosmopolitanism of the first half of the century that cultivated “a sense of national cultural inferiority” (39). 8. Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2002), 4. 9. Colley sees British identity as an effect of Protestantism, which united England, Scotland, and Wales against the Catholic French. Newman emphasizes instead the anti-aristocratic stance of mid-century English nationalism, reading it as a reaction to the cosmopolitan hegemony of the early part of the century. Paul Langford, following Benedict Anderson’s notion of the nation as an “imagined community,” focuses on the shared qualities of politeness and sensibility. Leonard Tennenhouse has recently suggested that such modes of “feeling English” were, by the late eighteenth century, an exportable quality that

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defined a British diaspora. See Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006); and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 10. Newman claims, for example, that the English experienced a “sense of national cultural inferiority” as a result of early eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism that was “was very much greater than the more extreme Anglophile scholarship has allowed” (39). 11. Felicity A. Nussbaum, ed., The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 1. 12. Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination; David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Chi-ming Yang, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 13. Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 67. 14. “The capitalist microcosm [of the Royal Exchange] emerged as a reasonably ordered place . . . only after it was tamed, and that required everything from a good, working clock to a sequestering of its denizens and their policing . . . Only gradually, and through the intervention of the governmental authorities and the freewheeling habits of consumption and the self-interest of merchants, did the exchanges become calm and safe enough for any reasonable social life to occur” (Jacob 73). 15. David Porter, “Sinicizing Early Modernity: The Imperatives of Historical Cosmopolitanism,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, no. 3 (2010): 299. 16. Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:282–83. All references are to this edition. 17. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 2. 18. Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 11. 19. Srinivas Aravamudan notes that this is only one of many titles given to the collection by various editors over the years; he prefers Letters from the Levant for its broader geographic suggestiveness. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 159. 20. Robert Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 56. 21. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 32. 22. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 160. 23. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 99. 24. Laura J. Rosenthal, “Introduction: Recovering from Recovery,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 50, no. 1 (2010): 9.

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25. April 1, 1717. In Montagu, Collected Letters, 1:312–15. 26. Rosenthal, “Introduction,” 10. 27. Furber, Rival Empires of Trade, 89. 28. The unpleasant, crowded quality of central Vienna described here owes much to its unique mode of development in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, which illustrates one version of European imperial self-presentation. Following the successful defeat of the Turkish siege of 1683, Emperor Leopold I focused on expressing Vienna’s status as a major European metropolis through architectural development, a project carried on through the first half of the eighteenth century by his heir Charles VI. To this end, Baroque architects such as Fischer von Erlach and Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt were recruited to erect an extraordinary number of palaces in the style of Versailles and other iconic structures of European political power. But these improvements were made on top of and around the existent medieval city center, an “exceptionally concentrated” core of narrow streets and old houses. “No attempt was made to transform this dense organism by means of geometrical planning,” according to art historian Christian Norberg-Shultz. “Many new buildings were erected but the Gothic street pattern was left intact.” Christian Norberg-Shultz, Late Baroque and Rococo Architecture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1974), 242. 29. One of the solutions to Vienna’s urban crowding was simply to build outward, beyond the fortifications that had long protected the city from Ottoman encroachment. Most of the newly erected garden-palaces “formed a ring around the old core, separated from the latter by a belt of open land in front of the fortifications,” which Norburg-Shultz compares to the rings around Saturn (242). 30. Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 308. All references are to this edition. 31. “The Forest: To Penshurst,” lines 59–60. In Ben Jonson, The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (New York: Penguin, 1988), 95–98. 32. See Jean-Louis Flandrin, “Distinction through Taste,” in A History of Private Life, III: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier (Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press), 265–307. “In the Middle Ages people served themselves from the common plate with their hands. Two or three people sipped from the same bowl and ate meat from the same cutting board. Everyone drank from a single cup, which circulated around the table. Knives and spoons were passed from person to person. Bread and meat were dipped in the same saltcellars and sauceboats. By contrast, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, each person had his or her own plate, glass, knife, spoon, fork, napkin, and bread. Whatever was taken from common serving dishes, sauceboats, or saltcellars had to be served with utensils and placed on one’s own plate before being transferred to the mouth. Thus, every diner was surrounded by an invisible cage” (255–56). 33. Mimi Hellman, “The Joy of Sets: The Uses of Seriality in the French Interior,” in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (New York: Routledge, 2007), 146.

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34. Daniel Cottom, “Taste and the Civilized Imagination,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39, no. 4 (Summer 1981): 367–80. 35. Hellman, “The Joy of Sets,” 147. 36. Addison and Steele, The Spectator, 3:538. 37. Vimalin Rujivacharakul locates a range of questions and problems arising from the slippage of signification between the terms “China” and “china” in discussions of “things Chinese” in a global context in the introduction to Collecting China: The World, China, and a Short History of Collecting (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 15–28. “Between China and china, Chineseness and objects, cultural identity and materiality, and geopolitical body and thingness, the relationship and disconnection between a geocultural connotation of ‘China’ and an object known as ‘china’ carry historical and theoretical implications that go far beyond the much too simple discussions of a connection between the object’s materiality and its geographical origin . . . The paradoxical association and disconnection between China and china create the key problematic at the foundation of a history of collecting ‘Chinese things’” (15). 38. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). Wahrman describes this culture as one in which “the world’s all face,” where “face” refers not to the modern concept of a facade overlaying the substance of the self, but the visible and therefore expressive aspect of a person. In such a regime, “masquerading . . . came closest to characterizing the essence of humankind” (166). 39. See Karl-Heinz Speiss, “Asian Objects and Western European Court Culture in the Middle Ages,” in Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia, 1400–1900, ed. Michael North (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 9–28; Michael Elia Yonan, Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011); and Donald F. Lach, A Century of Wonder, Vol. II of Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 40. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 2:19. 41. Robert E. Röntgen, The Book of Meissen (Exton, PA: Schiffer, 1984), 22–28. 42. Quoted in Ibid., 301. 43. Ibid., 31–32. 44. J. F. Hayward, Viennese Porcelain of the Du Paquier Period (London: Rockliff, 1952), 4. 45. Geoffrey A. Godden, Eighteenth-Century English Porcelain: A Selection from the Godden Reference Collection (London: Granada, 1985), 138–44. 46. Michael Elia Yonan, “Veneers of Authority: Chinese Lacquers in Maria Theresa’s Vienna,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 4 (2004): 659. 47. Ibid., 667. 48. When the women at the bagnio in Adrianople “would fain have undress’d me for the bath,” Montagu writes, “I excus’d myself with some difficulty . . . at last forc’d to open my skirt and shew them my stays, which satisfy’d them very well, for I saw they beleiv’d I was so lock’d up in that machine that it was not in my own power to open it, which

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contrivance they attributed to my Husband” (1:314). Other examples of Montagu’s satirical take on the European nobility include her observation that the Austrians “are never lively except upon points of ceremony,” to the point of coming to a literal standstill in the road when two coaches carrying persons of equal rank meet (1:273), and her note of the “Curiosity” that “all the Princes [of Germany] keep favourite Dwarfs . . . I am told the King of Denmark has so far improv’d upon this fashion that his Dwarf is his cheife Minister” (1:294). 49. Denys Van Renen, “Montagu’s Letters from the Levant: Contesting the Borders of European Selfhood,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (2011): 3. 50. Ibid., 9. 51. For a summary of Webb’s career as a context for An Historical Essay, see Rachel Ramsey, “China and the Ideal of Order in John Webb’s An Historical Essay,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 3 (2001): 483–503. Porter discusses Webb’s importance to the seventeenth-century European pursuit of “linguistic legitimacy” in Ideographia, 43–49. 52. Ramsay, “China and the Ideal of Order,” 486–87. 53. Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 3. 54. Ibid., 76. In particular, Markley identifies Peter Heylyn, John Webb, Isaac Vossius, and John Ogilby. 55. John Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, ed. John Forster (London: H. G. Bohn, 1863), 3:137. 56. Porter, Ideographia, 78–132. 57. John Webb, An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability that the Language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language (London, 1669), 40. All references are to this edition. 58. A version of this narrative was published in 1649 by an anonymous author identified only as “a Lover of English-mens Freedomes” under the title A Prospective Glasse: Wherein Englands Bondage Under the Normane Yoke, with the Rise, Growth, and Continuation Is Clearly Asserted. The publication date suggests the usefulness of such anti-French treatises for the movement against the Stuart monarchy. Christopher Hill credits Sir Edward Coke with popularizing the myth as part of Parliamentary oppositional discourse in the years leading up to the Civil War, but he shows how the narrative was put to various political purposes throughout the seventeenth century. See Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 46–111. 59. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Kant: Selections, ed. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 439. 60. China, while the most extreme example of language preservation, is not the only example in the Essay. Other examples of national tongues (if not the “primitive language” of all mankind) preserved by “inland” peoples include “Native Irish,” which, presumably because it is less corrupted and more natural than English, is easier for English-born children to learn than their own language, and “the old British tongue,” which “is yet remaining in Wales” (41–42).

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61. In this passage, “they” refers to the “Cathaians,” whom Webb describes as a people, originally Chinese, who traded with the Tartars on the border of China and thus “forgetting the manners and customs of China, by perpetual commerce and conversation with the Tartars degenerated, and took up their customes; so that in the end, though nevertheless after many Centuries of years, they began to invade their native Countrey” (128–29). 62. Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 444. 63. The nostalgia of Webb’s ideal constitution of national identity is significant here; not only have the purity of noble bloodlines and the body of the monarch in particular been displaced as dominant signifiers of English identity by the civil war, but scholars have also offered plenty of evidence that the terrain of national identity was shifting away from noble bodies as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. See, for example, Richard Helgerson’s influential Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 64. The phrase was coined by the MP William Blackstone to describe the English character in Commentaries of the Laws of England (1765–69). Langford adopts it as the title of his study of English culture, observing that it refers to a “consensus about the central characteristics of mid-eighteenth-century England” (1). 65. Chen Shouyi, “John Webb: A Forgotten Page in the Early History of Sinology in Europe,” in The Vision of China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Adrian Hsia (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1998), 88. 66. John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty” and Other Writings, ed. Stephan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 70. 67. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9. All references are to this edition. 68. Srinivas Aravamudan, “‘The Unity of the Representer’: Reading Leviathan against the Grain,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 4 (2005): 635–36. 69. See Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003). 70. Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr (London, 1701), 22. 71. Ironically, the mythology of Chinese insularity remained prominent in English discourse even after the Kangxi Emperor opened Canton to European factories in 1685 in order to cultivate trade relations. This change in Chinese trade policy was particularly advantageous to the English, who took advantage of it to build direct relations with Chinese merchants that eventually helped them supersede the Dutch as China’s primary European trading partner. See Furber, Rival Empires of Trade, 125–46. 72. Atlas Chinensis: Being a Second Part of a Relation of Remarkable Passages in Two Embassies from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Vice-Roy Singlamong and General Taising Lipovi, and to Konchi, Emperor of China and East-Tartary (London, 1671), 715, 714. 73. See Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, A Century of Advance, Vol. III of Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 5–118;

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Steensgaard, “The Growth and Composition of the Long-Distance Trade of England and the Dutch Republic before 1750”; P. J. Marshall, “The English in Asia to 1700,” in The Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 264–85; and Furber, Rival Empires of Trade, 191–201 and 230–63. 74. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 55. All references are to this edition. 75. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, “A Mind for Passion: Locke and Hutcheson on Desire,” in Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850, ed. Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 132. 76. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 170. 77. For more on how the eighteenth-century popularization of the cabinet generated new modes of collection and new models of epistemology, see Barbara M. Benedict, “Connoisseurship in the Mental Cabinet,” chapter 4 of Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 158–201. 78. The controversy centered on claims by Matteo Ricci and subsequent Jesuit missionaries in China that Confucianism was fundamentally compatible with Catholic doctrine; part of the logic of this argument was that certain Confucian rituals seemingly at odds with Catholic belief, such as the worship of ancestors, were civil rather than theological in nature. For more on Jesuit writings on China and the Rites Controversy, see Porter, Ideographia, 78–132, especially 108–21. 79. See Clement Fatovic, “The Anti-Catholic Roots of Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom in English Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 66, no. 1 (2005): 37–58. 80. Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 27. 81. For recent work on European “interiors” from the art historical perspective, see Denise Amy Baxter and Meredith Martin, eds., Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), and from the literary and cultural studies perspective, see, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20, no. 3 (Spring 2008), a special issue on “Interiors,” edited by Julie Park. 82. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). See also Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (London: Routledge, 1988); John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993); John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London: Routledge, 1995); Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, eds., The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (London: Routledge, 1995); Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); and Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

NOTES TO PAGES 51–52 231

83. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds., Luxury in the Eighteenth-Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 2. 84. Berg and Eger, eds., Luxury in the Eighteenth-Century; Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg, eds., Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us About the European and American Past (New York: Routledge, 2007); Alden Cavanaugh and Michael E. Yonan, eds., The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010). While Berg and Eger consider the global context of the luxury debates in the final section of their book, both Furnishing the Eighteenth Century and The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain situate their European objects of study globally from the beginning, in order, in Goodman and Norberg’s words, “to suggest a remapping of the terrain of European furniture and its meanings across the globe at the intersections of gender, race, trade, and empire” (5). 85. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 70–71. 86. Ibid., 68–70. What I am calling chinoiserie Langford describes as “a wealth of trinkets, novelties, and knick-knacks in the French, Chinese, or Indian ‘manner,’ which invaded many homes” (68). 87. McKendrick explains the “consumer revolution” as the effect of social emulation: “Spurred on by social emulation and class competition, men and women surrendered eagerly to the pursuit of novelty, the hypnotic effects of fashion, and the enticements of persuasive commercial propaganda” (Birth of a Consumer Society, 11). 88. Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 81. 89. Ibid., 85. 90. Until the recent publication of Porter’s The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), the most extended study was Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (London: J. Murray, 1961). See also Dawn Jacobson, Chinoiserie (London: Phaidon, 1993); William W. Appleton, A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951); and Raymond Stanley Dawson, The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 106–31. 91. David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, 18–19. 92. In addition to Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, see Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Robert W. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Analysis of Beauty (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Stacey Sloboda, “Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness, and Taste in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, ed. John Potvin

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and Alla Myzelev (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 19–36; Ann Bermingham, “Elegant Females and Gentlemen Connoisseurs: The Commerce in Culture and Self-Image in Eighteenth-Century England,” in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995), 489–513; and Daniel Cottom, “Taste and the Civilized Imagination,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39, no. 4 (Summer 1981): 367–380. 93. This is the title of Part II of The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, 57–91. 94. Sloboda, “Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness, and Taste in Eighteenth-Century England,” 19. 95. In chapter 2, I address some of the Spectator letters that reflect men’s participation in the consumption of chinoiserie. 96. David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, 57–59. 97. Kathleen Lubey, “Erotic Interiors in Joseph Addison’s Imagination,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20, no. 3 (2008): 415–44. 98. Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. Pat Rogers. (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1971), 175. 99. Michael E. Yonan, “Igneous Architecture: Porcelain, Natural Philosophy, and the Rococo cabinet chinois,” in The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain, ed. Alden Cavanaugh and Michael E. Yonan (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 67. 100. Stacey Sloboda, “Displaying Materials: Porcelain and Natural History in the Duchess of Portland’s Museum,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, no. 4 (2010): 459. 101. Jo Dahn, “Mrs Delany and Ceramics in the Objectscape,” Interpreting Ceramics 1 (2000). http://www.uwic.ac.uk/ICRC/issue001/delany/delany.htm. 102. Augusta Waddington Hall, Lady Llanover, ed., The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany, 6 vols. (1861–62; reprint by New York: AMS Press, 1974), 3:477; quoted in Sloboda, “Displaying Materials,” 464. 103. “Women like Mrs Delany and her sister did not need new china. Their objectscapes were already replete with the significances that circulated around the existing contents. The ‘ladies’ to whom Wedgwood addressed his efforts were, with some notable exceptions, women of his own up and coming middle class . . . [Delany] did not aspire to the new styles that Wedgwood produced; whatever class-orientated behaviour she engaged in revolved around her membership of a cultural elite that owned and displayed exclusive objects.” Dahn, “Mrs Delany and Ceramics in the Objectscape,” n.p. 104. For a more detailed description of mid-eighteenth-century chinoiserie design and Chinese rooms in particular, see Dawn Jacobson, Chinoiserie, 124–49. 105. Thomas Chippendale, The Gentleman & Cabinet-Maker’s Director, 3rd edition (London, 1762), 4. 106. See Stacey Sloboda, “Fashioning Bluestocking Conversation: Elizabeth Montagu’s Chinese Room,” in Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors, ed. Denise Amy Baxter and Meredith S. Martin (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 129–48.

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107. Ibid., 132. 108. On the genre of oriental tales, see Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), and Fables of the East: Selected Tales, 1662–1785 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). I address the relationship between chinoiserie and fantasy in chapters 5 and 6. 109. For an analysis of the museographical problem of categorizing “things Chinese” in global collections, see Rujivacharakul, “China and china: An Introduction to Materiality and a History of Collecting,” in Collecting China, 16–20. 110. Jacobson, Chinoiserie, 7. 111. Honour, Chinoiserie, 84. 112. David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, 38–39. 113. Quoted in Cynthia Sundberg Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 76–77. 114. Margaret C. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of The Scientific Revolution (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1988), 81. See also Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 115. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 104, 155. 116. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 55. 117. Armstrong and Tennenhouse, “A Mind for Passion,” 170. 118. Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 44. 119. Isaac Newton, “A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton . . . Containing His New Theory about Light and Colours,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (London: Royal Society, 1671), 6:3083. 120. Yu Liu’s historical reading of Windsor-Forest argues that the poem’s vision of “harmonious confusion” derives less from the classical European concept of concordia discours, as many critics have claimed, than from the Chinese principle of natural irregularity popularized in England in early eighteenth-century theories of landscape design. Yu Liu, Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 84–90. Rajani Sudan links Pope to Newton to make a quite different argument than the one I make here, emphasizing Windsor-Forest’s turn to the logic of alchemy to negotiate and obscure the uneasy relationship between scientific, theological, and political authority in the early eighteenth century. See Rajani Sudan, “Mud, Mortar, and Other Technologies of Empire,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 45, no. 2 (2004): 147–69, especially 161–64. 121. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 12. 122. For another reading of Hogarth’s ambivalent relationship to chinoiserie, see David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, 78–91. Porter argues that

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“Hogarth rejected the Chinese style as an alternative to classicism . . . not so much out of a considered repudiation of its underlying aesthetic values, but rather out of a sobering recognition that to grant the validity of the Chinese taste would be to legitimate a regime not only of female aesthetic self-determination, but also of the autonomy of female desire more generally conceived” (91).

Chapter 2 1. William Wycherley, The Plain Dealer, ed. James L. Smith (New York: Norton, 1979), 4. All references are to this edition. 2. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 104. 3. See in particular Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (London: J. Murray, 1961), and Dawn Jacobson, Chinoiserie (London: Phaidon, 1993). Both Honour and Jacobson place chinoiserie’s zenith in English culture sometime between the establishment of a domestic industry in Chinese-style goods in the mid-eighteenth century and Queen Victoria’s pronounced rejection of Hanoverian rococo taste. Jacobson marks the waning of the fashion in England by Parliament’s 1846 decision to auction off the Prince Regent’s lavish Royal Pavilion at Brighton to pay for improvements at Buckingham Palace. 4. Anne Veronica Witchard, Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 11. 5. Michael Elia Yonan, “Veneers of Authority: Chinese Lacquers in Maria Theresa’s Vienna,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 4 (2004): 657. 6. Roland N. Stromberg, “Lovejoy’s ‘Parallel’ Reconsidered,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 1, no. 4 (1968): 384. 7. Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948), 99–135. 8. Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Robert J. Griffin, Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, “A Mind for Passion: Locke and Hutcheson on Desire,” in Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850, ed. Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 131–50. Pinch argues for “a long ‘era of sensibility’ stretching from the end of the seventeenth century into the beginning of the nineteenth,” which allows us to view the Romantic period not as a break from eighteenth-century culture but rather its “last phase” (11). Focusing on eighteenth-century poetry, Griffin demonstrates that Romantic historiography is founded on an uncritical adoption of Wordsworth’s rejection of Pope and has obscured the many formal and theoretical continuities of English poetry from the beginning to the end of the century. Armstrong and Tennenhouse offer a reading of Locke that challenges “the conventional wisdom [that] understands eighteenth-century theories of human nature

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in terms of an opposition between Enlightenment definitions of reason, on the one hand, and intuition, emotion, or imagination on the other” (131). 9. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas, 134. 10. David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 20. 11. In addition to The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, see David Porter, “Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28 (1999): 27–54, and “Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (2002): 395–411. 12. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Isaac Newton, Opticks; or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (London, 1704). 13. Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). The implications of Newton’s philosophy for extant regimes of power and authority both theological and political were, and remain, highly controversial; see Steven Shapin, “Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes,” Isis 72, no. 2 (1981): 187–215. 14. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I (Dublin, 1710), 156. All references are to this edition. For detailed analyses of the cultural imbrications of the “new science,” particularly its relationship to debates on language, theology, and politics, see Jules David Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I. A. Richards (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Margaret C. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of The Scientific Revolution (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1988); Margaret C. Jacob, Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); Peter Walmsley, The Rhetoric of Berkeley’s Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Peter Walmsley, Locke’s Essay and the Rhetoric of Science (Lewisberg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003). 15. Berkeley is able to make this conceptual shift in large part because he understands the term “noble” as a spiritual rather than a political designation. The “noble view” he proposes is opposed less to common ignorance than to the “minute philosophy” of “free-thinkers,” or atheists. See Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher, in The Works of George Berkeley, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1901), 2:3–368. I am grateful to Peter Walmsley for rightly pointing out that Berkeley himself would “bridle at being linked with Shaftesbury” (private correspondence). 16. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence Klein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 413. 17. Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 156. 18. This is not to say that taste was not also implicated in aristocratic power. See, for example, Daniel Cottom, “Taste and the Civilized Imagination,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39, no. 4 (Summer 1981): 367–80. Cottom argues that in

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the discourse on taste, “the realities of social organization are disguised in the form of a mental principle” (371). 19. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3:538. All references to The Spectator are to this edition. 20. Cottom, “Taste and the Civilized Imagination,” 371. 21. For a reading of the erotics of this vulnerability in Addison, see Kathleen Lubey, “Erotic Interiors in Joseph Addison’s Imagination,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20, no. 3 (2008): 415–44. 22. Cottom, “Taste and the Civilized Imagination,” 369–71. 23. I am deliberately using the term “Chinese” here to describe the aesthetic function Addison’s essay assigns to the term, not in the sense of “from China.” For a historical account of Addison’s theory of landscape design, including the influence of Chinese gardening styles popularized in England by Sir William Temple, see Yu Liu, Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 91–112. 24. Tony C. Brown, “Joseph Addison and the Pleasures of Sharawadgi,” ELH 74, no. 1 (2007): 171–72. 25. David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, 134. 26. Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 25. 27. Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (Edinburgh: E. & G. Goldsmid, 1889), 11:353. 28. Honour, Chinoiserie, 42. 29. According to Honour, in the first half of the seventeenth century, domestic imitations of Chinese objects, or “China worke,” flourished in countries like England that had limited access to the China trade. The earliest reference he provides to European-made furnishings in the Chinese taste is from 1600, in the anonymous French play L’Ile des Hermaphrodites, which mentions cabinets “ornez à la fascon de la Chine où il y a toutes sortes d’oyseaulx et d’animaux représentez.” Honour points out that Spain and Portugal, the European countries “most intimately connected with the China trade” in the first half of the seventeenth century, were the only countries in which domestic China work did not flourish. This suggests that the taste for things Chinese preceded the actual influx of goods in countries like England, which had to rely on European substitutions before authentic imported goods were readily available. Ironically, when imports increased later in the century, merchants struggled to make China goods fit the English “Chinese taste” that was by then well established, providing patterns and designs to Eastern factors to make sure the Eastern objects would appeal to English consumers. Honour, Chinoiserie, 44. See also Donald F. Lach, A Century of Wonder, Vol. II of Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 30. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 2.1.86–87. In William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

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31. Ben Jonson, Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 1.3.34–38. 32. Entry for September 25, 1660. In Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 1:253; also quoted in Honour, Chinoiserie, 51. 33. John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. De Beer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 3:310. All references are to this edition. 34. For a cultural history of the global porcelain trade, see Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 35. Cynthia Sundberg Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 88–90. 36. Benedict, Curiosity, 5. 37. This description thus participates in what Stephen Greenblatt identifies as early modern discursive regimes of marvel and wonder, which both participate in and exceed European imperial agency. See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 38. Ibid., 20. 39. Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1971), 175. 40. Thomas Macaulay, The History of England: From the Accession of James II (London, 1855), 3:56. 41. David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, and Other Essays, ed. John W. Lenz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 38. 42. Wall, The Prose of Things, 189. 43. I borrow this wonderful phrase from David Porter, whose coins it in “Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy,” chapter 3 of Ideographia, 133–92. 44. For a recent reading of the politics of the “Restoration sex comedy,” particularly The Country Wife, see Laura J. Rosenthal, “‘All injury’s forgot’: Restoration Sex Comedy and National Amnesia,” Comparative Drama 42, no. 1 (2008): 7–28. Rosenthal argues that the hero status of the libertine in these comedies is always ambivalent, due to their resistance to marriage as “the foundation for familial and national strength and stability”; using this figure, “sex comedies test the boundaries of what kinds of violations the elite community, which no longer takes its superiority for granted, can recover from and what kind of process this recovery demands” (16, 15). 45. In John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, The Complete Works, ed. Frank H. Ellis (Harmondsworth, UK Penguin, 1994), 40–42. All references to Rochester are to line numbers from this edition. 46. William Wycherley, The Country Wife (New York: Norton, 1991), 4.3.84–85, 110–12. All references are to line numbers from this edition. 47. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 56.

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48. Porter, Ideographia, 183. 49. Benedict, Curiosity, 124–25. 50. Porter, Ideographia, 183. 51. Wycherley, The Plain Dealer, 3–4. 52. September 22, 1660. Pepys, 1:250. 53. Wycherley, The Plain Dealer, 4. 54. It also performs the operation of mind it figures, taunting the reader to hear another meaning: as the play’s editor James L. Smith points out, “touchstone” is “perhaps used in a double entendre for testicles.” Wycherley, The Plain Dealer, 4n52. 55. The Rape of the Lock, 2:105–106. In Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963). All references to Pope are to line numbers from this edition. 56. An Epistle to a Lady, line 268. 57. Windsor-Forest, line 14. 58. Kowaleski-Wallace, 52–69. For a more recent overview of this function of china, see Stacey Sloboda, “Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness, and Taste in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, ed. John Potvin and Alla Myzelev (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 19–36. 59. Porter, Ideographia, 186. 60. Addison, No. 446 (Aug. 1, 1712). Addison and Steele, The Spectator, 4:66–67. 61. Steele, No. 65 (May 15, 1711). Addison and Steele, The Spectator, 1:280. 62. Steele, No. 266 (Jan. 4, 1712). Addison and Steele, The Spectator, 2:537. 63. In Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), Erin Mackie points out the continuity of cultural concerns from the Restoration to the early eighteenth century, even as the discourse of taste performs a shift of privilege from inherited aristocratic identity to tasteful subjectivity. She writes, “the reform of taste and manners undertaken by The Tatler and The Spectator is perhaps not best understood as a simple supplanting of the aristocratic codes of taste by some already in place, fully formed mode of bourgeois taste. Rather, the very objects of reform are those dominant standards of taste and conduct that, though more fully dispersed across status hierarchies and class lines, are traceable to those set by the Restoration court” (20–21). 64. Addison, No. 10 (March 12, 1711). Addison and Steele, The Spectator, 1:44. 65. Mackie, Market à la Mode, offers the best sustained reading of how Addison and Steele’s periodicals display “a drive towards regulation, toward channeling . . . passions for consumption into avenues mapped out on ethical and social coordinates, rather than on the valueless grid of profit and loss” (29). See also the introduction to The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator, ed. Erin Mackie (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 1–32. 66. Anthony Pollock, “Neutering Addison and Steele: Aesthetic Failure and the Spectatorial Public Sphere,” ELH 74, no. 3 (2007): 709.

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67. Pollock emphasizes the role of visuality, as opposed to conversation, in Addison and Steele’s model of social regulation; The Spectator, he argues, “should be thought of as a vehicle for privately consumed, surrogate visuality—a spectatorial model of publicness” (707). 68. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Lover, and Other Papers of Steele and Addison, ed. Walter Lewin (London: Walter Scott, 1887), 45. 69. Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode, 60. 70. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Tatler, ed. George A. Aitken (New York: G. Olms, 1970), 3:152–53. All references are to this edition. 71. Calamus trees “abound in the Madras territories, along the foot of the Himalaya from Dehra Doon to Sylhet, in Assam, Chittagong, in the Malay Peninsula, Siam, Cochin-China, Sumatra, and in the Eastern Archipelago . . . They furnish the dragon’s blood, Malacca canes, and rattans of commerce, some being formed into walking sticks.” Dragon cane “is less flexible than the common rattans, but strong, springy, and much valued.” Jambee is “imported from China” and has “a pale, hard bark, and flexible stems.” Edward Balfour, The cyclopædia of India and of eastern and southern Asia: commercial, industrial and scientific, products of the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, useful arts and manufactures (London, 1885), 545. 72. “Advertisement,” London Gazette, No. 4059, October 5, 1704, http://www. london-gazette.co.uk/. 73. Balfour, The cyclopædia, 545. 74. According to the OED, “Jambee” cane was so named because it hailed from “the district of Jambi,” a major trading port in the Dutch Spice Islands (now Indonesia). “Jambee, n.” OED Online. September 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed. com/view/Entry/100694 (accessed November 13, 2012). 75. George Berkeley, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (Dublin, 1709). Of the distinction between “visible” and “tangible” objects, Berkeley writes, “it must be acknowledg’d, that we never See and Feel one and the same thing. That which is Seen is one thing, and that which is Felt is another . . . the Objects of Sight and Touch are two distinct things. It may perhaps, require some Thought, rightly to conceive this Distinction” (53–54, emphasis in original). Making the distinction is counterintuitive, Berkeley argues, because language conflates images and tangible things into a seemingly coherent whole. 76. “No sooner do we hear the Words of a familiar Language pronounced in our Ears, but the Ideas corresponding thereto present themselves to our Minds. In the very same instant, the Sound and the Meaning enter the Understanding. So closely are they United, that ’tis not in our Power to keep out the one, except we exclude the other also . . . So likewise, the Secondary Objects, or those which are only suggested by Sight, do often more strongly affect us, and are more regarded than the proper Objects of that Sense; along with which they enter into the Mind, and with which they have a far more strict and near Connexion, than Ideas have with Words. Hence it is, we find it so difficult to discriminate, between the immediate and mediate Objects of Sight, and are so prone to attribute to the former, what belongs only to the latter” (Berkeley, New Theory of Vision, 55–56).

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Chapter 3 1. Daniel Defoe, The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton (London, 1720), 37. All references are to this edition. 2. George Berkeley, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (Dublin, 1709), 174. 3. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). 4. James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 12. 5. Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 211. 6. Srinivas Aravamudan, “In the Wake of the Novel: The Oriental Tale as National Allegory,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 33, no. 1 (Autumn 1999): 9–10. See also Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 202–43, which develops the argument of this essay to show how early eighteenth-century prose fictions “[provide] transcultural lines of flight from within the national language” (202). 7. Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentleman (London, 1630), 276. 8. Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie (London, 1652), 9. 9. Joseph Addison, Spectator 69 (May 19, 1711). In Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:292–96. All references to The Spectator are to this edition. 10. Heylyn, Cosmographie, 5. 11. Cynthia Klekar argues that seventeenth-century European writers pointed to China as an example of how a moral economy based on benevolence, courtesy, and civility generates national stability and social order. See Cynthia Klekar, “‘Sweetness and Courtesie’: Benevolence, Civility, and China in the Making of European Modernity,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, no. 3 (2010): 357–69. 12. Brathwaite, The English Gentleman, 278. 13. Specifically, according to Andre Gunder Frank, a long-established network of Asian trade routes that expanded to include Europe and the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 14. Louis Hennepin, A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America (London, 1698), 155. 15. William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (London, 1697), iii, 484. 16. Frank notes that in response to the difficulty of finding foreign markets for European manufactures, the British East India Company was obliged by its charter “to include British export products of at least one-tenth of the value of its total exports. Yet, the company had constant difficulty to find markets even for this modest export, and most of that went only as far as West Asia” (74). See also Niels Steensgaard, “The Growth and Composition of the Long-Distance Trade of England and the Dutch Republic before

NOTES TO PAGES 108–112

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1750,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, ed. James D. Tracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 102–52; and Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, A Century of Advance, Vol. III of Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 17. Frank, ReOrient, 74. 18. Maxine Berg, “Asian Luxuries and the Making of the European Consumer Revolution” in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods, ed. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 229–30. 19. Including the Great Recoinage of 1696, which officially standardized coin money for the first time in Great Britain. 20. Deborah Valenze, The Social Life of Money in the English Past (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 38–39. 21. The resemblance between coins and words as currencies of value has generated a number of studies of the affinity of language and money, notably Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), and Money, Language, and Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); and Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), and The Coiners of Language (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994). 22. Lydia H. Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” Critical Inquiry 25 (1999): 730–48. Liu argues that the ceramic pot in Robinson Crusoe “evokes [Chinese] porcelain by metonymic association and calls up the existence of the latter by virtue of its absence” (732). 23. Sandra Sherman, “Promises, Promises: Credit as Contested Metaphor in Early Capitalist Discourse,” Modern Philology 94 (1997): 327–49; Thompson, Models of Value; Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination. These recent studies build on a vast body of work that ties Defoe’s texts to emergent capitalism. See in particular Maximillian E. Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), and Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel. 24. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. J. Donald Crowley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 57. 25. Robinson Crusoe, despite its supposed “realism,” thus contains a provocative echo of Aladdin’s “wonderful” lamp, a tarnished Chinese relic that when rubbed and handled releases a spirit capable of generating varied and unlimited forms of value. See Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, ed. Robert L. Mack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 651–726. 26. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, “Spectral Currencies in the Air of Reality: A Journal of the Plague Year and the History of Apparitions,” Representations 87 (2004): 86. 27. Valenze, The Social Life of Money, 38. 28. For more on Dampier’s influence on Defoe, see Ilsa Vickers, Defoe and the New Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 216–18.

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29. “toy, n.” OED Online. September 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed. com/view/Entry/204133 (accessed November 9, 2012). 30. Defoe, Singleton, 41, 45, 55, 73, 99, 114, 123, 127, 140, 160, 170, 175, 177. 31. “artifice, n.” OED Online. September 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www. oed.com/view/Entry/11206 (accessed November 9, 2012). 32. Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, 5th ed. (London, 1745), 1:246. 33. “trinket, v.1”. OED Online. September 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www. oed.com/view/Entry/206188 (accessed November 9, 2012). 34. Ann Louise Kibbie, “Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Moll Flanders and Roxana,” PMLA 110 (1995): 1023–34. 35. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 508. 36. It also directly contradicts accounts of the remarkable savvy of indigenous consumers in their dealings with European traders. See, for example, Arthur J. Ray, “Indians as Consumers in the Eighteenth Century,” in Old Trails and New Directions: Papers of the Third North American Fur Trade Conference, ed. Carol M. Judd and Arthur J. Ray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 255–71. Ray documents English reports of the power North American Indians exercised as consumers of French and English goods in the late seventeenth century. 37. Berg, “Asian Luxuries,” 229. 38. See, for example, Spectator 252 (December 19, 1711); 326 (March 14, 1712); and 336 (March 26, 1712). 39. Joseph Addison, The Lover 10 (March 18, 1714). In Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Lover, and Other Papers of Steele and Addison, ed. Walter Lewin (London: Walter Scott, 1887), 44. 40. See Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Brown’s seminal work on how such female figures and their “frivolous” tastes serve as scapegoats for English imperial interest has generated a number of illuminating studies of the female consumer in this period, notably Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Martha Pointon, Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession, and Representation in English Visual Culture, 1665–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Robert W. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste: The Analysis of Beauty (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). On the prominent role of things Chinese in this context, see Stacey Sloboda, “Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness, and Taste in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, ed. John Potvin and Alla Myzelev (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 19–36; and David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 41. Robert Dodsley, The Toy-Shop (London, 1735), 6–7.

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42. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste, 5. 43. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 211. 44. Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 157. 45. H. A. Crosby Forbes, John Devereux Kernan, and Ruth S. Wilkins, Chinese Export Silver, 1785–1885 (Milton, MA: Museum of the American China Trade, 1975), 53. 46. Carl Christian Dauterman, “Dream-Visions of Cathay: Chinoiserie on Restoration Silver,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 23 (1964), 25. 47. “Chinoiserie decoration on silver seems to have been confined to England between the 1670s and 1690s” (Dauterman, 13). 48. Cynthia Klekar, “‘Prisoners in Silken Bonds’: Obligation, Trade, and Diplomacy in English Voyages to Japan and China,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2006): 86. For another recent account of how rituals of exchange and diplomacy in the East are misinterpreted by the English, see Robert Markley, “Anson at Canton, 1743: Obligation, Exchange, and Ritual in Edward Page’s ‘Secret History,’” in The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 215–33. 49. David Porter, “A Peculiar but Uninteresting Nation: China and the Discourse of Commerce in Eighteenth-Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (2000): 181–99; Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 177–209. For an overview of “sinophobic” and “sinophilic” European representations of China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see also Colin Mackerras, Sinophiles and Sinophobes: Western Views of China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), and Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). 50. Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 199, 179. 51. Shell, The Economy of Literature, 4. 52. Addison, Spectator 411 (June 21, 1711), 3:537. 53. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 195–98. In The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).

Chapter 4 1. Quoted in Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (London: J. Murray, 1961), 73–74. 2. Daniel Defoe, Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress, ed. John Mullan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 173–74. 3. In this example, the Chinese object is deliberately conflated with the early modern category of the Orient based on images of Turkey and Persia, a conflation nicely captured in the phrase “a fine Persian, or India Damask.” While this kind of slippage among imaginary Eastern realms is not uncommon, there are distinct connotations to Far Eastern

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references (usually including “China,” “Japan,” and “India,” which make up what I call in this book the Chinese taste or chinoiserie) and Oriental references. Consistent with her role as a courtesan, Roxana’s infusion of “Chinese” self-coining with French-style Turkish and Persian inflections deliberately sexualizes her performance. See Madeleine Dobie, “Orientalism, Colonialism, and Furniture in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past, ed. Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (New York: Routledge, 2007), 13–36. Dobie notes, “The European embrace of Chinese and Japanese goods and techniques represented an implicit homage to these cultures and their rich decorative traditions. By contrast, Turkey and Persia were for the most part evoked in furnishings in a different way. These references were predominantly linguistic and reflected a growing association of the Muslim Orient with traits such as sensuality and indolence” (15). 4. See, for example, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Robert W. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); David Porter, “Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28 (1999): 27–54; “Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (2002): 395–411; and The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Stacey Sloboda, “Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness, and Taste in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, ed. John Potvin and Alla Myzelev (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 19–36. 5. See Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects; and Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 6. See Sir William Temple, Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, with Other XVIIth Century Garden Essays, ed. Albert Forbes Sieveking (London: Chatto and Windus, 1908), and John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. De Beer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). 7. Yu Liu, Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 14. 8. Maxine Berg explains the complexity of the category of “luxury items” in the eighteenth century: “Luxuries, formerly negatively associated with foreign imports and with elite ostentatious display, gave way to consumer goods identified with middling-class domestic interiors and dress. Distinctive British consumer goods connected the middling classes to an economy extolling the virtues of quality, delight, fashion and taste, comfort and convenience, and variety and imitation.” Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 21. 9. Alexander Pope, Windsor-Forest, line 15. In The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963). All references to Pope are to line numbers from this edition.

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10. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 297–98. 11. Hannah Woolley, A Supplement to the Queen-Like Closet, or A Little of Everything, Presented to All Ingenious Ladies, and Gentlewomen (London, 1674), Preface, n.p.; 71. Appended to The Queen-Like Closet, or Rich Cabinet, 3rd ed. (London, 1675). 12. Hannah Woolley, The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery (London, 1675), preface, n.p.; 176–80. On the racial implications of seventeenth-century cosmetic treatments, see Kimberly Poitevin, “Inventing Whiteness: Cosmetics, Race, and Women in Early Modern England,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 11, no. 1 (2011): 59–89. 13. J[ohn] S[hirley], The Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities (London, 1687), 158–60. 14. C. K., Art’s Master-Piece; or, a Companion for the Ingenious of Either Sex (London, 1697), 129. 15. John Stalker and George Parker, A Treatise of Japaning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688), Preface, n.p. All references are to this edition. 16. While specific arts such as japanning were increasingly feminized over the course of the eighteenth century, chinoiserie as a whole remained the aesthetic concern of both sexes, as evidenced by Chippendale’s mastery of the Chinese style in architecture and furniture design, and Chambers’s expertise in Chinese décor and landscaping. See Thomas Chippendale, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director (London, 1754); and William Chambers, Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils (London, 1757), and A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (London, 1772). 17. See Ann Bermingham, “Elegant Females and Gentlemen Connoisseurs: The Commerce in Culture and Self-Image in Eighteenth-Century England,” in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (New York: Routledge, 1995), 489–513; and Tita Chico, “The Arts of Beauty: Women’s Cosmetics and Pope’s Ekphrasis,” Eighteenth-Century Life 26, no. 1 (2002), 1–23. 18. Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: Random House, 1979), 12. 19. James H. Bunn, “The Aesthetics of British Mercantilism,” New Literary History 11, no. 2 (1980): 303–21. 20. My reading departs here from Chico’s, which argues that The Rape of the Lock stages a “rivalry” between the female art of cosmetics and the male art of ekphrasis, precisely to perform the poet’s superior skills in the arts of “painting.” The reading I present in this section does not contradict Chico’s but focuses on a wider field of women’s aesthetic work that, unlike face-painting alone, appears closer in nature and importance to the work of the male poet. 21. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 44–53. 22. Fussell, Poetic Meter, 131. See also J. Paul Hunter, “Form as Meaning: Pope and the Ideology of the Couplet,” in Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. David H. Richter (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1999), 147–62. 23. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), xxi.

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24. Stalker and Parker, A Treatise of Japaning, 37, 38. 25. Marcia Pointon, Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession, and Representation in English Visual Culture, 1665–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 28. 26. Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects, 60. 27. For more details on tea-preparation and -service in the eighteenth-century home, see Jane Pettigrew, A Social History of Tea (London: National Trust, 2001). 28. Though Belinda’s company at this court gathering is more distinguished, certainly, than the crowds one might meet in other public spaces in London, the conspicuous detail of coffee helps to show that Belinda has, indeed, crossed a social and cultural threshold. Habermas associates the coffee-house with the birth of the public sphere, and Stallybrass and White point out that, in this capacity, the coffee-house was a distinctively masculine space. See Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 80–100. For a more recent assessment of the masculinity of the coffee-house, see Brian Cowan, “What Was Masculine About the Public Sphere?,” History Workshop Journal 51 (2001): 127–57. 29. Aubrey Williams, “The ‘Fall’ of China and The Rape of the Lock,” Philological Quarterly 41 (1962): 412. 30. Ibid., 415, 417. 31. A point elaborated by Clarissa in canto V of the poem. The author informs us in a footnote that he introduced this passage “in the subsequent Editions, to open more clearly the Moral of the Poem.” 32. Ralph Cohen has argued that “[i]n The Rape of the Lock change must be interpreted in terms of natural or normal change and unnatural or artificial and grotesque change.” This distinction is precisely what is at stake in the seventeenth-century arts of interior decoration. In The Rape of the Lock, responsibility for monitoring material transformations is assigned to Belinda, while, as Cohen points out, the poet takes responsibility for monitoring the analogous line between “natural” and “unnatural” change in the verse itself. Ralph Cohen, “Transformation in The Rape of the Lock,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 2 (1969): 207. 33. Stewart, On Longing, 54–60. 34. Hunter argues that this is precisely the work—both formal and ideological—of the heroic couplet: “Rather than privileging one half or the other of the conflict or negotiating a successful compromise, the closed couplet tends to privilege the balancing itself— the preservation and acceptance of difference” (157). 35. I do not mean to suggest that prior to the eighteenth century representations of chinaware were universally positive and evocative of “good taste.” Even the bawdiest associations of women and china in the Restoration era, however, did not attack their subjects with the ferocity of the scatological satires I discuss in this section. William Wycherley’s notorious “china scene” in The Country Wife (1675), for example, while permanently infusing chinaware with pornographic potential, ultimately celebrates the

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sexual appetites of the women it mocks, giving them the last laugh over Horner and his relatively feeble sexual performance. China remains an object of pleasure on the Restoration stage, not one of disgust. 36. “Jordan” was a popular term for a chamber pot. The Dunciad, Book II, lines 157–90. 37. William W. Appleton, A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951). See in particular chapter 4, “The Dissenting Opinion.” 38. David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). The quoted phrases are taken from the titles of chapters 1, “Linguistic Legitimacy and the Interpretation of Chinese Writing,” and 3, “Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy.” 39. Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 243. 40. “The Progress of Beauty,” lines 51–52. In The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). All quotations from Swift are to line numbers from this edition. 41. Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 48–49. 42. According to the OED, “puppy-water” was “the urine of a puppy, formerly used as a cosmetic.” “Puppy, n.” OED Online. September 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www. oed.com/view/Entry/154804 (accessed November 13, 2012). Other sources suggest the recipe for this cosmetic varied, but remained consistently distasteful. The second edition of Mary Evelyn’s Mundus Muliebris, for example, includes “a most rare and incomparable receipt, to make pig, or puppidog-water for the face”: “Take a Fat Pig, or a Fat Puppidog, of nine days old, and kill it, order it as to Roast; save the Blood, and fling away nothing but the Guts; then take the Blood, and Pig, or the Puppidog, and break the Legs and Head, with all the Liver and the rest of the Inwards, of either of them, put all into the Still if it will hold it, to that, take two Quarts of old Canary, a pound of unwash’d Butter not salted; a Quart of Snail-Shells, and also two Lemmons, only the outside pared away; Still all these together in a Rose Water Still, either at once or twice; Let it drop slowly into a Glass-Bottle, in which let there be a lump of Loaf-Sugar, and a little Leaf-gold.” Mary Evelyn, Mundus Muliebris: or, The ladies dressing-room unlock’d, and her toilette spread in burlesque. Together with the fop-dictionary, compiled for the use of the fair sex (London, 1690), 22–23. Evelyn’s poem, which criticized the excesses of luxury and cosmetic improvement through the spectacle of indiscriminate hoarding in the dressing-room, would have included the recipe less for pragmatic instruction than to emphasize the disgusting mixture of ingredients masquerading as an enhancement to beauty. 43. See Daniel Cottom, Cannibals and Philosophers: Bodies of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), especially chapter 1, “In the Bowels of Enlightenment,” 1–34. 44. Ibid., 200.

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45. “A Ramble in St. James’s Park,” line 102. In The Complete Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Frank H. Ellis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994). References are to lines from this edition. 46. Swift, “Lady’s Dressing Room,” 95. 47. Porter, Ideographia, 194–98. 48. Jonas Hanway, A Journal of Eight Days’ Journey . . . to which is added An Essay on Tea (London, 1756).

Chapter 5 1. Elizabeth Robinson Montagu and Emily J. Climenson, Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Bluestockings: Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761 (London: John Murray, 1906), 1:271. 2. Lars Tharp, Hogarth’s China: Hogarth’s Painting and Eighteenth-Century Ceramics (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997), 54–55. 3. Nahum Tate, Panacea: a Poem Upon Tea in Two Canto’s (London, 1700), 35. 4. Charles Rollin, Taste: An Essay (London, 1732), 2–3. 5. Samuel Johnson, The Major Works, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 816n509. All references to Johnson are to this edition. 6. Jonas Hanway, A Journal of Eight Days Journey from Portsmouth to Kingston Upon Thames . . . To Which Is Added, An Essay on Tea (London, 1756), 213. All references are to this edition. 7. Gerald G. Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740– 1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 67. 8. Ibid., 67. 9. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), argues that this model of subjectivity continues to organize modern middle-class values: “The illusion persists that there is a self independent of the material conditions that have produced it and that such a self can transform itself without transforming the social and economic configuration in opposition to which it is constructed. This transformational power still seems to arise from within the self and to affect that self through strategies of self-discipline” (94–95). 10. Hanway, A Journal of Eight Days, 246. 11. The sheer quantity of tea that came into Britain every year by the mid-eighteenth century is impressive. By 1750, the British East India Company recorded importing almost five million pounds of Chinese tea into Britain every year, a figure that does not account for the vast amount of tea smuggled illegally into the country to bypass heavy taxes. See Roy Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003), 24. According to another historian, “One authority calculated that during the 1770’s Englishmen actually consumed about 13,000,000 pounds of tea annually.” Benjamin Woods Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 6.

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12. William W. Appleton, A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 62–63. 13. David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 138. 14. Chi-ming Yang, “Asia Out of Place: The Aesthetics of Incorruptibility in Behn’s Oroonoko,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42, no. 2 (2008): 235–53. 15. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Penguin, 2004), 48. All references are to this edition. 16. See Madeleine Dobie, “Orientalism, Colonialism, and Furniture in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past, ed. Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (New York: Routledge, 2007), 13–36. Dobie argues that in France, Chinese and oriental design effectively obscured the colonial origins of precious tropical woods including ebony, imported in large quantities from places like Madagascar and Ile de France. 17. “On King Charles” (1673), lines 8–11. In John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, The Complete Works, ed. Frank H. Ellis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994). 18. The Female Tatler, No. 67. In Erin Mackie, ed., The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 294–97. 19. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3:245. 20. Delariviere Manley, Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, of Both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediteranean (London, 1709), 33–34. 21. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I : An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 38. 22. Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 130–31. 23. Manley, Secret Memoirs, 32–33. Quoted in Benedict, 131. 24. Addison and Steele, The Spectator, 3:537–38. 25. Benedict, Curiosity, 122. 26. William Hatchett, A Chinese Tale (London, 1740), 10–11. All references are to this edition. 27. John Stalker and George Parker, A Treatise of Japaning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688), Preface, n.p. 28. George Bickham, Deliciæ britannicæ (London, 1742), 182. All references are to this edition. 29. See David E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800, rev. ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 82, and Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 89. 30. See Tita Chico, Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (Lewisberg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005), 25–45.

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31. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 3–27; Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 255–70. 32. McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 255–56. 33. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 13. 34. William Beatty Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). See Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) for an account of how eighteenth-century fiction exceeds and challenges the ideological functions that “rise of the novel” arguments have assigned to it. 35. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). 36. See David Porter, “From Chinese to Goth: Walpole and the Gothic Repudiation of Chinoiserie,” Eighteenth-Century Life 23, no. 1 (1999): 46–58; reprinted in David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 115–30. 37. Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (London: J. Murray, 1961), 196. See my discussion of Chinese rooms in chapter 1. 38. For other recent discussions of Chambers, see Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, 37–54; and Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 28–37. 39. William Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (London, 1772), x. All references are to this edition. 40. “The Story of Aladdin; or, The Wonderful Lamp.” In Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, ed. Robert L. Mack (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 651–726. 41. Addison and Steele, The Spectator, 3:522. 42. Quoted in Martin S. Day, “The Influence of Mason’s Heroic Epistle,” Modern Language Quarterly 14, no. 3 (1953): 235. 43. R. C. Bald, “Sir William Chambers and the Chinese Garden,” Journal of the History of Ideas 11, no. 3 (1950): 293. 44. Robert R. Rea, “Mason, Walpole, and That Rogue Almon,” Huntington Library Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1960): 188. 45. Porter, “From Chinese to Goth”; Stephen Bending, “Horace Walpole and Eighteenth-Century Garden History,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994): 209–26; Yu Liu, Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008). 46. Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England . . . to which is added The History of The Modern Taste in Gardening, 2nd ed. (London, 1782), 4:283.

NOTES TO PAGES 177–190

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47. Quoted in Porter, “From Chinese to Goth,” 55. 48. Ibid., 57. 49. R. C. Bald, “Sir William Chambers and the Chinese Garden,” 290. 50. Dawn Jacobson, Chinoiserie (London: Phaidon, 1993), 187–98. 51. See Donald Nichol, ed., The New Foundling Hospital for Wit, 1768–73 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006). 52. William Mason, An Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers, Knight, comptroller general of His Majesty’s works, and Author of a late Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (London, 1773), preface, 3–4. 53. Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, 19. 54. Mason, An Heroic Epistle, lines 9–12. 55. See Sheila O’Connell, The Popular Print in England, 1550–1850 (London: British Museum Press, 1999). 56. William Halfpenny, New Designs for Chinese Temples, Triumphal Arches, Garden Seats, Palings &c. (London, 1750–52); George Edwards and Matthew Darly, A New Book of Chinese Designs: Calculated to Improve the Present Taste, Consisting of Figures, Buildings, & Furniture, Landskips, Birds, Beasts, Flowrs., and Ornaments, &c. (London, 1754); Thomas Chippendale, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director (London, 1754); William Chambers, Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils (London, 1757). 57. See Maria Gordon-Smith, Pillement (Kraków: IRSA, 2006). 58. Robert Sayer, The Ladies Amusement; or, Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy, 2nd ed. (London, 1762; facsimile edition, Newport, UK: Ceramic Book Co., 1959), introduction, n.p. 59. See David Drakard, Printed English Pottery: History and Humour in the Reign of George III, 1760–1820 (London: J. Horne, 1992); Cyril Williams-Wood, English Transfer-Printed Pottery and Porcelain: A History of Over-Glaze Printing (London: Faber and Faber, 1981). 60. Quoted in Neil McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood: An Eighteenth-Century Entrepreneur in Salesmanship and Marketing Techniques,” The Economic History Review 12, no. 3 (1960): 419. 61. Williams-Wood, English Transfer-Printed Pottery and Porcelain, 25. 62. Sayer, The Ladies Amusement, 4.

Chapter 6 1. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Marilyn Butler (London: Penguin, 2003), 189. All references are to this edition. 2. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 74. 3. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler 4, in The Major Works, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 175. All references to Johnson are to this edition.

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4. Weber argues that “rational empirical knowledge has consistently carried through the disenchantment (Entzauberung) of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism.” Max Weber, “Intermediate Reflection on the Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” in The Essential Weber: A Reader, ed. Sam Whimster (London: Routledge, 2004), 238. 5. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, rev.ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4. 6. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 55. 7. The Spectator 411–21 (June 21–July 3, 1712), in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3:535–82. All references to The Spectator are to this edition. 8. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 508. 9. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Douglas Brooks-Davies and Thomas Keymer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7. 10. Samuel Richardson, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Peter Sabor (New York: Penguin, 1981), 395. 11. Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, 5th ed. (London, 1766), 5:62. 12. Ibid., 5:76. 13. Jane Collier, An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, ed. Audrey Bilger (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003), 70. 14. Sarah Fielding, The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (London, 1754), 2:308–9. 15. Jonas Hanway, A Journal of Eight Days Journey from Portsmouth to Kingston Upon Thames . . . To Which Is Added, An Essay on Tea (London, 1756). See my discussion of Hanway’s Essay on Tea in chapter 5. 16. John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Sabor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 96–97. 17. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote: or The Adventures of Arabella, ed. Margaret Dalziel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5–6. All references are to this edition. 18. Johnson, The Major Works, 175. 19. The style of landscaping Lennox describes—by which “[t]he most laborious Endeavors of Art had been used to make [the land] appear like the beautiful Product of wild, uncultivated Nature”—corresponds exactly to Addison’s description of “Chinese gardening” in Spectator 414 (3:551–52). This style was so popular in England in the first half of the eighteenth century that it became known in Europe as the “Anglo-Chinese garden.” 20. Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (London: Pandora Press, 1987), 112, 188. 21. Frances Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 155, 67. Mary Jo Maynes points out that in eighteenth-century France, silk

NOTES TO PAGES 199–209

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was an economic “growth sector”; it was also iconic of Europe’s oldest trade routes with China, the “Silk Road,” as well as of European aristocratic status since medieval times. See Mary Jo Maynes, “Gender, Labor, and Globalization in Historical Perspective: European Spinsters in the International Textile Industry, 1750–1900,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 4 (2004): 47–66, and Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello, “East & West: Textiles and Fashion in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 4 (2008): 887–916. 22. I am thinking in particular of the episode in Vol. II, Letter XV when Evelina’s cousins coerce her into taking an ill-advised stroll along the “dark walks” at Vauxhall. Becoming separated from them, Evelina is harassed by crowd of men who take her for an “actress,” or prostitute. Her narrow escape from rape—assisted by a man who has himself repeatedly made unwanted sexual advances toward her—leaves her feeling “ashamed” and “extremely mortified.” Burney, Evelina, 193–206. 23. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2008), 318. All references are to this edition. 24. Elizabeth Robinson Montagu and Emily J. Climenson, Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Bluestockings: Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761 (London: John Murray, 1906), 1:271. 25. By “chinoiserie aesthetic,” I mean not only chinaware but the broad aesthetic Addison calls “a mixt kind of furniture,” discussed in chapter 1. Mrs. Baynard’s preference for mixing Roman and Gothic styles, for example, is paradigmatic of the kind of aesthetic confusion associated with the “Chinese taste” in general. 26. Montagu and Climenson, Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Bluestockings, 1:271. 27. Aravamudan provides just such a survey in Enlightenment Orientalism as evidence to counter “arguments that institutionalize novelistic realism as the telos of eighteenth-century fiction” (18). 28. Cecilia and Camilla by Fanny Burney and Belinda by Maria Edgeworth are domestic novels that, like Northanger Abbey, follow the personal development of young women as they enter British social life. 29. Freud argues that one of the primary ego-functions is the process of “reality testing,” by which the subject is able to distinguish internal fantasy from external reality. See “A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams” in James Strachey, Sigmund Freud, and Anna Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1974), 14:217–35. 30. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 385. 31. This one effective moment finally ends the novel’s humorous chain of incidents in which the reader is made to understand that Arabella is embarrassing herself, but Arabella herself remains quixotically oblivious to humiliation. Although Arabella is shown to feel ashamed at the moment the quixotic spell is broken, the novel offers no evidence that this shame remains an active part of her subsequent character, as Austen does with Catherine. 32. Strachey, S. Freud, and A. Freud, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 219.

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33. Walter Scott, Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction, ed. Ioan Williams (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 227. All references are to this edition. 34. Burke makes a similar move in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), in which he posits “novelty,” the aesthetic quality that appeals to “curiosity,” as a primitive quality that appeals primarily to children. The “novel” had been central to Addison’s theory of the pleasures of the imagination, which defined the aesthetic of the previous generation. Burke thus locates a historically earlier version of British taste in the childhood of the modern individual. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 29. 35. Walter Scott, The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, from the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford (New York: Harper & Bros., 1891), 99–100. 36. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Vivien Jones (London: Penguin, 1996), 172. 37. Jane Austen, Sense And Sensibility, ed. Ros Ballaster (New York: Penguin, 2003), 61. All references are to this edition. 38. Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 6. 39. Alistair M. Duckworth reads this as a defensive posture against the “degradation” that attends the loss of traditional estates and the social networks they sustain. See Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

Afterword 1. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 486. All references are to this edition. 2. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 8. 3. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 4. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 85–92. 5. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3:538. 6. Ibid. 7. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 8. Charles Lamb, “Old China,” in Elia and the Last Essays of Elia, ed. Jonathan Bate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 281.

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9. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Barry Milligan (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 82. 10. Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 6. 11. Ibid. 12. For a reading of this dynamic in the field of Romanticism, see Karen Fang, Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-Napoleonic Authorship (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010). Fang argues that while “high” or early English Romanticism rejected commercial materialism as part of an elevated artistic sensibility, later texts by Lamb, De Quincey, and others typically register literature’s debt to imperial commercial enterprise through recurrent oriental and exotic tropes. 13. See Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye. 14. Elaine Freedgood, “What Objects Know: Circulation, Omniscience and the Comedy of Disposession in Victorian It-Narratives,” Journal of Victorian Culture 15, no. 1 (2010): 97. 15. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 71.

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INDEX

The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight, Woolley, 125 The Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities, Shirley, 126 accumulation, in English households, 11–12, 50–52 Adam, Robert, 57 Addison, Joseph, 16–18, 20, 29, 53–54, 62–63, 68, 70–73, 89–103, 105, 107, 116, 120, 123, 150, 156, 158, 163–64, 166–67, 175–77, 192–94, 216 on the Chinese garden, 71–73, 150, 252n.19 on the pleasures of the imagination, 70–71, 102, 105, 120, 166–67, 192–93, 216 on taste, 99–102 The Spectator, 90, 92–96, 99–102, 116 aesthetics architectural, 26–27, 178–180 of the cabinet chinois, 55–56, 58 of canes, 99 of chinoiserie, 52–65, 66–68, 71–80, 88, 89, 102–104, 123–25, 126–32, 147–51, 158–87, 191–203, 206–7, 210–13, 253n.25 of cosmopolitanism, 29–36, 54–65, 178, 191 of the dinner table, 28–29

of English culture, 34–35, 51–52, 61–65, 121, 145–51, 174–87, 188–213 harmonious confusion, 63, 88, 101, 129, 132, 233n.120 imagination and, 66, 68–73, 95–104, 106, 149, 198–99 of “magnificence,” 26–30, 51–52, 198 of nature, 43, 64–65, 69–73, 102–4, 124, 127–35, 140–46, 150, 160–61, 175–81, 183–87, 203 order, 63–64, 124–39, 142–44, 150, 194, 212 and pleasure, 29, 33, 35, 54, 68–73, 79–81, 102–3, 105, 120, 133, 143, 159, 166–68, 183, 192–94, 214–17 and reason, 66, 68–73 and women, 33, 53–58, 88–89, 124–28, 132–46, 174–75, 191, 212 America, commerce in, 107–8 amusement, chinoiserie as source of, 181–87 The Analysis of Beauty, Hogarth, 64–65 Anglo-Chinese gardening, 176–77, 252n.19 Anglo-Saxon language, and English identity, 38–39 Appleton, William W., 139, 158 Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 176, 241n.25

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274

INDEX

Aravamudan, Srinivas, 9, 23, 42, 106, 189 Archduchess Margaret of Austria, 30 architecture, 26–27, 178–80 Baroque architects, 226n.28 aristocratic houses, interior design of, 26–30, 50–52 Armstrong, Nancy, 45, 62, 67, 154, 173 artifice, 114–17, 151 artificer, 113–14, 116 Defoe’s, 120–22 feminine, 144, 150 of figurative language, 115, 194 in gardening, 176–77, 180–81 of the trinket, 113–15, 200 Art’s Master-piece, C.K., 126 Atlas Chinensis, Ogilby, 43 Augustus the Strong, 31 Austen, Jane, 13, 188, 191, 192, 203–15 domestication of china, 210–13 novels of, 203–10 Austria, Archduchess Margaret, 30 Bantam-work, 128 Barker–Benfield, G. J., 173 Beaufort, Duke and Duchess of, 57 beautification, arts of, 125–32 Behn, Aphra, 160–65 Benedict, Barbara, 6, 73, 76, 82, 166, 167 Berg, Maxine, 51, 108, 116, 117, 121 Berkeley, George, 72, 102, 103 on nobler views, 69–70 on pleasing speculation, 103–5 Bickham, George, 170–72 Bluestocking circle, 58 Böttger, Johann Friedrich, 31 Bourdieu, Pierre, 214 Boyle, Robert, 60 Brantlinger, Patrick, 110 Brathwaite, Richard, 106, 107, 114, 115 Braudel, Fernand, 27, 28 Brewer, John, 51 Brown, Bill, 6 Brown, Laura, 63 Brown, Tony, 72–73 Bunn, James, 132 Burney, Frances, 88, 199 business, 16, 114, 181–87

cabinet chinois, 55–58 Camilla, Burney, 88 canes, 98–100, 239n.71 “Jambee,” 239n.71, 239n.74 Captain Singleton, Defoe, 105, 106, 109, 112, 113–14, 116, 118–20, 122 Carey, Daniel, 8 Catholic relics, 34 Cavanaugh, Alden, 51 Chambers, Sir William, 175–81 Chang, Elizabeth Hope, 217 Charles II, 36, 38, 75, 80, 164 Charles V, 30 charm, monstrosity of, 192–197 Chen, Shouyi, 41 Chico, Tita, 127 childhood, 14, 197, 203–4, 206, 209–10, 215, 254n.34 China atheism of, Locke, 49–50 in cosmopolitan imagination, 21–22, 27 as “familiar exotic” in British culture, Chang, 217 as ideal nation, Webb, 36–41 Jesuit writings on, 37, 230n.78 and orientalism, 1–9 sinography, 3–7 trade, 18, 44, 108–10, 115–20, 132, 229n.71, 236n.29 The Chinese Convert, Kneller, 171 “Chinese ecliptic,” Hayot, 22 Chineseness, 1–4, 6, 7, 72, 158, 217–18 of chinoiserie, 58, 59 of garden, 72, 103 of porcelain, 32 English identity and, 10, 12 Englishness and, 151, 180, 217 of tea, 156 of imagination, 103 Chinese objects, 2. See also chinoiserie Chinese Rites Controversy, 49 A Chinese Tale, Hatchett, 168–173, 174 chinoiserie, 1–3, 66–67 aesthetics of, 52–65, 66–68, 71–80, 88, 89, 102–4, 123–25, 126–32, 147–51, 158–87, 191–203, 206–7, 210–13, 253n.25 canes, 98–100, 239n.71

INDEX

China “craze,” 67, 90 chinaware, 1, 32, 123, 140, 143, 144– 45, 148, 163, 182, 187, 197 “Chineseness” of, 58–60 Chinese room, 57–58 Chippendale, 57–58, 124, 175, 181 civilizing effect of, 147–48 cosmopolitanism of, 29–36, 61–65 English production of, 31, 117–18, 149–50, 181–87 erotics of, 80–83, 164–73 Habsburg collection of, 11, 30–36, 55–56 japanning, 30, 52, 54, 76, 92, 122–31, 142, 160–63, 168–69, 181–83, 207–9 mass-produced, 183–86 Meissen, 31, 32, 147 mirrors, 27, 28, 94, 168, 186 mixed quality of, 50–65 orientalism and, 243–44n.3 porcelain, 27, 30–32, 44 and print technology, 147–50, 181–87 punchbowls, 147–49, 181, 182 as semiotic system, 61 silver, “flat-chased,” 117–18 tea service, 136, 201 “trinketing” of, 116 Wedgwood, 57, 58, 124, 182 women and, 53, 82, 94, 97, 136–40, 143–44, 162, 163, 197 Chippendale, Thomas, 57–58, 124, 175, 181 Civil Wars, England, 160 Cleland, John, 196, 197 coffee ritual, 136–37, 246n.28 Colley, Linda, 18, 19 Collier, Jane, 195 commerce Defoe, 120–21 Defoe’s romance of global, 105–6 language and national identity, 38–40, 47–49 value of, 44 with strangers, 106–10 communal dishes, food, 29 The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe, 114 Confucianism, 230n.78

275

consumer, 3, 11, 16, 81 consumerism, 173 consumption, 94–96, 217–18 culture, 91, 92, 96–98, 100, 113, 182 demand, 44, 101, 124, 164, 182, 217–18 English, 59–60, 115–16, 148–49 non-aristocratic, 52 revolution, 51, 231n.87 women, 82, 88–89, 92, 123 The Cook’s Guide, Woolley, 125 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 69, 70, 123 corruption, culture variation as, 38 cosmetics arts of beautification, 126–27 puppy-water, 141, 247n.42 women’s, 126–27, 245n.20 Cosmographie, Heylyn, 107 cosmopolitanism, 14, 39, 220n.12 aristocratic, 18 Berkeley and, 103 commercial, 17, 35, 37 eighteenth-century, 21, 159, 191, 220n.11, 225n.10 English, 20–36 Enlightenment, 11 European, 12, 21, 25, 115 Kant and, 40 sinography and, 3–7 upper-class, 178 Cottom, Daniel, 29, 71, 142 The Country Wife, Wycherley, 80, 81, 84, 85–87, 89, 246–47n.35 A Court Lady’s Curiosity, Pierce, 168, 170, 171, 183 court life, Montagu’s descriptions of, 33–34 craze, China, in Europe, 67, 90 The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable, Fielding, 196 Dahn, Jo, 56 Dampier, William, 107, 109, 112, 114 Dauterman, Carl Christian, 117, 118 debauchery, 166 Defoe, Daniel, 5, 13, 42–43, 78 Captain Singleton, 105, 106, 109, 112, 113–14, 116, 118–20, 122

276

INDEX

Defoe, Daniel (Cont.) contrivance, commerce and wit, 120–21 The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 119–20 money and meaning, 110–12 Robinson Crusoe, 110, 111, 241n.25 spectral traffic, 117–20 usury and figurative language, 113–17 Delany, Mary, 56, 174 Deliciæ Britannicæ, Bickham, 170–71 Denham, Sir John, 36 De Quincey, Thomas, 217 A Description of a City Shower, Swift, 63, 141 Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils, Chambers, 181 disenchantment, Weber, 190, 252n.4 Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, Chambers, 175, 177, 178, 183 Dodsley, Robert, 116 domestic arts, and beautification, 125–32 domestic manuals, 125–26 double entendre, 81, 83–88, 169, 238n.54 Dowager Empress Amelia, games in palace of, 32–33 Dowager Princess of Wales, 178 dressing room china in, 87 as cultural site, 123, 154 design of, 56, 58, 132–36, 147 and ladies’ taste, 169–72 Elizabeth Montagu’s, 147, 150, 202–3 poems, 13, 125, 168, 247n.42 in Swift, 23, 139–45 Duchess of Portland, 56, 57 The Dunciad, Pope, 139, 140 Du Paquier, Claude Innocentius, 31–32 early modern orientalism, 5 East India Company, 44, 59, 126, 149 British, 240n.16, 248n.11 Dutch, 223n.3 Swedish, 178

Economy. see also Trade silk, 252–53n.21 world, 223–24n.4 Eger, Elizabeth, 51 Elector of Saxony, 31 England, 1, 2, 4, 7, 12, 17–18 China trade, 35, 44, 109, 115, 119, 132, 229n.71, 236n.29 chinaware, 2, 31, 74, 77, 123–25, 132, 148, 182, 210–13 as cosmopolitan nation, 35–36 culture of, 14, 17–18, 20 Englishness, 9, 19, 58, 151, 153–55, 180, 217 English taste, 12, 73, 104, 116, 124, 149–51, 158–73, 175, 197 gardens of, 62, 123, 175, 177, 178 identity of, 38–40, 64–65, 151, 224n.7, 229n.63 and imagination, 11, 89–102 literature of, 5, 6–7. See also novels; poetry luxury goods of, 52–54 role of China in English identity, 36–41 tea in, 152–158 The English Gentleman, Brathwaite, 106 Enlightenment, 8, 159, 235n.8 English literature and philosophy of, 5 identity in age of, 6 improved subject of, 11–12 Orientalism, 9, 215 post-, 9 and Romanticism, 67–68 Epicoene, Jonson, 74 An Epistle to a Lady, Pope, 87 eroticism. See sexuality Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke, 11, 44–48, 69, 192, 206 An Essay on Criticism, Pope, 120–21, 128 An Essay on Tea, Hanway, 145, 152–58, 159 An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, Collier, 195 An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, Berkeley, 102 Evelina, Burney, 199

INDEX

Evelyn, John, 37, 74–80, 123 The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Smollett, 199–202 fantasy, novel, 191 The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe, 119–20 The Female Quixote, Lennox, 190–91, 192, 197, 199, 203, 205 female quixotism, 201–3 The Female Tatler, 164 Ferdinand I, 30 Ferrier, Susan, 88 Festa, Lynn, 8 fiction. See also novels; poetry Austen’s novels, 203–10 commerce and, 120–121 Defoe, 105–106 figurative language and, 113–117 imagination in novels, 190–192 money and meaning in, 110–112 spectral traffic in, 117–120 Fielding, Sarah, 191, 194, 195, 196, 198 figurative language, usury and, 113–17 Finch, Anne, 88 food feasts, 28–29 preparation manuals, 125 Foucault, Michel, 10, 11, 42, 61, 133, 165 Frank, Andre Gunder, 18, 108, 240n.13 Freedgood, Elaine, 218 free-thinkers, 235n.15 Furber, Holden, 18 Fussell, Paul, 132, 133 games, at the palace of Dowager Empress Amelia, 32–33 gardens Anglo-Chinese, 176–77, 252n.19 Chinese, 68, 71, 72–73, 150, 176–77, 252n.19 English, 62, 123, 175, 177, 178 European, 72, 73 Garrick, David, 57 The Gentleman & Cabinet-Maker’s Director, Chippendale, 58, 181 Germany, 25 Gibbons, Grinling, 77 globalization, 14–15

277

Glorious Revolution, 171 Goodman, Dena, 51 Great Britain, material status, 14 Greece, 40 Greenblatt, Stephen, 77 Greene, Donald, 152 Griffin, Robert J., 67 The Guardian, 90 Gulliver’s Travels, Swift, 140 Habsburgs chinoiserie, 30, 32, 34, 44, 55 empire, 22 household property, 11 Hakluyt, Richard, 74, 76 Halfpenny, William, 181 Hampton Court, 76, 77 Hanway, Jonas, 145, 152–58, 159, 196, 216 Hatchett, William, 168, 169, 174 Hayot, Eric, 4, 22, 50 Hayward, J. F., 31 Haywood, Eliza, 168 Hegel, Georg W. F., 4 Hellman, Mimi, 29 Hennepin, Louis, 107, 109, 112 Heylyn, Peter, 107, 115 Hildebrandt, Count Schönborn’s palace, 27 historical cosmopolitanism, 21 An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability that the Language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language, Webb, 36–41, 44, 49 The History of Sexuality, Foucault, 165 The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Richardson, 195 Hobbes, Thomas, 42 Hogarth, William, 64–65, 147, 148, 149, 174, 181 Honour, Hugh, 58, 59, 74, 175, 234n.3 Hottentots, 49 human mind, Locke on understanding, 45, 46–47, 50, 66 Hume, David, 67, 79 Hunter, J. Paul, 173 imagination, 70, 71–73 and aesthetics, 66, 68–69, 73, 106, 149, 198

278

INDEX

imagination (Cont.) Chinese things and English, 89–102 and chinoiserie, 103–4, 194–95 English theory of, 67, 105–6 fiction in novel, 190–92 Mather’s, 99–100 pleasures of, 15, 68, 70–71, 102, 105, 120, 166–67, 193, 197, 216 and taste, 101–2 imagined community, 224n.9 India, 44, 239n.71 canes, 99 East India Company, 44, 59, 108, 126, 149, 178, 223n.3 furniture, 76–77 god, 93, 147, 202 shop, 95, 96, 107, 122, 128, 164, 199 wares, 25, 30, 31, 52, 58, 59, 92, 107 The Ingenious Gentlewoman and Servant-Maids Delightful Companion, Shirley, 126 Jacob, Margaret, 20, 60 Jacobite rebellion (1745), 178 Jacobson, Dawn, 58, 234n.3 Jambee canes, 239n.71, 239n.74 James II, 162, 171 japanning arts of, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128–31 chinoiserie, 183–84, 186, 245n.16 objects, 160, 163, 166, 169, 182 tables, 30, 54, 129, 207 Treatise on Japaning and Varnishing, 127, 129, 130, 131, 134, 169, 170, 183 Jesuit writings, on China, 37, 230n.78 Jewish Naturalization Act, 158 Johnson, Samuel, 156–58, 190, 192, 194 Jones, Inigo, 36 Jones, Robert W., 116 Jonson, Ben, 28, 74 Joseph Andrews, Fielding, 194 Kant, Immanuel, 39, 40, 67 models of taste and judgment, 53 Kaul, Suvir, 8 Kibbie, Ann Louise, 114 King of Hanover, 34 King of Poland, 31

King of Prussia, 31 Klekar, Cynthia, 119, 240n.11 Kowaleski–Wallace, Elizabeth, 82, 124 Lach, Donald F., 4, 30 The Ladies Amusement, Sayer, 127, 181, 182, 183 The Ladies Directory, Woolley, 125 “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” Swift, 141, 144, 168 “Lady’s Library,” Addison, 53–54 Langford, Paul, 51 language Anglo-Saxon, 38–39 as object of vision, 102–3 preservation, 228n.60 purity of, 37–38 rhetorical, 115 figurative, 113–17 Latour, Bruno, 218 Lennox, Charlotte, 190, 197, 199, 203, 204 levantinization, 23 Leviathan, Hobbes, 42 Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth, 111 Linnell, John, 57, 58 Linnell, William, 58 Litterati, Sect of, 49 Liu, Yu, 123, 233n.120 Locke, John, 3, 11, 18, 36, 57, 62, 67, 69 on atheism, 48–49 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 11, 44–48, 69, 192, 206 on figurative language, 115, 194 on the mind, 50–51, 61, 66 Second Treatise of Government, 45 Lockean subjectivity, 12, 44–45 London in relation to China, 22 as “Emporium for all the Earth,” 16–17 London Gazette, ad for canes, 99 Lovejoy, A. O., 67, 68, 177 The Lover, 90, 91, 97, 116 Lowe, Lisa, 23 Lubey, Kathleen, 54 luxury goods, in eighteenth-century English life, 52–54, 244n.8

INDEX

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 78 McKendrick, Neil, 51 McKeon, Michael, 173 Mackie, Erin, 95, 238n.63 Madagascar, in Captain Singleton, 109, 111–12, 115, 120, 249n.16 Madre de Dios, Chinese curiosities, 74, 76 Manley, Delarivier, 164–65, 166, 167 The Man of Mode, Etherege, 80 Steele’s review of, 89–90 Markley, Robert, 5, 20, 36, 37, 106, 110, 119, 140 Marot, Daniel, 57 Marriage, Ferrier, 88 martial skill, 33 Mason, William, 177, 178, 179, 180 material possessions, 10, 11–12 Mather, Charles, 97–100 Measure for Measure, Shakespeare, 74 Mediterranean trade, 224n.5 Meissen, 31, 32, 147 Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Cleland, 196 Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bilduph, Sheridan, 199 “A Midnight Modern Conversation,” Hogarth, 147, 149 Mill, John Stuart, 5, 41 missionaries, in China, 37, 230n.78 Moll Flanders, Defoe, 114 money meaning and, 110–112 “real” and “imitation,” 108 usury, 113–17 Montagu, Edward Wortley, 23 Montagu, Elizabeth, 58, 147, 150, 174–75, 202 Montagu, Mary Wortley, 20–36 on aristocratic house interiors, 29–30, 34–36 on court life, 33–34 and English cosmopolitanism, 20–36 in English literary studies, 23 on European aristocratic culture, 35–36 European travel of, 24–36 on food, 28–29

279

on games at palace of Dowager Empress Amelia, 32–33 The Mysteries of Udolpho, Radcliffe, 205 mythology, 229n.71 national identity China as model of, 37–38 commerce and, 38–40, 47–49 English, 3, 17–19, 36, 41, 47, 109, 153–54 Webb on, 38–39, 42, 229n.63 nature painting as expression of, 128 power of agreement, 130 Netherlands, 18, 24, 44 New Book of Chinese Designs, Edwards and Darly, 181, 184, 185 New Designs for Chinese Temples, Halfpenny, 181 A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America, Hennepin, 107 Newman, Gerald, 18, 19, 152, 153, 179 Newton, Isaac, 64, 67, 69 A New Voyage Around the World, Defoe, 106 A New Voyage Round the World, Dampier, 107 Norberg, Kathryn, 51 Norman Yoke narrative, 38, 41 Northanger Abbey, Austen, 188, 192, 203–9 novels of Austen, 203–10 china in, 195–97 disenchantment of object world in, 190–92 eighteenth-century, 195–197 English, 189, 197 fantasy, 191 monstrosity of charm in, 192–197 orientalism and English, 188–189 and romance, 190–192, 197–198, 203–210 Nussbaum, Felicity, 3, 20 Ogilby, John, 43 On Liberty, Mill, 5 Optics, Newton, 69

280

INDEX

orientalism, 9, 222n.32 British, 152 dream logic of, 158 early modern, 5 and English novels, 188–189, 197, 199, 215 Enlightenment, 9, 215 modern, 14 other forms of, 7–10 pre-orientalism, 9 prehistory of, 11–12, 22 romantic, 152 Saidian, 7, 8–9 emergence of, 173–181 Orientalism, Said, 23 Oroonoko, Behn, 160–165 Ottomans, 30 Panacea: A Poem upon Tea, Tate, 148 Park, Julie, 6 Parker, George, 127, 129, 130, 131, 169, 183 Pepys, Samuel, 74, 78–79 periodicals, of Addison and Steele, 68, 90–93, 96, 99, 101 Pierce, Joseph, 168 Pillement, Jean, 181, 182, 184 Pinch, Adela, 67 The Plain Dealer, Wycherley, 66, 81, 83, 84, 88, 89, 162 pleasures of the imagination, Addison on, 70–71, 102, 105, 120, 166, 193, 197, 216 Plumb, J. H., 51 Pococke, Richard, 31 poetry, 2, 13, 64, 234n.8 and beautification, 132 Pope’s, 87, 127, 130–133, 139 and subjectivity, 122–125, 133 Swift’s, 139–144, 147 urban, 63 Pointon, Marcia, 135 Pollock, Anthony, 90 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 4, 224n.4 Pope, Alexander, 13, 17, 18, 20, 62, 64, 87, 101, 120–121, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 177–178 The Rape of the Lock, 87, 125, 132–139, 140, 143

porcelain, 27, 30–32, 44 bowl with transfer-printed design, 181, 182 Chinese, 30–31 Porter, David, 4, 5, 20, 21, 37, 52, 53, 54, 58, 59, 68, 73, 82, 83, 89, 119, 139, 145, 158–159, 174, 177–178 Portugal, 18, 44, 76 postcolonial theory, 8. See also orientalism post-Enlightenment, 9. See also Enlightenment pre-Orientalism, 9. See also Orientalism Pride and Prejudice, Austen, 211 Principia, Newton, 69 “The Progress of Beauty,” Swift, 141 The Progress of Romance, Reeve, 189 property, 45–46, 71 pseudo-Orientalism, 9. See also Orientalism punchbowl, 147–149, 181, 182. See also chinoiserie puppy-water, 141, 247n.42 Queen Anne, 25, 135 Queen Mary, 55, 76–78 Queen Victoria, 234n.3 Radcliffe, Ann, 205, 206, 208 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 74 “A Ramble in St. James’s Park,” Rochester, 144 The Rambler, Johnson, 4, 190, 194 Ramsey, Rachel, 37 The Rape of the Lock, Pope, 87, 125, 140, 143, 150, 168, 196–197 order of things in, 132–139, 246n.32 realism, 14, 158, 192, 194, 197, 210, 241n.25 Reeve, Clara, 189 Renaissance, 14, 19, 77 Restoration comedy, 80–89, 237n.44 diaries, 73 period, 18, 80, 151, 159, 164, 170– 171, 238n.63 Richardson, Samuel, 191, 195 The Rise of the Novel, Watt, 174

INDEX

Robertson, Hannah, 127 Robinson Crusoe, Defoe, 110, 111, 241n.25 Rochester, Earl of, John Wilmot, 81 Rollin, Charles, 150 romances, 190–192, 197–198, 203–210. See also novels Romanticism English, 255n.12 and Enlightenment, 67–68 historiography of, 234–235n.8 and orientalism, 152 Rosenthal, Laura, 23 Rotterdam, Netherlands, 24 Roxana, Defoe, 114, 122 royal cabinets, 57–58 Royal Exchange, 16, 21, 225n.14 Royal Society, 60, 64 Said, Edward, 7, 8, 11, 22, 23 Saussy, Haun, 4 Sayer, Robert, 127, 181, 182, 183 Schor, Naomi, 191 Scott, Katie, 51 Scott, Sir Walter, 209–210 Second Treatise of Government, Locke, 45 Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, Manley, 164– 165, 167 self-fashioning, 10 selfhood, modern, 14–15 Sense and Sensibility, Austen, 211–212 Seven Years’ War, 31, 152 sexuality, 3, 13 erotics of chinoiserie, 80–83, 164–73 female, 87, 173 modern, 151, 165–166, 173 upper-class, 168 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, 69, 70, 72, 123, 178 Shakespeare, William, 65, 74 Shell, Marc, 120 Sheridan, Francis, 199 Sherman, Sandra, 110 Shirley, John, 126 Signior Dildo, Rochester, 81, 82, 164 The Silent Woman, Jonson, 74 Silk Road, 30, 253n.21 sinography, 3–7 Sloboda, Stacey, 53, 56, 58

281

Smith, Adam, 116–117 Smollett, Tobias, 199, 202 sovereignty, Hobbes’s theory of, 42 Spanish Succession in 1714, 18 The Spectator, 16, 52, 53, 54, 55, 70, 71, 90, 116, 150, 151, 154, 155, 163 Addison and Steele, 90, 92–93, 96, 99, 101 Spectator 69, 16, 17, 25, 62 Spectator 336, 164 Stalker, John, 127, 129, 130, 131, 169, 183 Steele, Sir Richard, 68, 163. See also The Spectator Stewart, Susan, 133, 138 “Strephon and Chloe,” Swift, 143 Stromberg, Roland N., 67 subjectivity accumulation and, 155 and cabinets, 57–58 English, 6, 13, 50, 104, 145, 151, 218 female, 68, 138, 154, 173 Lockean, 12, 44–45 materials of modern, 11–15, 217 rational, 159, 163, 168, 183 poetry of, 122–125, 133 Surinam, in Oroonoko, 160–162 Swift, Jonathan, 13, 23, 63, 125, 139– 146, 167 taste aristocratic, 186–187 and chinaware, 144–145 Chinese, 52, 53–54, 68, 221–222n.26, 234n.122 and Chinese objects, 31, 74–80 and dressing room, 169–172 English, 12, 73, 104, 116, 124, 149– 151, 158, 175, 197 European-made furnishings in Chinese, 236n.29 and imagination, 101–102 perversion of, 158–173 rethinking modern, 214–218 theory of, 67, 69–70, 105–106 Tate, Nahum, 148, 156 The Tatler, periodicals, 90, 95, 97, 150 tea Chinese, 135–136, 145, 248n.11 English ritual of, 135–136, 152–158

282

INDEX

tea (Cont.) Hanway’s Essay on Tea, 145, 152– 158, 159 Johnson on Englishness of, 156 quality, 248n.11 Temple, Sir William, 67, 123, 175, 177, 178 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 45, 62, 67, 224n.9 Tharp, Lars, 147 A Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith, 116–117 theory of sovereignty, Hobbes’s, 42 Theresa, Maria, 31, 55–56 Thompson, James, 106, 110 A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Defoe, 78 The Toy-Shop, Dodsley, 116 trade Europe and China, 35, 44, 109–110, 115, 119, 132, 223n.3, 229n.71, 236n.29 global, 117–120 Mediterranean, 224n.5 Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley, 69 Treatise on Japaning and Varnishing, Stalker and Parker, 127, 129, 130, 131, 134, 169, 170, 183 trinkets, 200, 218, 231n.86 in Defoe, 105–121, 150 toys and, 108–110, 112 transforming money into, 113–117 The True-Born Englishman, Defoe, 42–43 Turkey and chinoiserie, 243–244n.3 Montagu’s representation of, 23–24 Turkish Embassy Letters, Montagu, 23 Valenze, Deborah, 108, 111 value “imitative” and “real,” 108 in trade, 109 van Kley, Edwin J., 4 van Renen, Denys, 33 variety, 66 varnishing, 127, 128–131 Verney, Edmund, 122, 123

Victorian era, 14 Vienna, Austria, 24, 26, 226n.28, 226n.29 vision, language and, Berkeley 102–103 Wahrman, Dror, 14, 30 walking canes, Mather’s, 98–100 Wall, Cynthia Sundberg, 60, 75, 80 Walpole, Horace, 174, 177, 178, 180 Warner, William, B., 173 Watt, Ian, 105, 174 Webb, John, 36–41 Weber, Max, 190, 252n.4 Wedgwood, Josiah, 57–58, 124, 182 Williams, Aubrey, 137 Williams–Wood, Cyril, 183 Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester, 81 Wilson, Kathleen, 19 Windsor Castle, 171 Windsor-Forest, Pope, 17, 21, 25, 62–63, 64, 101, 129, 233n.120 Winn, Sir Rowland, 57 Witchard, Ann Veronica, 67 women and arts of beautification, 132–139 and body language, 92–93 and china, associations of, 246–247n.35 and consumption, 94–96 and cosmetics, 126–127 and desire for china, 93 domestic manuals for, 125–126 female subjectivity, 68, 138, 154, 173 genitalia of, in A Chinese Tale, 168–173 relationship to chinaware, 53, 82, 94, 97, 136–140, 143–144, 162, 163, 197 Woolley, Hannah, 125 Wren, Christopher, 36 Wycherley, William, 66, 73, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 88, 89, 90, 162, 164 Yang, Chi-ming, 5, 20, 222n.27 Yao, Steven G., 4 Yonan, Michael E., 31, 51, 55, 58, 67 The Young Ladies School of Arts, Robertson, 127 Yuan-Ming-Yuan, 179–180