The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (review)

The slight and clearly intentional obfuscation of David Porter's title advances the theoretical challenge that engages not only this text but also an increasing range of recent writing on eighteenth-century England. Like Chi-ming Yang's Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660-1760 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), Porter's book seizes on the ambiguous implications of "Chinese taste" to indicate the breadth of his inquiry: though many of his case studies illuminate an English taste for objects deemed Chinese in design or origin, he is interested in revealing the extent to which a kind of Chinese taste could possess English authors and consumers, directing their desires and shaping the development of English aesthetic and literary culture. This recentring ensures that Porter's study is at once ambitious and, in a way, frustrating; as he reminds us, "we cannot say with certainty or precision what eighteenth-century consumers actually ... thought of the Chinese-style goods they purchased and admired, nor can we establish definitively what kinds of perhaps unconscious meanings and ideas they associated with them" (107). We are left with many resonant but suppositional conditions, such as his suggestion that "if eighteenth-century consumers were entranced by the visual charms of Chinese porcelains and lacquerwares, their pleasure may well have encouraged the cultivation of habits of perception and response that transposed elements of a Chinese value system into English social practice" (114). Porter's scrupulous attention to methodological standards does not diminish the signal contribution of this study to the resolution of such ambiguities; indeed, his work as a whole has significantly advanced the field's understanding of the many contributions that "illegitimate" discourses of chinoiserie made to the development of polite society in the eighteenth century. As Porter notes, criticism of quite recent vintage still frequently recapitulates a story of European exceptionalism that discounts Chinese global prominence and influence, or, equally unhelpfully, maintains an emphasis on the distance and difference of Chinese aesthetic production reminiscent of much earlier critical traditions. Porter aims for a more rigorous standard that avoids overly elevating coincidental aesthetic traditions and also does not underestimate the complexity and value of transcontinental exchange.

The result is a book that crosses disciplinary categories. It is both a literary history that includes analysis of Chinese scholars' stones and Scottish tapestries and a history of material culture that closes with a stirring consideration of Thomas Percy's Reliques of English Poetry (1765). For many readers, Porter's volume will be most valuable as a text that takes female writers and consumers seriously in all their incarnations. He presses hard on the familiar equation of eighteenth-century women with the fragile porcelain that was symbolic of their delicate virtue, and, in an argument nicely built up over a series of chapters, shows the richer potential functions of the "material correlative" (59). Vases decorated with scenes of Chinese women at leisure in an apparently all-female space offer an alluring "fantasy machine" (58) through which English women can reinforce and expand their own imaginative fictions of domestic all-female retreats. Likewise, Chinese scholars' stones, distinctively twisted and pitted, evoke an aesthetic iconography predicated on fluidity and exchange, in marked contrast to the static ideals of beauty familiar from Joshua Reynolds. Porter links these aesthetic interventions to the divergent discourses of female gossips, suggesting that through the "imaginative vision" of Chinese things, "the transgressive undercurrents of women's chatter could, for once, be acclaimed and legitimized" (109). And, finally, a wide-ranging survey of literary tea tables and the mothers who preside over them illustrates the evolution of a cult of motherhood ever more firmly grounded in the movements of the teapot. If not every reader has the wealth of knowledge to follow Porter along each of his shifts between decorative arts and literature, all will benefit from his injunction by example that critics cease producing studies of foreign influence that simply reinforce apprehension of difference...