‘Frailty, thy name is China’: women, chinoiserie and the threat of low culture in eighteenth‐century England

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, the expanding trade conducted by the East India Company with China reinforced the latter’s material presence in England. Indeed, England became a vast market for Chinese goods which, in turn, paved the way for the blossoming of chinoiserie objects. This growing enthusiasm for things Chinese fuelled the ongoing debate on taste and beauty. The craze for chinoiserie resulted mainly, but not solely, from feminine appreciation of these imported or created commodities. Among them, tea and china especially, but also wallpapers or textiles encountered a real success. Women became collectors of objects in the Chinese style, and their increasing consumption of these exotic products spurred an aesthetic turmoil among the champions of the classical taste. Thus in the 1750s at the height of the ‘Chinese fashion’, negative aesthetic judgements on chinoiserie emerged, which mapped out a gendering of this artistic style, whereby Chinese wares became metaphorical representations of women. Looking at various examples taken from periodicals (the World, the Spectator, the Idler) and pictorial representations (such as William Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress), this article examines how the feminisation of the style was developed as a popular topos in the eighteenth century in a deliberate intention to present both chinoiserie and its female aficionados as emblems of low culture. It will be shown how the female appetite for this other form of artistic expression was perceived as a manifestation of a perverted taste, and a threat to nascent English aesthetics. The gender‐oriented representation of this exotic art will be studied as the production of a male dominant discourse in an attempt to curb the propagation of the new style and the endangering power of women in the realm of art, culture and taste.

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