My first reaction to this book was a sense of disappointment that David Porter’s excellent and pithy survey Ideographia (Stanford, CA, 2001), which was strongest on the seventeenth century, had been followed by a transitional book of recollected essays about eighteenth-century porcelains, gardens, and exemplary figures like William Chambers, William Hogarth, Horace Walpole, and Thomas Percy. From this collection of elegant essays, readers should not expect comprehensiveness or a more clearly political intervention like Robert Markley’s The Far East and the English Imagination (Cambridge, 2006). But The Chinese Taste is a significant book, especially for issues of gender in the eighteenth century. It makes clear strides toward solving one of the most difficult problems in gender studies, the tendency toward localism and domesticity encouraged by the archival record that only seems challenged in exceptional cases like Elizabeth Marsh or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
Among the many insights in this book, Porter’s thesis about China as a utopian space of autonomy for women in the eyes of eighteenth-century English men like Hogarth is profoundly original, making a nice counterpoint to the burgeoning literature on Chinese pain and foot binding that Porter cites at the beginning of the book. In terms of material culture, Porter’s honesty is both refreshing and thoughtful, as when he admits the difficulty of treating porcelains as a kind of text in part because of a Protestant and Weberian tradition of disenchantment. He uses such insights to open up a space to write about porcelains more precisely in terms of gender—how porcelain became a sign of women’s publicness in emblematic spaces like the china shop. There could have been more examination of actual pieces owned by the English women he mentions or at least an engagement more generally with collections of porcelains, inventories, or the imitation wares coming out of Bow, Chelsea, and a myriad of other English potteries. Such evidence about actual women’s taste would support the provocative readings about masculinity and male fantasy in the works of Hogarth that Porter climactically brings into focus on page 89 (halfway through the book) with the striking engraving from A Chinese Tale (1740) of a Chinese woman masturbating in front of a mirror. Porter’s work nevertheless still demonstrates how important to the gentleman’s sense of masculinity apparently ephemeral porcelain was as a sign of the autonomy of female desire, even if the related issue of perceived effeminacy among Chinese men (a staple of travel literature) remains unexplored.
In terms of the theme of translation, room remains to develop understandings of masculinity and especially the notion of ambivalence toward more direct translation, which in some ways is the thesis of the book (3) and runs as a red thread throughout. That Thomas Percy’s 1759–61 reworked translation of the Hao Qui Zhuan (the focus of chap. 8) involved an East India Company representative’s manuscript dating from the 1730s as well as a Portuguese one makes a historian immediately ask, so what was going on in the 1730s, and how was it different from the 1750s? Or, more broadly in terms of gender, why did some English men translate directly and in manuscript and other English men ambivalently and in print? Interesting questions about the distance between the literary and the translated in relation to Romantic notions of masculinity and authorship deserve far more attention here, especially given Porter’s strong contention derived in part from A. O. Lovejoy that the domestication of a Chinese aesthetic profoundly transformed “constructs” of gender, nation, and desire.
Such unanswered questions, the essaylike incompleteness, and at times purely experimental character of the chapters suggest some theoretical and historical aporias. References to cutting-edge work in comparative literature sinology on the issue of translating Chinese (Haun Saussy, Christopher Bush, Lydia Liu, Timothy Billings, among others) are few and far between. Translation scholarship is quite careful even if wide ranging about examining layers of relations between texts and languages. Porter’s emphasis on gossip in the chapter on the scholar’s stone may be a kind of rejoinder to this studied approach, although moments like the linking of Jackson Pollack with the early Ming painter Wu Wei seem both poorly conceived and off topic.
Most of the gestures toward cross-cultural comparison are admirable but often oddly reliant on cultural artifacts from the Ming (1368–1644) and earlier as if Chinese culture is somehow timeless (and unified). While Porter deliberately excludes Europe from the picture, a particular problem with William Chambers who worked for the Swedish company, the important changes in garden and porcelain design during the Qing dynasty, the complex role of Tokugawa Japan, and the changing nature of East India trade under the new united company (including the ability to make custom orders like armorial ware) are all completely ignored.
I found myself thinking of Roland Barthes while reading Porter’s beautifully written introduction and looking at his one personal photograph. Porter evidently went to Suzhou and took a snapshot of a Lake Tai rock while visiting the Humble Administrator’s Garden. The piece in the Lotus Pavilion (Furong Xie) dates from after 1860 (tidied up in postwar restorations), and the whole setting is very much late nineteenth century rather than exemplary of either the early Qing or the Ming. In treating this as a timeless moment, “Scholar’s stone in a Suzhou garden” (99), I detect a resistance by Porter to both the precise identification of the Modernist connoisseur like Fenollosa as well as the Tel Quel notion of the “neutral.” The snapshot critically reenacts the ambivalence toward translation inherent in the English department, part of a broader effort to resist any straightforward romantic appropriation of China. Like Porter’s subjects, we too live in an era of essays and surfaces, a Whig oligarchy buttressed by debt schemes and East Indian trade, a period of great ambivalence toward imported Chinese things. In that sense, the book deeply engages in the topic of English chinoiserie.
