Eugenia Jenkins's A Taste for China traces the English attraction to, and later suspicion of, things Chinese in the long eighteenth century, thus mapping out a “prehistory of Orientalism.” In the Restoration, the author demonstrates, English consumers embraced all things Chinese with little trepidation; Chinese objects, in fact, came to epitomize cosmopolitan taste. Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, this enthusiasm gradually turned into what we now understand as Orientalism, re-categorizing Chinese objects and presumed Chinese attitudes into something distinctly un-English. Part of this change came about through a transformation in subjectivity itself, moving from a self that incorporated external objects to a new emphasis on identity as generated by interiority.
Jenkins opens by proposing that in the Restoration, “a newly powerful England on the world scene paired commercial cosmopolitanism with national identity” (17). Cosmopolitanism, she goes on to show, did not challenge nation identity but instead defined it. Jenkins proposes that we turn from understanding Restoration nationalism as largely reactionary (the kind explored by Linda Colley and Gerald Newman) and think of it instead as a “something more like the mind theorized by John Locke: a capacity to import external objects in the form of ideas, and an ability to identify with their orderly and meaningful arrangement” (19). Jenkins finds one powerful example of this cosmopolitan identity in the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who makes wide-ranging and appreciative observations about several different cultures, both European and non-European. Jenkins also shows how Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters reveal how elite taste had shifted from a premium on the expression of opulence to a nuanced sense of refinement. Central to this refinement, Jenkins argues, was the appreciation of Chinese objects. While the English traded with a range of other cultures, China in particular, Jenkins argues, represented the nation's cosmopolitan ambitions. The appreciation of Chinese porcelain suggested a particularly high level of sophistication and not simply the wealth of the possessor.
Chinese objects make their way into the literary imagination as well. In William Wycherley's The Country Wife, Chinese porcelain embodies the double entendre: Wycherley “places china at the center of a struggle for imaginative control of the material world” (88). In Defoe, the second chapter demonstrates, Chinese objects continue to function as both commodities and inspirations for the imagination. While Defoe has been praised for his contributions to the development of realism, Jenkins suggests that we read Captain Singleton instead as a romance. Following Robert Markley, she suggests that this novel does not reflect reality, but instead creates its own fantastical vision of infinite profit. Defoe disavows the Eastern dominance in the global market, instead imagining the British as heroic in their trading; nevertheless, Defoe's fiction remains haunted by the undeniable truth of Eastern commercial superiority. The following chapter on Pope and Swift shows the divergent uses to which writers put Chinese objects. As Jenkins suggests, Chinese things came to epitomize the early eighteenth-century commitment to an aesthetics of everyday life that shaped nature into a pleasing order. This aesthetic is visible in poetry, but also in gardens and home decoration, as evidenced by a proliferation of books that offered instruction in the arts of painting, japanning, varnishing, and other forms of beautification inspired by the East. On Belinda's dressing table in Pope's Rape of the Lock, Jenkins points out, we see the “harmonious integration of Eastern commodities into English culture” (135). Early eighteenth-century writers, however, at the same time began to associate Chinese objects with disgrace and scandal. Swift contributed to this backlash by threading debased and tawdry versions of Eastern objects into his scatological poems, a move that simultaneously rejected the earlier idealized image of things Chinese and also a certain kind of idealized woman who enjoys them.
In the last two chapters, Jenkins argues for a transition from an embrace of Chinese objects to an increasing sense of Asian things as “other.” This reflected a change in English self-understanding: “[i]dentity was no longer something one could import” (151). To support this point, she explores Jonas Hanway's Essay on Tea (1756), which warns readers away from the trade and the drink; she then looks at the scandalous eroticization of things Chinese, and, in two final chapters, the novel. As it emerges in the second half of the eighteenth century, Jenkins argues, the novel enforced the separation of East and West by associating things English with reality and things Oriental with dangerous forms of the imagination. This split finds a parallel in the genres of realism (the English novel) and romance (which becomes Orientalized). Jenkins cites several novels in which Oriental objects imply frivolity or scandal, but offers extended readings of The Female Quixote and Northanger Abbey. Both novels, she suggests, render romance and the gothic as exotic in general but Oriental in particular, and “[t]he Orient in whose image Arabella fashions herself—an amalgam of mythologies Eastern settings, including Persia, Scythia, Ethiopia, and Egypt—refers to nothing else but fictionality itself, specifically fiction's lack of real-world referent” (198).
After Jenkins' insightful and highly persuasive account of Restoration cosmopolitanism, this conclusion seems a little less nuanced. While the first half of the book might exaggerate the place of China in English cosmopolitanism as other cultures—Ottoman, French, Spanish—played a role as well, the first several chapters give an excellent and persuasive account of the power of Chinese things in English culture and the way that global objects could all rest comfortably together on Belinda's dressing table. The possibility that novels like The Female Quixote represent such a dramatic turnaround, then, seems unnecessarily schematic, overlooking the novel's expressions of affection for romance even as it demands that the heroine turn away from the genre. Nevertheless, Jenkins offers enough evidence to reveal a powerful new strain of sinophobia that earlier writers did not share. A Taste for China thus offers a new account of English culture and new forms of identity revealed by the passion for and suspicion of Chinese objects.
